Stolen from the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance(146)

“You plan on telling anyone what you saw today?” he persists, his smile giving way to a businesslike, flat expression once again.

I toy with the idea of telling him I’m going straight to the papers with this. But the more practical, self-preserving part of my brain prevails, so I simply shake my head.

And with that, both his arms fall to his side, leaving me free to move. I hesitate, blinking at him in confusion and disbelief. Surely he’s not going to just… let me go?

“What are you doing, man?” Lukas exclaims.

Leon rolls his eyes and turns back to him, facing away from me. “Relax, Luke. She doesn’t know anything. No point in interrogating an empty witness, moy brat.”

“You want me to take her in anyway? For trespassing?” asks the cop, barely glancing up.

Leon waves his hand dismissively. “No need.”

“Alright,” the officer replies. Then he stands up straight and starts yelling, “Okay, okay, disperse the troops. You all have to get outta here before somebody sees you talking to me. You’re not the subtlest crowd, you know.”

“Embarrassed to be seen with us?” laughs one of the other bikers.

“That hurts our feelings, sotrudnik,” cackles another one.

“Yeah, yeah,” groans the cop. “Just scram before my chief comes along.”

They all start walking back to their respective motorcycles and the cop shoots me a withering glance as he climbs back into the driver’s seat of the squad car. “You, too!” he grunts.

“Oh — oh yeah, okay, sorry!” I stammer, hurrying away toward my car. I can’t help but feel Leon’s green eyes following me as I go. Piercing me straight through.

“Remember what we talked about here today!” he shouts after me.

He doesn’t have to add the two words implied to follow…

Or else.





26





Leon





I founded the union   Club because us dock workers have to stick together. Because the bosses want to bleed us dry, and the cops want to make it easy for them to do just that. We keep each other safe together, ride together, live together. And if I mean to keep the cops off the backs of the hard-working men and women who keep this rusty chunk of New Jersey running, I’ve gotta get all of us to work together.

Pushing open the door to The Glass, I step into the smoke-filled bar like it’s closer to home for me than my own bed. In a lot of ways, the rough-looking dive next to the drydock really is. It’s more than just my bar.

It’s our bar.

About a dozen heads turn to look me over as I stride across the faded, worn red carpet, and most of them wear the union   Club’s patches on their backs. They either raise a hand in greeting or their faces split into a grin as a few voices shout greetings across the bar.

“Hey, Prez!”

“Welcome back, Leon.”

“Roy, get our man a beer!”

Even if this weren’t where the union   Club went to unwind and talk over how the suits were trying to fuck us over next, I have something of a reputation around town that gets a degree of respect when I walk into places like this. I’m 6’2” of second-generation Russian clad in denim jeans and a worn, dusty leather jacket emblazoned with all the colors of the most well known bunch of men in town. I’m the leader of this pack of hounds, and I look it. My dark hair is shaved on the sides, and the top of it is spiked and sideswept. My cut jaw is covered in stubble, and my pale green eyes demand attention when they lock onto someone else’s.

I give a friendly smile back to the rugged bunch of bastards and clasp arms with the giant of a man posted up nearest to the entrance. His face is covered in a large black beard that covers his beaming smile and comes to a rest halfway down his portly body, but I know there’s a layer of muscle under all that extra love that could drop a man cold in an instant.

“Missed you today, Genn,” my voice rumbles to my old friend, the club’s Sergeant at Arms. Gennady Filipov, Genn for short, has been my right-hand-man in the union   Club since I founded it, and I couldn’t ask for a better man.

“Heard you had a hell of a weird run-in today, yeah?” he replies as we make our way towards the bar.

The Glass is a safe place to talk business. Probably the safest place in town — it’s our base of operations. The first round of Russian immigrants opened this place and called it the Glasnost. Used to be where all the Russian dock workers who could hardly put together a sentence in English met to talk about how things were going.

But all that’s our parents’ and grandparents’ story, and since we all grew up here, it got shortened to The Glass pretty quickly. A few of the older members allowed to wear the club’s kutte — jackets covered in our patches — still meet up and swap stories in the mother tongue, but most of us, myself included, only have a trace of a Russian accent in our voices.