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Dravin

T he only thing royal about Prince Ashton Taggert Jr. is the pain he causes in my ass. Moments like this make me wonder why the fuck I have a cover job.

Ten to one the yelling turns into screaming, and it devolves into borderline hysteria from there. Ugly crying. Ranting. Shit flinging.

In the corner of the massive boardroom, I screw my thumbs into my eyes. No one notices. Like the coffee bar, the artwork on the wall, and most of the token office furniture, I’m just a fixture. I’m made to blend in. I don’t need to be seen until there’s an issue.

I make thousands of dollars a day to watch my client’s shithead son pretend to run this company, and for all the ass licking corporate tools here to pretend that they enjoy it.

He’s gone off the rails again, ranting about meaningless shit.

The company lost a bunch of money last quarter and he’s pretending that he knows the first thing about it or that he gives a fuck.

A vein throbs dangerously near the surface in his forehead.

If I wasn’t up his ass twenty-four seven, I’d almost be worried that he’d taken back up with his little white powder habit. Another reason that I was hired.

I’m far less security and far more glorified babysitter.

Ashton Taggert Sr. was adamant that he wanted two things—his son alive and scandal free.

The first few weeks of my job included ensuring that the prince of idiocy got off the drugs, stopped taking his clothes off where he could be photographed, and was discreet with his terrible choice of women, including the high end escorts.

His father thought it was an impossible job, so he hired the best.

Within two weeks, I had Prince cleaned right the fuck up.

Checking off more than a few boxes on the Psychotic Assholes checklist and looking like a scary motherfucker works wonders when it comes to intimidating even rich little brats into listening to you.

Prince rails at me daily about firing me, but he’s not my employer.

He has no say in the matter. Since he’s twenty-seven but has the mentality and the attitude of a petulant toddler, he’s pretty much guaranteed my bodyguard-slash-babysitter role for the foreseeable future.

Lucky. Fucking. Me.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I subtly slip it out, checking the number.

Marcus .

I’m out of the boardroom before anyone notices I’m gone. Spoiler alert—they won’t. In a world of rich assholes, I matter less than the chairs they’re parking their manicured asses on. For a few, I suppose I mean that literally.

I keep my back to the glass, but still side-eye Prince. He’s escalating. In a few seconds, spittle is going to start spurting all over the place.

“Dravin.”

“I have a problem, Dray. I need to meet.”

I’m the kind of man who has been accused of not having things like mercy or feelings. It’s not true, but when you look like I do, it’s easy to see why people would make assumptions. They serve me well, so for the most part, I don’t complain.

The only people who truly know me are the men who I shared a past with, and most of them, I don’t keep in contact with. Marcus never stopped being a brother to me, even when he chose a different path. We all do what we have to in order to survive.

Marcus’ tone sparks something to life in the bottom of my gut that glows like a bitter ember. “Can’t do that. I’m across the country, working a job.”

“A job or a job .”

“Bodyguard shit.”

A ragged inhale crackles over the phone. “I fucked up. Every way you can, I did. We got in with guys we had no business fucking with. Bratva .”

I grasp the phone tight and curse under my breath. I could easily be accused of not having many emotions these days, and while that’s incorrect, nothing runs as deep as the pull of brotherhood. I owe so much more than friendship to this man. I owe him my life .

“Jesus Christ, Marcus,” I curse under my breath. “What the fuck? How did you get involved with the Russian mafia?”

“I know.” The words are dull, dropping to the ground like spent shell casings, the weight of a horrible finality wrapped around them. “I don’t have time to go through this with you. I just… I need you to promise me one thing.”

Marcus saved my life overseas. Not once, twice, or three times.

He pulled me from literal death on seven separate occasions.

People like us really can’t say that we have friends in the civilian world.

I don’t know that you can go into that kind of training as a regular person and come out of it as anything less than half a trained machine.

The fear gets boiled out of you after a while.

You see things that you’ll never forget.

You see the world differently, through the sharp lens of combat, and it’s hard just to stop doing it when you finally leave it behind.

I grind my teeth while the rest of my body stays rigid. “If you want me to take on the entire Bratva with 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 the fear twisting 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 was me . 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 mean A . 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’s final .”

“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.

We used to say that before every mission. Sometimes, every godforsaken morning.

You can’t kill what’s already dead. That was us.

Men that the higher ups weren’t afraid to throw away.

Except we were good at it. Too good. We became so good at being disposable that we become indispensable and we got so good at that , we turned into ghosts.

The kind of men who don’t officially exist. The kind you send in when all else fails.

“Die well, my friend.”

I hang up before I can do something stupid like getting sentimental. Marcus doesn’t have the time. Neither do I.

Within a few seconds, an address appears on my screen. I memorize it before I dismantle the phone, breaking the SIM and taking out the battery.

I charge into the boardroom, walk straight up to Prince, and grab him by the collar of his twelve thousand dollar suit.

He’s so shocked that he stops mid rant. The table in front of him is wet with sprays of spittle. Around the room, mouths literally gape open and eyes pop.

All these rich corporate fucks are seeing me now.

“Sorry,” I rasp in my thick, ruined voice. Compliments of time six out of seven. Smoke inhalation. I nearly burned to death. “There’s been an emergency. You’ll have to excuse us.”

I march Prince out of the room. He stumbles and whimpers in front of me. “W- what emergency?” he gasps out as I toss him into the elevator like a ragdoll. He rights himself against the back wall while I punch the button to take us down to the basement, where his driver is waiting.

“You’re flying to Chicago for business.” I pull my 9mm out of the holster of my black suit jacket.

For this job, I’m dressed just like all the rest of these pricks, but seeing as I’m private security, I’m allowed certain liberties.

“Say a word or pull out your phone at any time from now until we land and you’ll paint your daddy’s SUV or that jet with your lovely brain matter.

Stay quiet, do what I say, and as soon as we land, you’ll never have to see me again.

You can take the plane straight back here.

Do you understand, or do you want to make bets on exactly what shade your head will be when it pops like an overripe melon? ”

He whimpers, tears filling his eyes, his muscles quaking.

“Don’t you dare piss yourself. That would be hard to explain. This needs to look legit. You act the part for the next few hours, and you get to keep all your limbs. Yeah?”

He sniffles, so I slap him across the face. The smack echoes through the elevator, so damn satisfying. I’ve wanted to do that for months .

“Stop sniveling and get your shit together. You have five seconds before we’re off this elevator.”

To his credit, he draws himself up, smears the back of his hand over his eyes and nose, and wipes the mess on his immaculate jacket.

Big surprise. This little asshat wants to live to see another day in his spoiled, enchanted, life. Here I thought that Prince would never do a single favor for me and that I couldn’t have been saddled with a more useless piece of human waste.

I’m not wrong very often. In this case, I’m glad I am.