Page 85 of Filthy Love

The smarter way to best an enemy was to cut them off at their weakest points, weaken the beast, kill the beast.

And if he wasn’t hitting some poor asshole then Lawless liked nothing better than using his substantial intelligence to play the odds and beat the house.

In this instance Grigori was the house and Lawless was cutting that fool down to size.

One dollar at a time.

Or maybe a few hundred million in a matter of seconds.

They were taking theBratvadown with money and not brute force. As Rider rightly stated when their plan was put into motion, they could easily kill Grigori. But organized crime soon rallied and his boss, Alexei, would have someone to take Grigori’s place in moments.

Nah, if they wanted the Russian mafia out of their territory it was only going to happen one way. And with a few clicks he was well on the way to draining the Russian’s funds he’d amassed in just a few months. The man was greedy. They’d known Grigori was only using the gambling as a stepping stone to bigger activities. And sure enough, if not for the RS having associates in the ports they’d never have known of how Grigori tried to bring his drug money through to clean it real nice on American soil.

Now Lawless was no stranger to cleaning dirty money. Truth be told their club was funded on how they moved money throughout the states and a few Arab emirate countries. The RS money was more travelled than Lawless was, that was a fact.

He wished he could be there to see Grigori’s pasty white face when he realized he was losing money hand over fist.

It was a good day to become richer, he figured.

He collected his jacket, slid it on with a shrug. He’d leave nothing of himself behind, having wiped down anything he’d touched after he’d slipped both phone and tablet back where he’d found them.

Without giving the comatose couple a glance, he left the motel room and walked relaxed around the back to his car. If they suspected David Tennant of rifling through their stuff they’d find no record of Lawless. Could he be blamed if those morons didn’t knowDoctor Who?

Sliding in, he put the call through to the clubhouse to his president and chief.

His smirk was epic starting up his baby, giving it a little roar of her engine, she’d earned the pump of extra gas.

“Got him.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“I’m in that dream again where I’m dating Colton Hawk…” - Gia

“There's something wrong with him!” Snapped the petite woman wringing her hands together, her whole-body language was curled in on herself. Today marked the thirteenth consecutive week for Beth and Skip Minksky marriage therapy. Sitting beside her on the soft cotton couch was Beth’s husband of eleven years looking resigned to his wife's outburst.

It wasn’t the first time this kind of explosion occurred within moments of their session beginning but after a break through when Gia explained what theory of mind was. In psychology terms it was to hear someone else’s point of view, not to just listen and wait for your turn to talk, it felt as though the pair were finally hearing each other.

“Try it the way we said, Beth, and not to lay blame.”

“Fine.” She huffed. “I feel,” she stressed the word, “that there's something wrong with him. Why does he need sex four or five times a week? It's too much, I'm not a machine.”

Skip dropped his blond head over his hands and sighed really long.

It was the same argument they'd been having for weeks now having moved on from their initial need for therapy being that Beth had her mother living with them and Skip considered it an intrusion to their marriage being that mom in law interfered in every decision within their house.

Listening to their back and forth discussion with the tools she'd aided them with in their first sessions she saw the husband's barriers go up at first, as was his default setting, but over time he'd learned Gia's office was a safe space for him to confess his opinions, even if they were against his wife. Slowly his shoulders lowered, and he looked her directly in the eye. “I love you Bethie. That love means I want to fuck you. Excuse my language, doc.” He said to Gia offhandedly and she smiled. She'd heard worse in her time as a therapist.

She'd seen much worse when she’d trained in drug counselling for eight months. Oh boy. That had been the most taxing time in her professional career. She'd hated every moment of that internship, knowing in the first month it wasn't the area of psychology she wanted to aim her career towards.

She wanted to help people in love.

The proof of her successes was pictures in a folder of her couples she’d helped over the years. Their relationships healed resulting in children sometimes.

It gave her the sense of accomplishment.

She might not have had that kind of partnership in her life yet, but she could claim a hand in mending broken hearts.

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