“Why allow us to come if you didn't want to negotiate?” Repo asked.
“Hey, wallpaper,” Lucky said, looking at me. “What do you think of your boyfriend's question? Why would I do that?”
Because you're more than the dumb thug you portray yourself to be. Because you want to gauge the Veins' response and see how much of a threat we thought you were.
And because fuck you, that's why.
“No idea,” I said.
“Of course not.” Lucky laughed and whistled to someone outside of the room for a beer. “Look at you. You're a fucking pet refrigerator. I'm surprised you can speak at all.”
My eyes narrowed. Repo glared intensely at me, trying to persuade me from doing anything foolish. I stayed silent.
A topless girl promptly came in and handed the perspiring bottle to Lucky. He slapped her ass so hard as she left that it launched her forward a step. The girl yelped, biting back a pained cry and quickly dashing from the room.
Lucky grinned at me and shook the sting of the slap out of his hand. “You make sure that wall doesn't fall down, huh?” He shifted his attention back to Repo and they resumed the discussion. Repo had briefed me on the special kind of shitbag that Lucky was before we pulled in, but even still, this asshole was really testing my patience.
Another thing that went right up my ass was that they didn't honor the initial agreement about how many enforcers were allowed. Lucky had his muscle—a large, scarred-up Serbian guy who wore a sergeant-at-arms patch, standing behind his chair. He also had at least one other guy pretending to be a brothel client in the room on the other side of the grand staircase.
A door on the far side of the stairs was suddenly pushed open, a train of girls led in by a smartly dressed fat guy. A third biker coming down the stairs greeted him. He wasn't one of Lucky's guys, but they certainly knew each other.
The biker had the girls line up against a wall, telling them to stay there and wait. They were dirty and disoriented, definitely not brothel material, at least not in this country.
One scared girl immediately caught my eye. A redhead in an overstuffed coat, she looked different than the others in a way I had to take a second to place. Despite being caught in the same drug-induced haze as the rest, it was impossible to mistake the energy, the freshness, that the other well-worn women didn't have.
She kept lowering her eyes, sinking into her coat like it was armor. The other girls were limp, some with their breasts hanging out, or close to it.
Modesty in a brothel? What the fuck was this?
The fat man in the suit walked in and whispered something to Lucky, darkening his expression. All I caught was one name: Tully.
When the man had finished talking, the pres roughly grabbed him by his collar, jerking him in closer. “That micromanaging little...” Lucky muttered. “You drill it into my brother's fucking head that if he nags me with that shit one more time, I'm going to shove my fist so far up his ass, I'll be able to use him as a fucking sock puppet!” Lucky pulled the frightened messenger to the side and in hushed tones continued, but being that the room was quiet and waiting on him, I heard every word he said. “I am well aware of the shipment date, so are all of my men. The girls will be there on time. Until then, they get moved when and how I fucking say they get moved.”
Lucky shoved him away, watching as the fat man scampered to the back of the room and waited. Then he cleared his throat and straightened his tussled shirt.
“Looks like you've got other business to attend to,” Repo started, seeing that this conversation was fruitless. “We'll show ourselves out. I'll let Remy know—”
Repo was still talking, but my ears had begun to ring. The Knights are running a shipment of girls for a human trafficking ring. The realization slammed into my gut, stole the air from my lungs. I felt incredibly stupid for not catching it right away. My mounting anger towards this man grew by the second. Who was his brother, this Tully guy? Was he part of another club?
My eyes wandered back to the wall. The redhead was shrinking by the second, swaying.
“Those just for show?” I interrupted Repo and pointed at the deck in Lucky's pocket. “Or do you actually know your way around a deck of cards?”
Few evils crept under my skin more than people selling people. It made my fucking knuckles itch.
Repo turned his back to Lucky and whispered to me, “What are you doing?”
“Relax, we're done, right?” It felt like I had blinders on, my eyes were locked on the Knights' pres and nothing else. Some shit I just couldn't let slide. With the negotiations over, I was officially off the clock. Now it was my time. “I'm just having a little fun.”
Lucky looked at me inquisitively. I didn't fully know what I was going to do. It was like I'd toppled the first in a long line of dominoes inside of me and set something larger into motion. My plan, if I had one, began and ended with me fucking this asshole up.