The Bratva’s Locked Up Love by Jagger Cole

21

Maksim

By my count,it’s been a full day since we locked ourselves in the office area. For a while, there were the faint sounds of roaring rioters outside. The odd popping sound of a fire-fight, at times. Maybe the scumbags out there are just murdering each other.

But after a while, it’s mostly quiet. The blast door is military grade, and the way this whole place is built tells me this office area is constructed to be a bunker fortress. Luckily, the bunker fortress came with a decently stocked kitchen.

Quinn and I are having a dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the couch, snuggled next to each other. I’m sore everywhere. So is she, I’m guessing. But neither of us has tapped out yet. Neither of us is going to be the one to throw in the white flag and call a halt to the endless sex marathon.

I doubt I’d ever throw in the towel on that, when it comes to her.

We’re dressed at least. For once. We somehow wordlessly decided that meals, even in our sex bunker, deserved clothing. At least for some semblance of civility, I guess.

I glance down, smirking as I see her lost in thought while she chews. She catches me staring and blushes as she swallows the bite.

“What?” She grins.

“Nothing. I’ve just never seen PB&J look so sexy.”

She rolls her eyes. “I was just thinking about…” she shrugs. It’s the topic that’s on the forefront of both our minds. But that neither of us wants to talk about: what comes next.

Slowly, she exhales. “We’re in a place called Yellow Creek Detention Facility,” she blurts. I nod. I haven’t pushed her for the name or what this place is. I’ve assumed that we’re in a CIA black site of some kind, but I wasn’t going to be the one to demand that answer from her.

“It’s not CIA,” she says slowly. “It’s run by a private contracting mercenary group.”

I frown. My mind flashes back to when I was first brought in here. The way I was beaten with the bag still over my head. How I was tased, and then locked with a chain bolted to the floor of an interrogation room.

I remember the guards yanking the bag off, and then saluting sharply as the door opened for a man with a mustache and silvered hair. The man who spat at me and told me he’d break me. He told me I’d give the entire Volkov family up before I begged him for mercy.

I roll my eyes at the memory. How badly he judged me. How little he realized that I would die a thousand times before giving up my brothers, or the man who saved my life. Part of me wonders if that prick died in the riot. Most of me hopes so. But a small piece of me hopes he didn’t, so I can have my time to spit in his face.

“Under contract from the US, I assume?”

She nods. “Yeah. It’s like Guantanamo, and you were right, we’re underground.”

The contractor group or maybe the US Armed Forces will eventually breach this place, then. Or there’s the alternative, which is far worse. If they think every one of their own people still down here are dead, and it’s deemed too costly a human toll to take the place back, they could just bomb it.

It’s been done, in Russia. There was a prison I was at briefly once that later had a breakout and takeover by the men inside. Taking back the crumbling old fortress to re-chain a bunch of scumbags was vetoed. Instead, they pulled the surrounding forces back and hit it with two of those cave-busting missiles they usually drop on Taliban hideouts.

My jaw grits. Option one will almost certainly result in them taking me from her. But I’ll take that over her dying. I’ll take that a thousand times over, even if it means my own death.

I’ve meant what I’ve said. I really will die before I give up Yuri or my brothers.

When I look down into her eyes, I can see we’re having the same unspoken worries—that they’ll either breach this place, or bomb it. Quinn frowns and blows air through her lips.

“Well, I could sure use a—”

She catches herself and makes a face.

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

I grin. “Don’t be. If I was bothered by being around people drinking, I would have had a very hard time in my line of work.”

“Russian mob isn’t one for temperance, hmm?” She teases.

I chuckle. “Not at all.” I pop the rest of my PB&J into my mouth and stand.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“To find you a drink.”

She rolls her eyes. “No, don’t. I was just joking.”

“I’m not.”

She grins as I wink at her. I turn to start prowling through the offices. This is a mercenary group privatized prison? Like hell there isn’t a bottle of booze stashed in here somewhere.

I find cigarettes, and two vaping pens. I even find what I think is Oxy in a plastic baggie under someone’s file folders, which wouldn’t exactly suggest that they have a prescription for it.

Finally, I step into the largest office, which I curiously haven’t been in yet. A huge desk fills the center of the room. My eyes glance past it, and I grin: jackpot. There’s a fully stocked bar cart in the corner of the room.

“What’s your drink?” I call out through the door.

“Tequila, please!” She chirps back. I smile. Even better. Alcohol was never my problem, but I’ve stayed away from all poisons since I kicked heroin. No point in poking the demons with a stick. But even when I did drink, I was never a tequila guy. My Russian ass had vodka or nothing.

I walk over to the cart and grab the bottle of tequila. But when I turn, I frown. Then my mouth thins as I narrow my eyes at the portrait above the office door I’ve just come through.

“Ublyudok,” I hiss. Motherfucker.

The man in the portrait with the stern look, stiff jaw, and mustache looking back at me is the same fucker who told me he’d break me when I first got here. The guy who seemed in charge. And judging from this big office, he is.

My eyes drop to the plaque under the picture that reads “Colonel Rockland Coolidge.” My brows knit. Weird, same last name as—

My eyes drop to the desk in front of me, and every muscle in my body freezes.

What the fuck…

There are more pictures of Colonel Coolidge. In some, he’s in a Navy uniform. In others, he’s in a commando suit with a rifle. But in one lone picture, he’s standing stiffly next to a girl, with his arm around her shoulder and a sign that reads “Congratulations Graduating Duke Medical Class.”

The girl has long, dark hair, and big blue eyes. She’s in a graduation gown and cap, holding a diploma.

The girl is Quinn.

Quinn Coolidge.

I see black clouds and rage as I grab the framed picture and storm out of the office. I cross the cubical bullpen like a storm and all but smash down the door to the office where we were just eating, back when things were simpler.

Before I realized the truth.

Quinn is turned away from me when I storm into the office.

“Honestly, if it’s going to bother you, I really don’t need a—”

“What the fuck is this.”

She shivers, turning quickly at the rough tone of my voice. When her eyes fall on the framed picture in my hand, her face scrunches up.

“Maksim—”

“Is this your father?” I snarl.

Her eyes widen at the edge in my voice as they drag from the picture to my face. She nods.

“Yes?” She frowns. “How do you—”

“He runs this place.”

She nods. “Yeah—”

“He told me he would break me,” I hiss. “When I first got here. I was chained to the floor and beaten and tased, and this man told he would break me or let me die.”

She pales. Her lips thin. “My father and I do not share the same—”

“You share the same name!” I roar.

She trembles, withering under my fury.

“Maks, let me explain—”

“Please,” I hiss. “I would love if you did.”

“This is not what it looks like, okay?”

“No?” I snap. “Because he and the rest of the goons in here were very, very eager to get information from me about the Volkov Bratva.”

“That’s what they do in here,” she snaps back, standing to give me a sharp look. “It’s a black site detention facility, Maksim. Look at who else was in here with you.”

“Yeah,” I growl, leaning close to her. “But now I’m just curious if you played honeypot with the rest of them too—”

She slaps me, hard.

The growl lodges in my throat as her face pales. But she doesn’t back down. She glares right at me.

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of that myself from now on, thanks,” I grunt. I can tell she wants to slap me again. Maybe I deserve it. But before we can get there, I turn, and I storm back out of the office.

An hour later,I’m back in Colonel Coolidge’s office, sitting in his chair, glaring at the bar cart full of bottles of booze. Again, liquor was never my problem. But temptation is a slippery slope. Giving in to something that isn’t “that much” of a problem can spiral into giving in to demons that know you far too well.

I scowl. There’s a good chance I over-spoke and overstepped with Quinn. I let my anger and confusion take the wheel and lead me into the darkness. And I’ve tried hard to not let that happen since getting clean.

I close my eyes and bring a hand up to pinch the bridge of my nose. Shit.

There’s a small knock at the door. I swivel and look up to see Quinn standing in the doorway. She looks pissed, but also so fucking beautiful. Instantly, I know I’m the one at fault here.

“I was an asshole,” I growl quietly. She smiles a little and steps into the room.

“I should have mentioned it earlier. I just didn’t even know you knew who my dad was.”

I nod. “I spoke badly, and I did not mean that.”

She bites her lips and walks across the room around the desk to stand in front of me.

“It’s not what you think, I promise you that.”

I nod. And then she tells me the whole story. How her father was never around, always off on a mission. How he opened this place, and either because of his controlling nature or because he felt like he needed to make up for lost time with her, he locked her into a contract here.

“My father and I have very different views of the world,” she mutters.

I smile. “So did me and mine,” I say, thinking of my father. But he and my mother were gone so long ago, killed in a car crash long before I had a chance to disappoint them. We weren’t ever that close either. It’s Yuri who’s ended up being the father-figure in my life.

I reach for Quinn and take her hand. I tug, and she smiles as she slides into my lap. Her hand cups my cheek as she looks into my eyes.

“I’m sor—”

“Don’t be,” I say gently. “I’m the one who should apologize. That was out of line.”

She shrugs with a grin. “You can blame being locked in a hole in the ground for two months. That’s valid.”

I chuckle as I pull her close. My lips brush against hers as my eyes close.

And then the blast door back at the front desk blows in with a deafening bang.

Suddenly, there’s smoke everywhere. There are men yelling, and laser sights lancing through the chaos to splay out over me. Quinn is screaming as we lunge to our feet. Her hand grabs mine in terror as men in black tactical gear pour into the room like a wave.

On the plus side, we’re not going to get bombed. The downside is, the little escape from reality with the most incredible girl I’ve ever known is over.

With twenty guns pointed at me, there’s nothing to fight. They drag her from me, her fingers clinging to mine before the grip finally breaks. She’s sobbing and screaming as they rush her from the room. I lunge after her, but something hits me from behind.

The darkness swims as the man with the mustache storms into view. He leers over me, snarling into my face as he raises the butt of a rifle.

Then it all goes black.