Kirill studied him thoughtfully.
“Lagoshin may be down a few guys,” Jax went on, “but I’m betting he’s still got you outgunned. I can help with that.”
“There are three of you,” Kirill scoffed.
“Three of us, but we got you the thing you couldn’t get for yourself… a direct line to Lagoshin’s location,” Jax countered. “And there are three now, but I’ve got a charter here in Vegas who will send in reinforcements.”
“In exchange for?”
Jax threw his hands up. “Hey, I’m just a guy trying to keep his sister from getting killed. She loves your boy, Oleg, and it looks to me like he feels the same. That makes you and me practically in-laws. All I’m suggesting is that we throw in together until Lagoshin’s in the ground and you’re running the Bratva’s operations in the western U.S. When it’s over, we maintain the current status quo. SAMCRO and the Bratva stay in our separate corners… and your people stay away from the Irish.”
Kirill’s eyes lit up. “I see, now. This is business for you.”
“This is family,” Jax said darkly. “My club is my family as much as Trinity is. I don’t want anybody else dying for no reason.”
He held out his hand, kept it rock steady as he waited.
Several seconds passed, but Kirill grasped his hand and shook.
“Good,” Jax said. “Now let’s go see what Luka has to say.”
As if on cue, they heard Luka scream. The anguished cry echoed off the walls of the empty pool and out into the desert sky. A massive red-tailed hawk circled overhead, watching the show.
* * *
Jax leaned against the wall of the empty pool as he and Chibs watched the Russians beat the shit out of Luka. Kirill mostly just observed, leaving the bloody-knuckle work to Oleg and a guy named Gavril. Oleg looked like he had no taste for the brutality. Regret hung on him like a sheen of sweat. When Gavril cut off the little finger on Luka’s right hand, Oleg had turned away. But when Luka still wouldn’t talk, it was Oleg who stormed in with a cry of rage and hit Luka so hard the chair tipped over, and the prisoner smacked his head on the concrete floor of the pool.
Luka had been beaten and cut, lost two fingers and four teeth. His face was split and swollen and bloody, and he slumped in the chair as if he’d been an inflated man and all the helium was slowly leaking out of him.
“He dead?” Jax asked, growing frustrated.
Kirill rounded on him. “You want to take a turn? You think you can do better?”
Jax pushed off the wall.
“Jackie,” Chibs said quietly, worriedly.
Jax strode over and began to circle Luka. “You could cut off his balls, threaten to take his cock as well.”
Kirill and Oleg both blanched. Gavril only looked defeated.
Luka spat bloody phlegm at Jax’s feet.
“This guy used to be your brother,” Jax said. “I get it. Nobody wants to torture a guy who used to get you a beer when he went to grab one for himself. But Luka’s not your brother anymore. He betrayed you. Lagoshin ordered him to stick with me, follow me till I found you, and then call it in. They were gonna come here and kill all of you.”
Oleg glared at Jax. “You think we are so weak?”
Jax frowned. “Nothing weak about brotherhood. You’re men of honor. But we all know this ends with Luka dead.” He crouched down, eye to eye with the prisoner. “Hell, Luka knows that. Thing is, he’s a man of honor, too, right? So the only way he’s gonna tell you what you want to know is if you make it so he’d rather hurry up and die than hold on to that honor.”
Luka glared at him. Jax stood up and glanced around at the Bratva men, who seemed to like him almost as much as Luka did.
“It’s not about honor,” Trinity said, walking down the steps into the empty pool. She tossed her hair back and turned to Jax. “It’s dread.”
“What?” Jax asked.
“They’re takin’ their time, buildin’ up to worse, lettin’ him fill up with pain and fear,” she said, glancing at Oleg and then Kirill. “This is barely torture. It’s foreplay.”
“We don’t have time for foreplay,” Jax said.
Trinity walked to Gavril and held out a hand. “Give me your knife, Gav.”
Gavril knelt and slid up the leg of his pants, retrieving a small dagger from the sheath strapped around his calf. Trinity took it from him as she passed by, moving into the deep end of the empty pool. Jax watched her curiously. Luka sniffed in derision and spit again, disdainful of the very idea that a woman could intimidate him.
She edged past Oleg, her back to him, controlling the space between herself and Luka.
Trinity grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back. Jaw tight, muscles standing out on her forearms, she pressed the knife against the skin just beside his left eye. In the morning light, Jax saw the trickle of blood drip from the wound.
“Bitch,” Luka sneered, eyes pinched closed.
Trinity dug the knife tip into his eyebrow, and Luka cried out as she sliced downward, splitting his eyelid. He tried to tear his head away, tried to use his body weight to move the chair back, but she held him tightly, and the position of the knife blade forced him not to fight too hard.
“She’s your sister, all right,” Chibs said quietly.
Jax stood away from the wall, staring at her. Trinity had grown up with the RIRA in the family, lived a life no stranger to violence and murder, but she had never been a part of that violence as far as he knew.
“Hey,” he said quietly, “don’t.”
Trinity shot him a hard look. If she understood that this blood she’d spilled had changed her, that she’d just given up a sliver of her innocence, he didn’t see it in her eyes. Jax knew she was no little girl, and he wasn’t the guardian of her innocence or humanity, but the moment still felt like a loss.
“Open your eyes,” Trinity told Luka.
The prisoner complied. Blood ran from the slit in his left eyelid, but he seemed to still have the eye. Luka stared at her, all his defiance and disdain obliterated by fear and pain.
“That’s just to prove I’ll do it,” Trinity said. “Five seconds, and I slice out your eye like I’m shuckin’ an oyster. The address where we can find Lagoshin.”
She had barely started counting when Luka blurted out the answer.
Task accomplished, Trinity let go of his hair. She handed Gavril’s bloodied dagger to Oleg and turned from the Russians, walking over to Jax. Where others might have worn a satisfied smile, Trinity had gone pale. She braced her hands against the inner wall of the empty pool and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Jax put a hand on her back. “You all right?”
Trinity took another deep breath. “If I can keep from pukin’ my guts up, I’ll be right as rain.”
* * *
Trinity hurried along the corridor, headed back to her room. The real estate agent had not wanted the water to the hotel turned on, but he’d supplied the surveying map, and Pyotr had managed to do it himself. By the time the water department noticed, they would long since have departed.
Just now she could have kissed Pyotr. There were days when a shower—even a cold shower, which was all they had—could save your life. Her face felt flushed, and she couldn’t seem to unclench her fists as she turned the corner. When she saw the door to her room, she managed to exhale, then shuddered in revulsion at the thought that the stale-smelling, dusty hotel room could offer her such reassurance. The building seemed to be closing in around her.