The Agreement (Darkest Lies Trilogy Book 1) by Bethany-Kris (motivational books for men .TXT) 📕

sat between them in the console until the damn thing started to ring. Through the Bluetooth speakers. He hadn’t put the radio on, but apparently, the speakers were turned up loud enough to make the ringing pierce through his eardrums.

“Is he as deaf as he is stupid?”

“It’s his phone,” Anastasia informed, glancing toward the phone.

Clearly.

Roman growled under his breath as he turned the volume down to a bearable level. Not that it did anything for the ache in his ears. “Why the fuck did he leave it in the car?”

“Paranoid. He thinks they’re bugged, and someone might be listening. He doesn’t like carrying them around everywhere.”

“Them? He has more than one?”

Anastasia shrugged. “He only ever gets burner phones and switches them out every week.”

Jesus.

He understood the need—many guys in his line of work replaced their phones often—still, not to that extent. Dima sounded more and more like someone who was constantly looking over his shoulder. Always afraid of getting caught with his pants down.

Why?

The obvious reason was rarely the right one.

The ringing finally ended, and then a few moments later, the screen on the dash blinked with a voice message. He didn’t know why, but the message started auto-playing through Bluetooth.

Shit.

Maybe the car wasn’t a rental.

Roman startled when he heard a soft, but annoyed, voice echo over the microphone.

“It’s me. Katee. There. I called you back. Are you happy now?”

She sounded like ... a girl.

Young.

Maybe ten.

Silence spread through the Bugatti when the message ended abruptly.

He really shouldn’t ask.

Roman’s mouth worked before he could stop it. “Who the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know. She calls him a lot, though,” Anastasia replied. “Maybe his sister?”

Maybe.

Either way, Roman didn’t give a shit. And because he couldn’t afford another distraction like the phone call, he didn’t waste time rolling down the window and tossing the device to the racing pavement below.

All he cared about now was getting the car to the shop where he would hide it until it could be cut down.

• • •

Despite owning three different chop shops across New York, the one in Brighton Beach was the one he preferred working at because it was also technically his home. One of two. He kept an apartment in the city—just because.

His loft was situated right above the chop shop. When someone from the bratva needed to find him, this was the first place they came to do so. And now it looked like the cops knew it, too.

Later, when he had time to think the situation over because he had nothing else to do except stare at the cement walls of a jail cell, Roman would blame the comfort he felt in the safety of his home for his distraction. He used the clicker to open the warehouse’s shutters before driving straight into a goddamn mess.

At first, when Roman saw the three armed cops standing there—weapons already drawn and pointed at him through the windshield—he thought it was a joke. Not once had his shops been raided in the past year. And even before that, the amount of police he had on his payroll ensured he could do business without worry they were going to constantly come up on him without enough warning from his sources to keep his side of things covered.

Except it wasn’t a joke.

And he was fucked.

“Oh, my God,” Anastasia whispered, horrified.

Roman’s foot had hit the brakes on the car to stop it all of three feet away from the legs of the officers. His other foot twitched with the urge to jam down on the gas, but a rational part of his brain kept him from making an even worse mistake than he already had tonight.

“Hands up—step out of the car with your hands up!”

“Now!”

Shit, he hadn’t even put the car in park. Roman’s heart raced like thundering hooves in his chest as his gaze darted from the cops in front of him, and the rapidly closing garage door behind him in the rearview mirror.

He could have made it—would have—if not for Anastasia reaching over and digging her red stiletto nails into his arm with enough force to drag Roman’s attention away from the danger he still faced.

“What the fuck are you—”

She didn’t even finish her sentence before the windshield was shot out of the Bugatti. Roman had enough sense to turn his face away from the exploding glass, but he couldn’t say if Anastasia had been smart enough—or quick, for that matter—to do the same. His low fuck hissed through the car when he turned his head just in time to see brass knuckles coming for the driver’s side window.

It was over, then.

Roman knew it.

His hands went up, and all he said, hoping Anastasia would hear, was, “Be easy, shit.”

Two cops went for him immediately—one must have got the car in park because the damn thing didn’t roll away when he found himself some distance away from the car, face down to cement with hands on his back and shoulders.

A knee found the middle of his shoulders, too.

“Nice place, Roman,” he heard one of the cops say above him. “Always wondered what it looked like inside.”

Christ.

“This was a setup,” Roman hissed as he watched the scene unfold.

Anastasia was pulled from the car, too, but it only took one pig to do the job on that side of things. The horror filling her face as tears streamed down her cheeks did nothing to ease the rough handling of the officer that dragged her to Roman’s side on the cement floor. It also didn’t stop her from fighting the man every step of the way.

He had to give her that.

Somehow, Roman got the feeling that she didn’t know what role she had played in this scheme—if that’s what this had been—but if she did ... he would make her wish she hadn’t.

Roman tensed when the weight of the officer’s knee came firmer into his back, the pain spearing through his spine instantly. “I said fucking easy, asshole.”

The cop only laughed. “It’s going to be a long night for