Page 41 of Drowning in the Deep
Eventually, my head lolled to the side, and I found myself in a strange world that blended my harsh reality with the terror that was to come. I knew I was mostly asleep, but I couldn’t pull myself out of it, and I couldn’t calm my racing thoughts. Images of Daemon, of my father, of that fucking rug danced in a macabre fashion through my mind in a nightmare that seemed to stretch on for hours.
The sound of a door opening had me jerking awake what was probably several hours later. My head was pounding as I turned toward the sound, not sure if I should be happy that someone was there or terrified.
It wasn’t the door to the room that was open, though. Rather, a small flap toward the bottom was pushed open. I heard my father’s voice say, “Elisa, I brought you something,” in a sing-song cadence.
My stomach growled in response as I prayed it was food. Without a second thought, I scurried over to the door on my knees, ignoring the pain that shot through me with every movement. Stretching my hand out, I said, “Give it to me.”
My father’s laughter hit my ears at about the same time nasty matted fur and sharp claws connected with my hand. Immediately, I recoiled, screaming and moving away as I flung the creature across the room. I took off for the corner, watching it scamper away over toward the shelves as another scream caught in my dry throat.
“I didn’t want you to get lonely, you fucking rat.” I heard my father continuing to chuckle as his footsteps echoed away from the door, leaving me alone with that nasty thing and my nightmares.
CHAPTER28
DAEMON
The morning after the hit on Leo, I gathered my brothers together in the same warehouse where the money was being kept. We had secured it overnight, and it would be nearly impossible for anyone to get to where we had it stored. After some calculations, we determined it was over five million dollars, which was a lot of cash, though we hadn’t bothered to come up with a definitive amount. All I knew was, it was enough to fuck Leo, and his crew was probably turning on him already.
We had another problem to sort out at the moment, though. If anyone was suspicious that we’d put a hit on our own guys and robbed them, I hadn’t heard anything about it. Obviously, I didn’t consider Leo one of our guys. He was disloyal and he got what he deserved. But before word could spread, we needed to move in on Viktor Yushenko and his army. Otherwise, we’d have all kinds of eyes on us, and that would make it a lot harder to strike.
“He’s got to have some kind of weakness, some kind of gap in his armor,” Vin said as he pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his jacket pocket and poured quite a bit into his coffee mug.
“Jesus, Vin. You’re drinking already?” Mikel asked from across the table. “It’s only nine o’clock in the morning.”
“I have to,” Vin said with a shrug. “If I don’t, I’ll start to sober up from last night, and then I’ll get a fucking hangover. No, thank you.”
Mikel swore at him under his breath again, but I returned my attention to Vin’s initial statement. “There’s a huge difference between the way that Viktor operates and how Leo ran his crew. Viktor’s men are all loyal to him. Anyone who comes after Viktor will have to contend with all of them, and there are a lot of them. Maybe fifty or so, I’m guessing.”
“That’s a lot of fucking soldiers,” Dezzy noted, sitting next to me on my left.
“It is, but he’s been around for a long-ass time, and he’s good at what he does. Which is why it’s unfortunate that Ma was able to manipulate him into taking her side.” I didn’t know how she’d managed that exactly since Viktor wasn’t one to be bought off, like Leo. She had to have something else on him, something I didn’t know about.
“What do we know about Viktor?” Vin mused aloud, sipping his spiked coffee. “Isn’t his daughter getting married soon?”
“Tomorrow,” Dezzy said with a nod. “And we’re all invited.”
“Well, I’ll get my suit pressed,” Vin joked. “Maybe the bride’s worth spoiling.”
While they continued to cut up about the wedding, I considered whether or not that could work for us. I hadn’t planned on going to the wedding at all. After all, the bastard had been fighting me at every turn, so why the hell would I want to go celebrate his daughter’s marriage? But now, I was wondering if this could play into our hands.
“There’ll be a lot of people at that wedding,” Mikel noted. “All of his men will be there, right? If we try to take Viktor out, they’ll start shooting, and we’ll obviously lose some people. I don’t think that’s the best way to go about this.”
I tended to agree with my brother. “That’s true. I’ve been thinking that we need to get him isolated, take Viktor out first, and then go about knocking off his guys. But that might take a long time.”
“And they’ll still be after us,” Vin reminded me. “They could hunt us down just as easily as we could pick them off.”
“We need something that will take them all out at once,” Dezzy said as he ran a hand through his hair.
“We could just bomb the fucking wedding,” Vin said with that wild look in his eyes. “Plant dynamite around the whole place—or something more sophisticated. That’d take ‘em all out at once.” His laugh let me know he was beginning to slip into his more demented persona.
“That would be way too fucking loud,” I reminded him. “We’d have the Feds showing up to see what the hell was happening.”
“Maybe we could poison them somehow,” Mikel said, rubbing his chin. “I read a script for this movie once where this chick used poisonous gas to get these two guys that were both after her to fight one another to the death.”
“Sounds like a light film, nothing the kids couldn’t handle,” Dezzy said, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t think they make a poison like that in real life,” I said, still thinking over what he’d said. “And having them turn on one another and hope that everyone who needed to die did, well, that would be hard to pull off. Seems a little too random for my liking. But I do like the thought of poison.”
As the three of them continued to talk about what it would look like if all of Viktor’s men suddenly turned on one another, a thought occurred to me. There was a guy my father had taken me to see several years ago when he’d put a hit out on a cop that had stabbed him in the back. I’d been there when that guy took a sip of his wine and was suddenly in the most excruciating pain I’d ever seen up until that time. He’d writhed around on the floor, vomiting blood, shitting himself, until he died.
