Chapter Twenty-one
Day sixteen…
SERGEI
It’s dawn, and my office is a shambles. I’ve torn it apart, thrown everything that’s not nailed down at the walls. Books ripped to shreds, papers scattered across the floor, pillows torn open. With every step, broken glass crunches under my feet.
I still haven’t slept. At least I don’t think I have. I’m moving in a daze of horror and rage.
It’s starting to sink in. I might never see her again.
I’ve put out the word. Fifty million dollars for my Willow’s safe return. Death to whoever took her, or knows where she is and does not tell me immediately. The kind of death that I specialize in – slow, excruciating.
Nobody has contacted me and asked for ransom. Nobody has called me up to taunt me. This makes no sense. Cataha is the type to gloat.
Why haven’t I heard from him?
I have my entire network on this. I’m offering a fortune. We’re getting some information trickling in about men who work for Cataha, called to work with him on a special project, but they were just ordered to get in a truck. No idea where they were headed.
The special project is Willow.
I know it.
This is what I tried to save her from. This is why I was willing to break her heart, stomp on it, slash it to pieces, back in California.
Why I was willing to break my own heart by lying to her.
Yes, I have a heart. I know this now. It beats only for Willow.
Hurting her was better than the alternative – whatever’s happening to her right this minute, somewhere dark and terrifying. Where she’s all alone and I can’t protect her.
And it’s her fault too. Damn her and her morals. Her conscience. What is the purpose of a conscience? What good has a conscience ever done for anyone? A conscience does nothing but mock and torment and insult.
Her conscience will be the death of her.
No. She can’t die. If she dies, I’ll burn the world down. Nobody will be safe. Good or evil, innocent or tainted, I will make everyone suffer for my loss.
Then Slavik bursts through the door, his face stubbled with beard growth and his eyes bloodshot. He was out all night, personally breaking down the doors of anyone who might possibly have a lead on Cataha’s whereabouts.
“What the fuck?” I snarl at him.
“Andrei’s got news. He has a lead.”
As Slavik explains, I feel a wild surge of hope. Andrei’s waiting for me at a construction site that I own.
I round up my men and we tear through the streets to get there. His lead is a woman named Sabina. Ludmilla’s sister. And she’s one of those vile bitches who betrays her own sex by luring women into the sex trade with false promises.
We’re there within the hour. Andrei will be getting a fat bonus from me.
The site has been closed down for the day, all the workers sent home. Andrei’s there with a dozen men. He meets me outside the room where they’ve got her chained up, and explains the situation to me. And he’s got a task for Slavik.
I storm into the room where my men are holding Sabina, who is strapped down to a chair. She was taken eight years ago, when she was sixteen. She looks much older than her years now, with that hardened prettiness so common to women in the game. Her lips are puffy with silicone, her hair is bleached a frosty platinum and blow-dried straight, and she’s dressed in Gucci from head to toe.
The look of rage and contempt twisting her face shows that she’s too stupid to understand her situation. Andrei has helpfully laid out a row of tools on a table right where she can see it – pliers, a blowtorch, skinning knives – but I can tell she doesn’t believe that I’d use them. She’s about to find out that I live up to my reputation.
She spits at me when I approach, a glob of saliva landing on my jacket. “I don’t know a fucking thing about your stupid whore girlfriend, and my boyfriend’s going to cut your dick off and feed it to you, asshole!” she sneers. “If you were smart, you’d—”
I never get to find out what I would do if I were smart. As she’s screeching at me, I pull a knife from my waistband and slash it down the left side of her face, carving a straight red line from cheekbone to chin.
Her eyes fly open with shock, and she makes a strangling noise, then starts screaming.
“My face! My face! My faaaaace!” She’s a cartoon caricature of shock and horror. She can’t believe it. I’ve seen that look so many times before, on people sitting in chairs just like this one, as the horrible reality of what I’m about to do to them finally starts to penetrate their dumb brains.
“Wasn’t anything special to begin with. I’m going to cut those silicone lips off and feed them to you.”
I ball up my fist and punch her on the side of the head. I have to will myself to pull my punch so I don’t snap her neck. Her head rocks to the side and her eyes go unfocused for a second.
Now she’s crying hysterically, straining against her bonds, taking in huge gulps of air and making huh, huh, huh sounds. Gritty rivers of mascara stream down her cheeks and mingle with the blood that’s dripping onto her white sweater.
“Where is she?” I bellow, pressing my knife up against her unmarked cheek. It’s taking everything I have not to gut her right there. I crave the sound of her agonized screams. My hand is twitching, my arm vibrating from the effort of not killing her.
I’m never this impatient, but the stakes have never been this high. Every second that she keeps this information from me is another second that Willow is suffering. Maybe dying.
Slavik bangs open the door, carrying a brown cardboard box, and instantly the room fills with the stink of blood. Much stronger than the little trickle that’s running down Sabina’s cheek.
Sabina still doesn’t get it. “Do you idiots even know who my boyfriend is?” Her voice is an outraged, terrified screech. Half-whining, half threatening. It’s really important to her that we know who her boyfriend is, because all her importance and self-esteem are wrapped up in her identity as Mogens’ Girlfriend.
Yes, I know who he is. Mogens is a medium-level pimp with sadistic tendencies, inefficient security, and delusions of grandeur, and most of his men will be dead by the end of the day, at the hands of my people.
“This boyfriend?” Slavik says helpfully, and he reaches into the box. He carried out the task that Andrei gave him with admirable speed and efficiency.
Because when Andrei was grabbing Sabina, some of my other men were grabbing Mogens, and they brought him to the same construction site.
Sabina stares at the box, and she’s finally starting to wise up. This time, it only takes her a split second to figure out what’s coming.
“Nooo…”
Slavik reaches in, grabs a handful of Mogen’s hair, and pulls his head out of the box. He’s raggedly sawed it off just under the chin. Mogen’s mouth gapes open, and one of his eyes is closed, the other open and staring at nothing. The smell of blood is overpowering, the reek so strong that I can taste it when I breathe.
Sabina screams at the top of her lungs, ridiculous melodramatic horror movie screams, and then her eyes roll back in her head and she passes out. Her head lolls to the side.
A bucket of ice-cold water wakes her right back up. Andrei had it sitting nearby. He’s thought of everything.
She jerks upright, and now terror has torn her face apart. She’s not pretty at all anymore. She blubbers and squeaks. “Don’t kill me, no, no, pleaaaase…”
I grab the tin snippers off the table and pinch her nose with them, squeezing hard. Now she’s talking, words spilling over each other, desperate to tell me everything I want to know.
She was taken to the place where they were holding Ludmilla, Cataha’s current base of operations. She got the impression that was where they’d be taking Willow.
They made her put a hood over her head, and she could tell they were doubling back on their tracks as they drove, but it took a total of about three hours to get there, which at least narrows things down. At one point, she smelled smoke from a peat fire, which narrows it down even more. The peat bogs in Russia sometimes catch fire and burn uncontrollably for months or years, and there’s a notorious one in our district.
They drove for half an hour after she smelled the smoke. The inside of the building looked like an old warehouse, and some rooms had factory equipment, but there was dust and cobwebs in the area she was in, so she knew that the factory hadn’t been operating for a while. She smelled a weird chemical smell.
Andrei is listening to everything she says and frantically tapping on a laptop on a small table.
Then she says something that fills me with more rage than I thought my body could contain.
She claims that Cataha is Vasily Toporov.
My tormentor, Willow’s father. That piece of shit who was supposed to have died years ago. The man who was there to greet me and my brother at the orphanage the day we were dragged in there screaming.
The man who stood there while our clothes were cut from our bodies. Who watched as we were forcibly bent over tables and probed, our ass cheeks spread as men jammed their fingers up there to see exactly how tight we were.
The man whose lips curled in a smile as they dragged Pyotr away from me, his screams of terror piercing my heart.
The blackness, which I thought was gone, is back now, and I’m roaring with fury.
Deep in the dark, I hear Pyotr’s cries the first time a man takes him, shrieks of pure agony as he’s torn apart by some pervert’s dick. I feel the savage blows of men’s fists raining down on me as I struggle to get to him. I hear my own weak, pathetic cries. “Please, take me instead! Do it to me instead!”
I’m blind and deaf, the sounds of my shouts coming from so far away they’re like an echo. I don’t know how much time has passed.
When I come to, I’m looking down on the ruined pulp of Sabina’s face, and from the angle that her head is hanging at, she can’t be alive.
And the full horror of what I’ve done hits me so hard that I stagger backwards and almost fall.
I beat her to death.
And she was my only link to Willow.
“No!” I shout. “No, no, no!” I look around wildly. Slavik’s mouth is bleeding.
I must have hit him.
There are six other men there. Andrei is hunched over his computer, his fingers clacking frantically.
“I’m searching property records,” he calls out to me.
I’m shaking all over. I’ve lost it. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve just killed Willow as surely as if I pulled the trigger on a pistol pressed to her skull.
Slavik slaps me across the face so hard that I stagger, and I lunge for his throat. Instantly, all six men are on me, three on each side, and they grab me by the arms and barely manage to restrain me.
Slavik doesn’t flinch. He’s in my face, flushed with fury and bellowing.
“Get it the fuck together!” he shouts at me. “You little bitch! Stop being a fucking pussy! Who the hell are you? Are you Sergei Volkov, or are you a weak little girl on her period?”
I draw on every ounce of strength I have and I force myself to go still. My men release me and step away, watching me warily.
“Where are we?” I say to Andrei.
He twists around to look at me. “Sir, we’ve got something. We’ve got something! We just got an email, and you will not believe who it’s from!”