Borderline Read online

  King & Moretti 2

  Borderline

  D.B. Steward

  Copyright © 2020 D.B. Steward

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: fantabanner

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my children

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  King & Moretti

  PROLOGUE

  ​People and cars moved around her, oblivious to her problems. Content with their own dull existence and meaningless lives. Humidity hung in the early September air in Washington D.C. Clinging to her skin like a wet sheet. Her mood was not helped by the thickness of the air around her. Or the pampered masses that marched along in an endless parade of mediocrity. The short and severe woman stood ramrod straight, waiting on the sidewalk. Her silver hair hung down past her shoulders, unlike the coiled spring of a coiffed bun she usually wore. Her appearance was haggard. It reflected the treatment she had endured the past two weeks. But by sheer force of will she stood as if there was steel in her spine. Her eyes were ablaze with the fury she had kept buried inside her while she languished in her cell. She was clad in the clothes she wore when they took her. A gray business skirt and matching Brooks Brothers blazer was all she had with her when they came. Her own clothes had her feeling like her old self, almost. It was an illusion of course. At least she was no longer stuck in the hideous orange jumpsuit they forced her to wear inside. Amina Golovkin had her own business to thank for her recent incarceration. Yet it was also responsible for her current freedom. Amina was a human trafficker, a slaver, a pimp. She made no excuses for the things she had done to survive. Protecting herself was her only mission in life. But to have protection in this world one needed money. Lots of it. Money could buy you power, and power could buy you safety. Amina knew the meaning of safety and how it was a luxury that only the powerful could buy.

  Before her arrival to America she had been a mother and a wife living in Bosnia. She had been happy. But that was another life. Before the war. Before the cleansing began. In her province all the Muslims were rounded up and placed into camps. In one of those camps her former life died and a new life was born. They killed her husband in front of her, her small children had their throats slit. The soldiers passed her around among themselves. She could not remember how many times they raped her. Amina had closed her eyes and let the blackness envelop her. But she could still smell them. Their breath was hot on her neck and face. She could smell their sweat. The musty, tangy mixture of body odor and stale cigarettes. Their sticky, grimy skin that touched hers and made her feel like their filth was melting into her body. Tainting her soul forever.

  Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Until finally in 1995 she was liberated by UN forces. She was free, physically. Her soul would never be free again. It would remain there, locked inside the camp forever. Trapped on that cursed scrap of dirt where her family died. Amina would forever carry a void inside her that she could not fill with all the money or power in the world. The horror that she had lived through taught her a lesson that she would take to her grave. Amina Golovkin swore that she would never be a victim again. She would be the predator from now on, and the rest of the world would be her prey.

  Amina left her home as soon as she was able. Living in the place where she had lived with her family was not an option anymore. The land itself held memories of the life she had led before and they refused to stay buried. She was now an empty husk. Neither alive nor dead. But she had nothing. Everything, all that she possessed was ripped away from her. Amina used the only currency she had left to fund her escape. Her body. She sold herself to anyone who had the money to escape far away. She moved east, staying in one location long enough to afford to run further. Always further away from her former home and her former life.

  By the time she had reached Germany she began to realize that she had established a network of sorts. Unknowingly, she had assembled contacts among her clients and colleagues. Amina started to think bigger than trying to escape the terrors inside. An idea began to form, she would not only survive. She would thrive. She worked to cultivate her relationships. Her clientele began to rise in class. Gone were the days of sweaty fumblings in filthy alleys. She was now wined and dined in the finest places in Europe.

  Amina absorbed every piece of information from her clients that could benefit her. She used, extorted, bribed, lied and did whatever else she had to do to climb higher. Soon she had convinced a few other women to join her stable and work for her. Amina was a natural business woman. She understood the basic principle of supply and demand.

  She was wealthy now. She was successful, but it still wasn’t enough. The deep hole in her soul demanded more. Her appetite was insatiable. It guided her. Always looking for new ways to cultivate more wealth and more influence. And then she found it. There was a key demographic in her market that was being ignored. There was a kind of man that she had come across in her business. Men that craved more than sex. Men with a predilection for violence against women. Men that were willing to pay to satisfy their urges. Men that would pay more to live out their fantasies. Misogynists and sadists of the worst order. Like the men she had known from the camps. Psychopaths.

  In another life she enjoyed cooking for her family, reading, and playing games with her children. That woman would not recognize the one she had now become. From prey to predator. Her travels had opened her eyes to a resource she could exploit. A resource that would never run out. Women that had fallen through the cracks of society. Runaways. Addicts. Women who had lost their families. They came from everywhere. All it took to tap into this bottomless reservoir was someone who could identify them. Someone who knew what they had gone through, someone who knew what these women wanted to hear. They were unknowing victims drawn into her web. They became part of her organization and once inside, they never left. Trapped prey to her predator.

  The underground market for violent sexual deviancy was, by nature, difficult to enter. Individuals that enjoyed the acts that decent society deemed criminal. Men that found it impossible to find services that catered to their violent needs. By using a combination of word of mouth along with the dark web, Amina created a secret network that provided
an international service to wealthy men with a bent toward violence against women. She created a by invitation only client list. A client would recommend someone. Then that person would be vetted by Amina. If that person was a suitable candidate they would receive a phone number. That number would connect to a burner phone. Once the person’s identity was verified they would be escorted to a safe house that housed a stable of Amina’s girls. Girls that could disappear without anyone caring. Unwanted. Disposable.

  As a procurer of women for sexual sadists, she had kept detailed files on her clients as insurance. Insurance that she could use in case of the discovery of her operation. Insurance that she would use to apply pressure to the clients who could keep her safe from arrest or prosecution. Insurance that she had never needed to use. Until now, that is. Until she had the misfortune of crossing paths with Kelly King and Sonny Moretti.

  She was struggling to understand how everything had deteriorated. She had planned for everything. She had thought of every possible scenario that might hurt her business. Her operation had taken every precaution to be secure and invisible. She should have been untouchable, invulnerable. That was her mistake, she mused. She had become too self-assured of her own safety. Overconfident.

  Her ambition had led to her downfall. Amina had made herself wealthy. Her fortune was larger than she had imagined in her wildest dreams. But the dark void inside her was always hungry for more. That was the reason why she had approached Ivan Popov. She wanted to expand her business further. To do that she would add the protection of a Russian mafia family to her organization.

  Amina’s intuition that had always proved infallible before, had failed her. Had she been thinking clearly, she would have never gotten involved with the Popov family. They were one of the most powerful crime families in Russia and had established a secure foothold already in the United States. Their protection would be essential in expanding her business from coast to coast. But going into business with them came with a huge liability in the form of Ivan Popov. Amina gritted her teeth. Ivan was an idiot. Being the son of a wealthy crime boss had made Ivan believe that he could live the life of a celebrity. Ivan lived his life as if he were a Kardashian or something equally absurd. His life was on display to the world via Instagram and Snapchat. He would flash his money everywhere he went like some big shot. He was known all over the country in every top shelf club as a VIP. He even owned his own cheesy nightclub.

  Ivan was the first Popov she approached about the venture and he was beyond excited to get into business with her. Ivan’s father, Petrov, was a shrewd businessman and had frozen Ivan out of the family organization. This made Ivan hungry to make his own money and crawl out of his father’s shadow. The arrangement had worked well for a while. Alas, Ivan had a propensity for taking a good thing and turning it into shit.

  Petrov Popov had his hooks into many government agencies in order for his criminal operations to run smoothly. There were many federal employees that also happened to be on the Popov payroll. Arnold Jackson was one of them. Arnold worked for ICE and helped Petrov. Arnold was helping to make sure that foreign nationals entered the US for Ivan without any difficulties. Ivan knew about Arnold and how he helped his father. Arnold’s work was so good that Ivan decided to recruit him to help bring in new workers for Amina. He paid Arnold a ton of cash and even invited him to many of his parties. It was too much for the mid level government bureaucrat to refuse. He began to moonlight in secret for the younger Popov. There were two problems with the new arrangement. Number one was that Arnold was not discreet with his spending or showing off his recent windfall on social media. Petrov used Arnold to bring in one or two people from time to time. Ivan was now bringing large groups of women over and drawing unwanted attention to the operation.

  Having a conscious was a liability in the business of human trafficking. Arnold was happy to look the other way, assuming that the women were hookers from overseas entering the United States. But he found out what the women were being used for, and what their inevitable fate would be. He also discovered that not all of them were old enough to be women. To everyone’s surprise, even a weasel like Arnold Jefferson had some principles. Arnold wanted out. But not only with Ivan, he wanted out of the whole Petrov business. The elder Petrov was furious that he was losing an asset like Arnold, and that the reason why was his own son. Petrov ordered a contract hit on Arnold. But using his own men to kill Arnold, a federal employee, would be too easy for the authorities to trace back to him. Petrov looked for a freelancer. Petrov made inquiries to other criminal organizations like his. He found Sonja Moretti, known in the underworld as the best paid assassin in the business.

  Sonny accepted the contract but balked once she found out what Arnold knew. That women and girls were being trafficked into the USA to be raped, tortured, and murdered. In exchange for his life, Arnold told Sonny about the slavery ring that Amina and Ivan were operating. Amina was unlucky enough to have the only paid assassin in the world with a conscience on her bad side. Sonny went to war against the Popovs and Amina. She shut down one of Amina’s brothels and killed Ivan and Petrov. Sonny and her partner, Kelly King, spared her life but they turned Amina over to the authorities.

  Authorities. Amina sniffed in disdain at the thought. The people who had held her weren’t the police or any law enforcement agency that she knew of. She wasn’t told her Miranda Rights or given access to a lawyer. There were no charges. No arraignment. A plain room, a locked door, and an armed guard. Once, a black woman came to her cell and asked her a few questions. But the questions were basic, her name, where she was from, how she entered the United States. But, Amina got the impression that the woman already knew the answers to the questions she asked. She stayed like that for a few weeks with no information or any idea if she would ever see the sky again. And then, one day, they released her. There were no instructions from her jailers, no warnings not to leave town, no future court date. The guards opened the door. They escorted her outside of a plain looking office building and put her out on the street.

  She took a moment to try and process what had happened to her but gave up after a moment. Amina asked a man who happened to be walking by if she could borrow his phone. She made a call and was thankful when the person she was looking for picked up.

  She shook her head. Amina attempted to concentrate on what was happening now. It wasn't helping her to dwell on what happened before. After waiting for about twenty minutes, the black Lincoln town car rolled down the street to her. The car stopped and a driver got out to open the back passenger door for her. Her stern face and eyes looked through him. That was all the driver received for acknowledgment as she climbed inside.

  “Good morning Amina.” The well dressed Gregory Martin greeted her with his charming Wall Street smile. “It’s good to have powerful friends isn’t it?”

  Amina nodded and the corner of her lip lifted in a cruel smile. “Indeed.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Two weeks ago

  Kelly squealed as she skipped around the suite. Her bright red hair was bouncing like thin springs. She was clapping her hands and giggling like she was six years old again. “Oh my God! Sonny do you believe this?” Spinning to face the taller woman with the high cheekbones, Kelly King’s smile beamed like the sun at noon. “This place is awesome! I bet Oprah stays here! Is that a fucking grand piano?” The Infinity Suite in the Langham Hotel was enormous and luxurious. There was a parlor sitting area off the main foyer. The sofas looked very comfortable to her. Kelly immediately jumped on one of them and began bouncing up and down. “I bet these couches cost more than my van!” She dropped onto her back and started kicking her feet into the cushions. “Look at me! I feel like Rick James!” The black haired woman raised a questioning eyebrow at Kelly. “Dave Chapelle? ‘I’m Rick James bitch?’” Kelly stopped kicking her feet and frowned at her companion. “I forgot, you don’t watch anything besides movies. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure we watch it, that show is hilarious! I’m going to show
you so many TV shows because Holy Fuck would you look at the size of that television!” Kelly took a closer look at the athletic woman who stood with her arms crossed near the foyer

  door, where she had not moved since they had entered the room. “You okay Sonny?” There was definite concern in her voice that brought her frolicking to an end.

  Sonny Moretti was not okay. She did not see the hotel suite in the same way that Kelly did. To Kelly it was a new and exciting playground. Sonny saw it as a cage. A gilded cage, but a cage nonetheless. The extravagant accommodations of the Langham Hotel only helped to cement her inclinations. They were being groomed so they would be docile and grateful toward their new masters. Her face remained a blank mask that concealed the animosity that churned inside her.

  “You’re still mad that they caught us.” Kelly read Sonny’s body language. She deflated as she began to consider the cause of Sonny’s apprehension. Kelly had been an employee of the federal government before. But Sonny had lived her entire life free and under the radar. Sonny had never worked a real job in her life, she had never had a boss. She had lived on her own and she liked it that way.

  Kelly was a little envious that Sonny had made it to adulthood and was never forced to sit through an employee review. She never had to ask for a promotion, put up with annoying coworkers, or submit vacation requests. It was the type of life that people who spent their days stuffed into small cubicles and fought traffic to and from a job they hated, dreamed of having.