Page 2 of Dravin

I grind my teeth while the rest of my body stays rigid. “If you want me to take on the entireBratvawith you, the answer is yes, but only because I know that I owe you.”

“We’re fucked. We’re so fucking fucked.”

The edge of panic in his tone raises the hair on the back of my neck. In all the years I’ve known Marcus, through all the shit, I never saw real fear enter his eyes. The rest of us just tucked it down into an inaccessible well inside of ourselves, but it was almost as though he wasn’t capable of feeling it at all.

Since the day I met him, I knew Marcus had something inside of him that most people don’t have. He joined the navy because he needed a career. He had people at home he needed to provide for. He was one of those people who went far because he was a natural soldier. He excelled at the worst sort of jobs, and never minded deprivations, or pain.

Maybe it bothered him more than he let on. The rest of us had that place inside of us where we could hide and we went there when we had to, but he never could. He just buried and buried the shit under so many layers that he stopped feeling it until he couldn’t.

Maybe it was civilian life that he couldn’t deal with.

When I lost my eye, that was it for me. He was back on American soil two years later. I don’t really know why he left. Not when all he’s done is seek out the same kind of brotherhood he had in the SEALs and found it in all the wrong places.

He’s Prez of a one-percenter motorcycle club. He actively enjoys doing all the things he himself never could have imagined as a soldier. Weapons, women, drugs. They’re his club’s main source of income. I’ve done a few jobs for him over the years, always because I felt like I owned him. He paid me and I still took his money, so that he couldn’t call it a favor. He was saving that until he truly needed it.

He needs it now.

It annihilates me to hear thefeartwisting like black smoke through his words.

“We’re finished. You won’t get here on time. They’re coming. Right. Now. Sure, we’ll go down brave. Shooting and fighting to a man, but there’s no hope. Before tomorrow morning, this place is gonna be a pile of smoking ashes. There won’t be anything left to identify. I did this to us. It wasme. These guys are unhinged. They aren’t going to be satisfied with just the club, Dravin. They’re going after our families.”

His fear wraps around my throat like a giant hand squeezing my airway. “What are you talking about?”

“One of our guys killed their Pakhan’s daughter. It was an accident, I swear. She wasn’t a kid or anything. She was nineteen. He was dating her secretly. She was the one who brought the product. They shot up together and she died. He didn’t. He got the hell out of there, but Dimitri refuses to believe that his daughter would have ever done something like that. He thought Jackson shot her up and killed her. He promised he won’t stop at anything. No one will be spared. Old ladies. Kids. All of us.”

It takes a lot to get to me, and by a lot, I meanA.Fucking.Lot. But this has me seeing black. The thick miasma covers my head like mourning cloth that dissipates into sludge. It drips into my one good eye, leaks into my mouth, and slithers into my nostrils.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Small drops until it’s an ocean sucking me under.

“Dravin. Are you there?”

“Yeah. What do you need me to do? Marcus is in LA. New York is literally across the country. Even if I had a private jet at my disposal, which I don’t, I’d never—”

I don’t have a jet.

But I know someone who does.

“My sister. They’ll send someone after her. It doesn’t matter that we’re here and she’s in Chicago. They’ll get to us and then they’ll find her. She’s disowned me and she changed her name a few years ago, but that’s not going to save her. They have people like…” He cuts himself off out of decency, but what he doesn’t say is,people like you.

Men who find those who don’t want to be found. Men who are more animal than human, with an animal’s sense of self-preservation and a hunter’s instinct. Men who will do whatever it takes, even if it costs them their lives.

I’ve never tracked an innocent person down to cause them harm, but Marcus doesn’t know that. He thinks I’m some type of hitman because that’s what I’ve allowed him to understand. He doesn’t know that most of the time, I work for the same client and they’re not exactly on the wrong side of the law.

“I’ll get to her. If you know where she is, that will save me time. I’ll be on a jet in twenty minutes. You have my word.”

There’s a long pause, but I know that he’s still there. I can hear him breathing. “Thank you isn’t enough.”

“Don’t get soft on me now. You saved my skin enough times, you know that I owe you. A life for a life.”

“Yeah. But I- just… this is the last time I’m going to talk to you.I can’t tell you how many times I thought that in the past, but this time, it’sfinal.”

“We’ve been preparing to die our whole lives.”

“You can’t kill what’s already dead.”

The words hit me like stepping on an IUD and having pieces of my body blown clean off. I drove over one once, but managed to walk away with scars, burns, and some shrapnel that’s still gravitating its way happily through my flesh. Time three out of seven that Marcus saved my hide.

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