TORTURE ME_ The Bandits MC(98)
Chapter 4
Gage
Julia pulled back from my grip on her arm as we reached the stairs. “Let go of me,” she snapped. “I can walk on my own, thank you.”
I raised my eyebrows. She was a feisty one. It just made me want her more. I wasn’t sure if she was old lady material, but she was definitely worth a go.
“Alright,” I said, letting go of her arm and stepping aside. “Ladies first.” I held my arm out, indicating I expected her to take the stairs in front of me.
She walked in front of me meekly, hurrying to get past me. I smiled to myself. I figured she probably thought I was going to try to hurt her after what she saw in the interrogation room with Dimitri. As long as she played by the rules, she didn’t have anything to worry about, short of teasing me too much by swaying that pretty little ass of hers as she climbed the stairs in front of me.
Once we were back in the shop, I led her into the office so we could go upstairs to the clubhouse. We renovated the second floor of the building, taking out all of the offices and opening it up from one end to the other, creating what was essentially one large lounge. We had pool tables, dart boards, weight benches, a large flat screen TV mounted to the brick wall with a few couches in front of it, and a fully functional kitchen with a stocked bar. Sure enough, when we walked through the door to the clubhouse, we found where everyone was hiding out.
“How big is your operation?” Julia asked when we walked in.
“You don’t need to know all that,” I told her. “You just need to know what you’re here to do. The less you know, the less you learn, the easier it’s going to be for you to return to your quiet academic life when all of this is over.”
I led her to one of the round tables at the bar and pulled a chair out for her. “I’ll be right back. Is beer okay?”
“Wine?”
I looked her up and down again. I pictured her as a red wine kind of girl. It was probably her guilty pleasure, like the things she did to herself at night when no one else was around. “Wine it is,” I told her, turning to the bar to grab our drinks.
I handed her a glass of red wine and sat down with a pint of Guinness.
“So, what did you learn?” I asked.
She took a sip of her wine and closed her eyes. I knew that look. That glass of wine was exactly what she needed after talking to Dimitri. “He’s not going to talk with you in the room,” she answered. “I don’t know if he’s intimidated or what, but he insists on talking without you. He’s convinced you’re going to kill him.”
“I am if he doesn’t start talking,” I teased her, but she didn’t seem to find it funny. She tensed up on me. “I’m kidding. He has too much information I need. If I could get it another way, he wouldn’t even be here.” What I failed to tell her is that we would have killed him instead of bringing him in. It seemed important to her for this just to be a simple procedure and not part of something bigger and uglier than I was letting on.
“And what is this about staying until I get something out of him?” she snapped after another sip of wine.
“You agreed. You came along.” I took a long drink from my beer.
She shook her head. “I didn’t realize I was getting into this at the time,” she said.
“Well, once you get him to talk, you can go back to your quiet, boring life a little wealthier and forget any of this even happened.”
“I don’t know about being able to forget,” she said as an afterthought.
“It’s easy to do. You just push it back and out of your mind, until one day, something comes up to remind you, and you realize you’d forgotten all about it.” I gave her my best warm smile.
She just shook her head. “Well, I guess if I’m going to be working on him for a while, I need to go ahead and meet with him alone. I might be able to get something out of him if I approach him alone.”
“Just don’t get any ideas,” I warned her.
“What do you mean?”
I looked at her over my glass as I took another long drink, finishing off the dark beer and relishing the deep flavor of it. “Just, before you go in there alone, you have to agree to tell me everything he says to you. I don’t think you understand what all is at stake here. In fact, for your sake, I hope you don’t.”
She set her glass down on the table and sat back in her chair, uncrossing her legs slowly—or maybe that was my imagination slowing time down to let me stare at her delicious skin in an attempt to see what was hidden up her skirt—and re-crossing them, switching which knee was on top. “I’m starting to get an idea of what’s going on here, and I don’t like it.” She leveled her eyes on me, forcing me to look up from her legs.