Free Kissing My Killer by Helena Newbury Page B

simply, “Payment sent to Semnadtsat.” That same day, $150,000 had left Nikolai’s private bank account, destined for a numbered Swiss account. “What’s semnadtsat ?”
    “It’s ‘seventeen.’”
    “You think he is doing trafficking after all? Seventeen women?” My guts twisted. “Jesus, ‘seventeen years old?’”
    He looked at my screen. “It says to seventeen. And it has capital letter, like a person.”
    “Who’s called ‘seventeen’?”
    “I don’t know. But I know someone who will.” Then he pressed his lips together, tracing the shape of the steering wheel with his fingers as he thought.
    “What?”
    “We will have to go into my world.” He shook his head. “It is not a place for you.”
    “For me, a woman?”
    He turned and looked at me and I saw that flash of blue in his eyes again, the fierce fire of emotion under all that cold. “For you.”
    “I’ll be okay,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.
    He considered, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “What about…?” He indicated the outside world through the windshield.
    “Better than staying on my own.”
    He looked at me again, this time for longer. Eventually, he seemed to make his mind up. “OK, then. But you do just what I say and you stay right the fuck beside me.”
    I nodded quickly, trying to ignore the building fear inside.
    And I tried to ignore something else, too: the fluttering in my chest when he’d turned all protective of me. “Where are we going?” I asked.
    Alexei started up the car. “Little Odessa.”

 
     
     
     
     
     

     
     
    Alexei
     
    Little Odessa. A little bit of Russia, right in the heart of Brooklyn. It had always felt like home...but I knew that would already be changing as word got around of what I’d done. By tomorrow, it would be hostile territory...and that tore me up inside.
    We pulled up outside a place called Soblazn , with a broken neon sign of a cocktail glass and a heavy, steel-reinforced door. I’d been there twice, when Nikolai wanted something delivered to Vadim, the owner.
    I looked between Gabriella and the door. “Stay right beside me,” I told her. “Okay?”
    She nodded. Then said, “Why? Who’s in the bar?”
    “It’s not a bar.”
    I led her up to the door. We were still a few feet from it when one of Vadim’s thugs filled the doorway. He seemed to have no neck, just a line where his chin met his muscled chest, and he was rolling a lollipop from one side of his mouth to the other.  “Alexei,” he growled. It could have been affectionate or threatening—he made it deliberately difficult to tell. “Business?”
    I nodded. “Is Vadim in?”
    The guy clacked the lollipop a few times against his teeth, looking at Gabriella. “Artur is in.”
    Artur was Vadim’s number two. We could start with him. I nodded and the doorman stepped back out of the way.
    There was another guy, sitting behind a Plexiglas window with a pay slot at the bottom. He didn’t ask us to pay the cover fee, but he nodded at Gabriella as she passed. “She here to audition?” he asked with interest.
    I squeezed Gabriella’s hand a little tighter. “No.” We pushed through a door and I heard Gabriella gasp in surprise. I think it was the fact it was broad daylight outside, as much as anything. She must have imagined these places only operated at night.
    Soblazn means “temptation.”
    We’d stepped into a world lit in purple, pink and blue. The room wasn’t big, but every bit of space was used, the tables and chairs deliberately arranged so that you had to spiral around to get anywhere. It made movement predictable—you could see where someone was heading long before they got there. That made it easier for the security guys to spot trouble and easier for the women to home in on customers.
    There were two working the poles, one of them a long-legged blonde who looked as though she might be Polish, the other a curvy redhead who was probably Russian. A third woman,