Little Dove: The Beast, #3

By Jaden Wilkes

How can you ever hope to find normal when your life is anything but?

Determined to make amends for his past, and show Columbia he truly is a changed man, Dimitri sets out to right wrongs and decimate those who bring nothing but sorrow to the world. 

Something goes wrong and Columbia is taken, spirited away into the underground world of sex trafficking and international crime syndicates. 

Dimitri must fight his way across the Europe to find her and bring her home. He would rather see the world burn than live without her in it.

He will tear the world apart looking for his little dove.

This is a tragic story exploring the consequences of daring to love in the midst of chaos and terror. 

****As with The Beast, this book explores dark themes. That being said, it is also a book filled with hope, love and light in the dark.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jaden Wilkes
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781386576082

Jaden Wilkes

Jaden is the pen name of a girl living on the prettiest farm in BC. She shares her space with her husband, her children, and an Irish Wolfhound named Tiberius. She can now be found lurking in the dark corners of the internet looking for artful porn gifs, dirty poems and places to promo her work.

Book preview

Prologue

She shuddered as the men gathered around her, pinching her skin and grabbing at her tits. She almost couldn’t remember her name; it had been weeks since anyone had called her anything other than Girl or Cunt.

She clutched her growing stomach and huddled in on herself to protect it from the jeering crowd. A voice boomed through a loudspeaker in a language she didn’t understand and she was dragged off the platform and thrown towards a small group of frightened women.

She looked at their faces and understood that they had all been purchased by the same buyer and would soon be traveling together to their new brothel.

It was a miracle that she was still pregnant, after the beatings she’d endured, but she needed to believe in miracles now more than ever.

She needed to get back to Boian like the grass needed the rain, like a bird needed the sky. She bitterly regretted leaving him every day since they’d been apart. She prayed he would still want her after all this time, that he hadn’t forgotten her.

She straightened her back, smoothed her long, black hair and looked at them all, the downtrodden, the beaten, the ghosts of girls long thought dead by the rest of the world.

My name is Ioana, she stated in heavily accented English, and we are going to get through this. We are going to escape.

She saw disbelief and fear ripple through the group, reaching each and every face except for one. A lithe blonde who had been crouched down unfolded herself slowly and stood up. She was tall, filthy and naked like the rest of them. There was something different about her though. She met Ioana’s gaze, looked her up and down with blazing eyes and replied, It’s about fucking time.

1 Dimitri

The room was poorly lit when he entered and he didn’t like it. Immediately his senses were piqued, there was something wrong.

He was here to meet somebody he’d never seen, only heard about. He was trying to settle an old debt and clear his conscience.

He had lied to Columbia and let her believe he had important business to attend in Prague. It was mostly true, but the business he had was not in Prague, but Bucharest.

He felt guilty lying to her about it, but his affairs in Bucharest were somewhat shameful to Dimitri. He didn’t know how to admit to Columbia his reason for going, and he was afraid she would see him differently if she knew how dark his past truly was.

He had been in a particularly cruel phase in his life almost a decade ago, a young man brash with power and lacking temperance. He had settled in Bucharest for a year, taking over the local operations of Sergei’s Eastern European sex network. It hadn’t occurred to him back then that the victims were people, terrified and desperate and most likely would end up dead.

He’d been drunk with power, abusing men and women like they were nothing better than dollar signs and achievement points to win favour with his boss.

Until one woman had set him straight years ago, and changed his path forever. Looking back, her intervention in his life had been the thing that precipitated the pulling away from Sergei. Her kindness and humanity had set him on a course much different than the one he’d been on at the time.

It still took years for him to realize how much of a brute he had been, and how killing with indifference would eventually take its toll on his spirit. It hadn’t been until his own brush with becoming less than human that he had been able to comprehend how valuable human life actually was.

Her name had been Sanda, and she’d been the head of a house they kept girls at. He knew Sergei’s enterprise had included boys, girls, men and women, but his assignment had been with women and older girls. Sergei had been testing his moral limits.

Looking back on it, he realized that Sergei had pegged him for a killer from early on, but had thrust this assignment on him in an attempt to curb Dimitri’s growing power inside the bratva.

Nobody really liked a man who got off on selling women and girls for profit. Sergei had attempted to undermine Dimitri’s growing popularity by setting him up as a surrogate pimp, trading flesh like business stock.

It might have worked had he not met Sanda, the woman who got into his head and stayed with him until he was almost broken and half mad through his own pain and humiliation.

He was here to meet her son; he knew it was time to pay restitution. It had taken Nico the last three years to find him, searching through Romania’s records had proven impossible so he’d turned to the massive underground network to hunt them down.

A single boy had survived her; he’d been in his teens when his mother had died.

Dimitri was here to see him, to pay for not saving his mother’s life.

But something wasn’t right, the room was too dark and the hotel too quiet. He sensed an ambush and almost felt as though he deserved what he had coming to him.

If it weren’t for his little dove, most likely pacing the hallways back home and nibbling on her thumb when she was terrified, he might have given into their attack.

But he had to make it home, he had lied to her about where he was going, but he wouldn’t lie to her about going back to her.

You can come out, he said into the silent room. It was a standard suite in a mid-level hotel in the middle of Bucharest’s tourist district. I know you’re here. The son had chosen it, and Dimitri had agreed, against his better judgment.

A movement from the short corridor between the main room and the bathroom caught his eye. A single figure stepped forward into the shared light of the table lamp.

Dimitri eyed the man up. He was younger than himself, leaner, but just as tall and just as tough looking. He was well muscled, with short dark hair and tattoos winding around his arms and peeking out the top of his shirt. Dimitri hoped he wouldn’t have to fight this young man; he didn’t want to have to kill him.

So, we finally meet, the young man said in heavily accented English. He stopped and sized Dimitri up, looking at him from dark, hooded eyes. The resemblance was unmistakable though, this was Sanda’s son.

We finally do, Dimitri replied and straightened up. He couldn’t show a moment of weakness or the young man would attack.

What do you want? he asked.

Only to repay a debt, Dimitri said in a calm, even voice, something I owe you from long ago.

Did you kill her? he asked with his lip curled in a sneer.

Dimitri thought about how to answer this, yes, he had been there when Sanda had died, but it wasn’t as cut and dried as her son might think. He simply answered, I didn’t, but I was responsible for her death.

Without warning, he pulled back and threw a punch at Dimitri’s face. Dimitri ducked and swung his own, striking the man in the jaw. Not enough to break it, but enough to split the skin on his knuckles and knock the man back on his ass.

Dimitri held his other hand out and wondered how long before the jaw swelled up. He’d better make this quick.

Sanda’s son took the hand begrudgingly and stood. He stared at Dimitri and flinched. It was an almost imperceptible gesture, but one that gave away the fact that he was carrying a weapon. A gun, Dimitri supposed, it’s always a gun when they want to kill you quickly.

Aren’t you going to ask me why, or how? Dimitri said to cut through the thick silence between them.

Does it matter? She’s gone and I never had a chance to know her, the man said and appeared to deflate. He slumped forward and his grief was almost unbearable for Dimitri. He knew he couldn’t reach out to offer comfort, the younger man would never take it.

She was a good woman, Dimitri said, and she changed my life.

I never knew her, he replied and looked at Dimitri. He laughed, an ironic twist to his lips, You know, I was raised in an orphanage. I was an orphan with a mother, but I never met her.

She talked about you constantly, Dimitri told him, she always meant to go back to you but by the time she got free, she was too ashamed to show her face. Had she known your grandparents had died and you ended up on your own, she would have come. I promise.

You say that, but who can really trust the word of an old whore? he said and inhaled deeply. He exhaled, as if gathering his thoughts. She was a whore, wasn’t she? I’ve heard it said on the streets, but never knew exactly what she did or what befell her.

She wasn’t by the time I met her, Dimitri replied, she was running a house by then. She was as kind as she could be to the girls who came through, but she had to be hard. She didn’t want to be hard, but she had to be.

Did she have a husband? My grandparents told me she ran away to be with a man.

She had a pimp, but no husband.

Can you tell me how it happened then? How did she die?

Dimitri paused and rubbed his hand across his freshly shaved head. Columbia had done it just before he left, to make him more imposing she had said. He didn’t feel imposing at the moment, he felt contrite.

I was a very different man back then, please understand this. Can we sit? Dimitri asked and gestured towards a small dining table near the window.

Sure, he replied and they both sat down, Dimitri was careful to keep his legs facing out so the table didn’t impede him if he needed to move quickly. Dimitri was impressed to see the younger man did the same.

She was a beautiful woman, your mother. Sanda, but everyone called her Beauty because of her thick, dark hair. When she was younger, a pimp lured her to the city with the promise of work for a wealthy couple. She’d planned on sending money back to your grandparents for your care and education. She’d always meant to return after she made enough to cover your university costs.

The man laughed, a sardonic sound that belied his grief.

She meant it. But of course, there was no housekeeping job and she was sold into sexual slavery the night she arrived. They keep girls in houses around the city…around the country and even the world. There is a never ending supply of men who will pay, who will use, abuse and treat them like cattle. Dimitri fell silent, thinking of his own mistreatment of the girls he had once paid. The girls he had once considered less than human, even those right up until he met Columbia.

Go on, he said and leaned forward. He really wanted to hear this, Dimitri thought, but it was going to be difficult.

By the time I was sent here to oversee the entire operation, your mother was no longer seeing clients, she was running her own house. She was good to her people, but cruel to her enemies. And as she gained power, she gained many enemies.

Sanda’s son shifted in his seat and placed his hand on his abdomen, exactly where Dimitri would have had his own weapon strapped, had he brought one.

"We worked together, on and off. It was strictly business, but eventually a friendship developed. It is imperative you understand what kind of man I was back then. I worked for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, he said and paused when the other man opened his eyes wide in surprise, then recovered immediately. I was the boss’s right hand man, and you know what that means."

He nodded, and said, Why were you babysitting whores in Bucharest then, if you were his second.

I believe now I was being punished for being too good, too efficient at what I did. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that your mother became a friend to me, and planted a seed in the back of my head that started to grow. She helped shape me into the man I am today.

And what kind of man is that? Sanda’s son asked with a sneer. Dimitri knew this was a lot to process and afforded him a very wide berth in accepting what was being said.

I am not a good man, Dimitri said, but I am a better man than I was and that’s all I can lay claim to.

How did she die? he asked at last. He was still and seemed perched on the edge of his chair. This must be a lot for him to take in, finding out about his mother from the man who was there at her death.

Dimitri rubbed his hand over his head again, conscious of his nervous gesture after Columbia had pointed it out to him. He said, I was there at the end, she was brave until the last moment. We'd been attacked by an American gang trying to edge their way into our market. They were collecting our girls, herding them up and stealing them, setting fire to our houses. We were in an all out war with them.

What does this have to do with my mother’s death?

"We were at her house one night, a converted townhouse here in Bucharest. A few blocks from here, you never would know what it was from the street. We were going over the week’s figures, your mother was counting the money she owed the bratva and complaining about the general problems that came from running a whorehouse. Breaking girls in, clients getting too rough, the usual things. It was a pretty quiet night, a Sunday if I recall."

Dimitri paused and took a deep breath, clearing his thoughts and thinking back to that night. I never knew it at the time, but looking back it seems that my mentor had set me up even then. He was in league with the Americans from the get-go. They broke in the front door; shot anyone they saw and eventually made their way to where we were situated. There were maybe twenty of them in total and they did a lot of damage on their way to your mother’s quarters.

He paused again, remembering Sanda’s determined look that night, the set to her jaw and how quickly she had reached for her guns. Dimitri had drawn his own weapons and fired at will.

We were outgunned and outnumbered but your mother fought like a true hero. She showed me an escape hatch she had built in and I insisted she go through ahead of me. She refused and I refused to leave her. We were trapped and we knew it, but she would not leave without finding the girls who needed her. You see, even though she was a hard taskmaster and cruel when she had to be, your mother saw them as people. Everyone else I worked with, myself included, saw them as meat…objects to be traded and sold. Your mother taught me to never forget that they were human beings.

The younger man pursed his lips as if in disbelief. But she never came for me, he said. She never came back.

She couldn’t, Dimitri replied, and she always thought she would…when she had saved some more money, when she had gotten a better job. She lived with regret every day of her life, if that means anything to you. She died helping girls through her escape hatch, she gave her life so many could keep theirs.

But you said you were responsible for her death, he said, his eyes flared with anger.

I had something to do with it, yes, Dimitri told him. I should have made her leave, I should have forced her to safety and killed the men on my own. In the end we got backup and I survived with a couple broken ribs and a grazed ear. But as your mother died, she told me two things. The first was to never forget that they are all people. Everybody has a story and unless they show you they deserve to die, we don’t have the right to take their life.

What was the second?

She told me to find her son, find her Boian and make sure he’s taken care of for the rest of his life…that she loved him.

Boian looked down at the surface of the table, his face was an unreadable mask but Dimitri sensed a maelstrom of emotions just under the surface. He gave him a moment to process the information.

What are you saying? Boian asked at last. So she’s dead and you’re here to what, save me?

Not save you, but make your life much more comfortable than it has been until now. You won’t ever have to work again.

I don’t work now, Boian replied with a smirk, I’m the Orphan King, the leader of the underground. I have never worked, except to stay alive.

I’m sorry to hear this, Dimitri said, but this money will mean you can come above ground, leave your life behind and live in luxury.

But I like my life, Boian said and stood, keep your money, Russian. There’s nothing you could offer me now that I don’t already have. He made towards the door. Dimitri scribbled some information on the back of one of his many fake business cards. He stood and blocked Boian’s exit.

The young man reached for his weapon, but hesitated as Dimitri held out the card. This is the banking information. If you ever decide to take the money, this is what you’ll need to access. There’s the account number, the routing number and the access code. If you ever need me, for anything, call the number on the front and I’ll do whatever I can to assist you.

He stepped back and allowed Boian to leave the room. As he walked through the door, Boian turned and asked, Who should I ask for? I mean, if I ever need to call.

Dimitri said, The Beast, and Boian left. Dimitri called down the hall to him, You should put some ice on that jaw as soon as possible or it’s going to swell.

Boian gave no indication that he’d he heard and kept walking.

Dimitri sat back down at the kitchen table and ran his hand over his head, thinking about Sanda’s death and what he hadn’t told Boian. Sanda had taken him as a lover although she had been several years older. Dimitri had learned a lot from her, about pleasing a woman, but after her death he’d purposefully forgotten it all.

She had been insistent that he didn’t lose his humanity; from the moment she met him. He had been called The Enforcer then, and she counseled him to never become what they wanted him to be, less than human himself. He had almost opened his heart to her, but circumstances and emotions had all been wrong for him.

It wasn’t until Columbia had come along that he’d realized that love, hearts opening, sex, obsession…it wasn’t a choice. With Sanda he had enjoyed her company and loved listening to her wax poetic after a good fuck. With Columbia he hadn’t had a choice, she had broken in through the front gate and stormed his heart with the military precision of a barbarian queen. He smiled and wished Sanda could have met Columbia. The older woman would love his little dove, but he knew Columbia would have her claws out and be spitting fire if she had met Sanda.

He turned his phone on and checked it. There were about a hundred texts from Columbia in the last few hours he’d had it turned off. He stood and left the room; he would have time to read her frantic messages on the flight back home. The meeting had gone faster than he’d expected, no talking about old times or going to the bank to make sure everything was in order.

Now he would go back to his little dove, the only reason he existed these days, and the one thing in the world that kept him from becoming the beast in anything but name.

2 Columbia

H ave you gotten anywhere with that last intel? Columbia asked Nico again. She couldn’t tell if he’d been ignoring her or hadn’t heard her the first time. She was getting agitated, she felt like they were about to get a huge lead on Sergei’s whereabouts. She was almost salivating, thinking about killing the fucker.

Can you back off for just a minute and let me think? Nico snapped at her. He had been unusually quiet and more than a little short tempered the last few days. Columbia considered making a joke about man PMS, but decided against it when she saw Nico drum his fingers on his desk. That was his tell, his nervous tic. When he was extremely stressed or angry, he always tapped his fingers.

She had an idea what was bothering him but couldn’t bring herself to give it a voice. The exact same thing was bothering her, which is why the two of them were sniping at each other constantly.

Dimitri had gone for four days. He’d insisted on going alone, he had some face-to-face business that had to be conducted in Prague. Columbia had thrown such a fit at being left behind that Dimi had ordered Nico to stay with her, to keep her calm after he left.

This was the third day, he would be back tomorrow but it couldn’t come soon enough. Columbia felt like taut wire, fraying and ready to snap. She’d spent the time pacing, barely eating, not sleeping...and hunting down every last thing she could find about Sergei.

It became the reason she breathed, the reason she got out of bed after a restless night and the reason she still went to spar with Nico every day. She was going to kill Sergei so she could let Dimi out of her sight without going stark raving mad.

Come on, she whispered and chewed a dry piece of skin on her thumb.

Would you please cut that out? Nico said and tilted his computer screen towards her.

What?

The chewing, the fidgeting, the sighing...it’s all driving me insane, he said, I get it, but Dimitri can take care of himself. He’ll be just fine.

Columbia dropped her hand to her lap and narrowed her eyes at Nico. She knew in her heart that Dimitri could take care of himself, but there was this constant underlying anxiety full of the, What ifs… All the possible things that could go wrong, from his plane crashing to Sergei trapping him and taking his life. There were a million possibilities that would prevent Dimi from coming home to her, and her mind happened to spin them all along on a constant thread of worry.

I know, she said, I know he’s fine and I know he’ll be home…but what if?

Nico pursed his lips and replied, You have to let that go. Just know he’ll be safe and you’ll be with him tomorrow. Now take a look at this.

Columbia ignored his pat advice; she wouldn’t believe Dimitri was safe until he was in her arms, that was just the way it worked at the moment. She leaned forward to see what Nico had found and took a moment to clue in.

It was a passenger manifest for a private jet that had been making regular flights from Moscow to Paris. A single person rode each flight in both directions, one Vasily Lavrov. She looked at Nico for clarification.

That’s Sergei! he said and pointed at the screen. We’ve got the bastard! He’s been making regular visits to Paris for some reason...although if I know him, it’s got to be about a woman.

How do you know? Columbia asked, studying the name again.

That was the name of his right hand man, one of the men Dimitri killed during the fire. Sergei always was a lazy, smug bastard, never trying too hard to keep himself hidden. The only reason we’ve had nothing on him all this time is because he has excellent people working for him.

Are you kidding? Columbia asked, looking at Nico and back again at the screen. She forced herself to focus on the name, willing the letters to open up and reveal Sergei’s secrets. So now what? We know he’s in Paris, what do we do about it?

His next trip looks like it will be in two weeks. I’ll go and do some recon. He probably won’t notice me, and from the looks of things he’ll be traveling alone. Let’s find out who he’s visiting and bang, you’ve got him!

This is amazing! Columbia cried and threw her arms around Nico. He pulled back stiffly, never completely comfortable with Columbia’s easy manners around him. She let go and moved her chair back on its wheels, smiled and simply gloated. They’d found him.

She stood and said, I’m going for a swim. She needed to work off