Massive Attack (A Guy Niava Thriller Book 1) Dana Arama (ebooks children's books free TXT) 📖

cariña. But if you get rid of her, you are welcome to stay here. The organization could always use someone like you.”

A hidden side-door opened, and a beautiful, long-legged brunette walked in holding a gold-plated gun. “She won’t stay here. And about the American -- I am still here,” she answered Zorro. “Alive and kicking and I won’t hesitate to shoot.”

“Zorro meet Gail. She is responsible for the new formula of the drug now flooding the market.”

I looked at her and knew now that it was no coincidence that Laura was here.

Murat Lenika,

New York City, November 14, 2015,

12:00 p.m. local time

We sat in the car and drove back to the city. Aldo drove and Alex sat next to him, trying to solve a new Sudoku puzzle. I knew that once he failed to complete it, he would start complaining that there must be a mistake and throw it aside in anger.

Usually, it would be me sitting next to him, helping him solve it in minutes, but today I sat at the back because I wanted to be alone. Instead of feeling pleased with myself about how the business was going, I felt down. Once again I’d been drawn to places, I didn’t want to be, with people who are good for business but bad for the soul. Of late, my business had brought me in contact with terrorism, and it was an alley I had never planned on going down. I felt better about my interactions with the drug world. Whoever wanted them came to me and purchased them, winning an hour of happiness. What could I say about terror except the latest pictures from the old continent showed that things didn’t look too good there. Actually, they looked terrible. That wasn’t the only bad thing. I looked blankly out at the changing scenery. Something about the look on the kidnapped boy’s face reminded me of Bobby and it made me feel ill. What was I supposed to do with him now? Save him? Remove him from the situation? Take a chance for his benefit and bring the guns before I got the okay from the Red Mafia?

I must have been about five when it first happened. Bobby was my first English friend that I had brought home. We went to play in the men’s lounge. In any other home, the mothers watch over the kids but with us, the Albanians, the women don’t mix with the men. It was important that the boys in the family were trained to act and feel manly from a startlingly early age. My father was there, smoking and drinking, watching TV and reading the paper. Two of my uncles were also there, whom I realized at a later stage weren’t blood relatives, but my father’s bodyguards.

There were more ‘cousins’ outside the room, as usual. Sometimes I would see them and other times not. On rare occasions they carried guns, but most of the time they just stood there. Either way, they always treated me nicely and called me ‘prince’.

“Where are we driving to, boss?” Aldo’s voice broke through my memories.

“Manhattan,” I answered briefly. He probably expected a specific address, but I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate.

“I was afraid you were going to say Brooklyn. Maybe Brighton Beach. Maybe meet with whoever your father forbade you to meet with.”

I didn’t answer. He was right about all the details except for the location. We were too far from the destination. If he knew, he would most likely stop now and not allow me to continue. The rest of the way was travelled in silence, and I slipped back into my memories.

Bobby and I were playing, and he was chosen to be the king and tell me, his knight, what to do, to order me to perform tasks. My father didn’t like that someone was telling his son what to do. The first time Bobby gave me a command, my father let it pass. I saw the displeasure on his face, and so I asked Bobby if we could switch roles. But Bobby insisted on being king, and yelled that it wasn’t fair -- we had flipped a coin and that he had only been king a few minutes… That was when my father, the ever-threatening presence in my life, involved himself. He pushed my friend back and he fell, a mere five-year-old, on the floor.

“Never let anyone boss you around!” he said leaned over Bobby, gripped his shirt and lifted him off the floor. All the while he spoke to me in that low, threatening tone I always associated with him. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” I answered, frightened. A wet stain started to spread on Bobby’s pants, and I knew that Bobby wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore.

Bobby’s stare. My father’s behavior. Rumor spread quickly between the parents of my English friends and no one wanted to play with me anymore. The Albanian friends weren’t really friends. They knew that they were playing with the prince of crime and behaved accordingly. So from the age of five I faced the world alone. Behind me was a driving force that reminded me of one thing – That I was a lone wolf, forbidden from befriending or accepting orders from anyone. I think that was my first lesson in life. If you don’t belong, at the very least don’t show it. Learn the field, blend in, get to know the routine, and only then go out and do what you want.

What did I want now? I wanted to understand the field, to know its demands and supply them. To be the number one supplier in the area and do what I wanted with all the money I earned. At the moment, there was a great need for drugs on the market. The new drug that El Desconocido had promised me was about to arrive. I needed to straighten things out with the Red Mafia before that. The Russians had to