13. Yuri
THIRTEEN
Yuri
I collect all of the passports into a small bag. Four passports, four women. Two of them are crying, one looks like she wants to cry, and one of them keeps saying something in Slovak. I guess I know which of the passports is hers. Two of them are Albanian, and the last one is Belarusian.
“Tell her to shut up,” I say in Russian. The Belarusian woman flinches, but the other three keep going. I guess they don’t understand me.
The guard with them laughs. He’s big, muscular, and bald, and I can imagine how easily he subdues these women. “Can’t do much about it. They cried the entire time in the van, too. Women are so fucking emotional.”
I don’t know what to say to that. We’re about to lock them into a cargo container with limited food, water, and two buckets in the corner to use as toilets.
“I’d be emotional too,” Nikolai mutters in English.
I don’t think the guard hears him because his expression doesn’t change. He’s too focused on the women. But making comments like that will get us into trouble, so I glare at Nikolai and mime zipping my lips.
Nikolai scowls at me, but he keeps whatever else he’d been planning to say to himself. He participates as little as he can, staying back to the point where one of the guards does start to eye him suspiciously.
“Problems?” the man asks darkly.
“No. No problems,” Nikolai says, limiting his words—probably to keep them from picking up on his American accent.
I guess he doesn’t want to be pegged as a sympathetic American, and he’s not wrong to be worried about that.
There are plenty of American men who are happy to buy a woman, though. This isn’t a uniquely Russian trade.
I glance through the passports to get the names of the women. “Natalia,” I say, and the Belarusian woman looks at me through her tear-stained eyes. “You and the women are going to be here for a few days. We have your passports. We know all the local authorities. The American cops, they will arrest you for being here illegally if you attempt to talk to them. Do you know what customs enforcers do when they have illegal women in their custody?”
She nods, sniffling. I’m sure the other men have been wearing them down by telling them how terrible American officials are and that they’d be worse than any other fate the women could have here.
Nikolai grits his teeth, but he doesn’t speak again. He glances at me with a thunderous look that he quickly gets under control.
“Do the other girls speak Russian or English?” I ask the guard.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. They didn’t react when I spoke to them in Russian.” He laughs again. “You should have seen how excited they were when they got out of the airport. Really thought they’d be getting some acting or modeling job here. Women are so fucking stupid.”
I clench my hands around the passports. This shouldn't be bothering me as much as it is, but my mind keeps going to Sierra.
She’d been so shaken after her confrontation with James. I can’t—don’t want to—imagine what she’d look like in a situation like this.
Sierra wouldn’t fall for a scam like this, right? She’s smarter, and she’s more jaded, and…
The excuses are dumb.
As I look at the women again, I see Sierra here, tucked away in a storage container and waiting to be sold off. It doesn’t escape me that we took Sierra to compensate for some missing weapons, either.
“Are we done here?” Nikolai asks in Russian.
The guard shrugs. “Should be.” He reaches out to one of the women and strokes her jaw. “We had fun, right?”
She can’t understand him, but her whimpering gets worse.
We herd the women into the container at gunpoint. I wish I didn’t have to look at their faces.
“Please,” Natalia says as I go to close the container door. “Please don’t do this. I can work. I can sew, or cook, or clean. Please.”
I laugh bitterly. “If you’re lucky, the person who buys you will want you to do that.”
Sex perverts aren’t the only ones who buy slaves, after all. Slave labor is a whole industry of its own, and Kotya had sat us down and explained all the numbers, and it makes financial sense but I’m still fucking angry that he’s making me do this.
I don’t see him here, staring down at the women, telling them their lives as they know it are over.
And I don’t see fucking Nikolai doing anything more than he absolutely has to, which leaves me to take on all of the responsibilities of making sure this goes smoothly.
One of the other women starts to speak, but I can’t understand her, and I know she can’t understand me either. The language barrier is almost welcome because it means I don’t have to hear her making the same pleas.
We shut and lock the container door.
“You have buyers lined up already?” the guard asks. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, taking a casual puff.
“Maybe,” I answer, and this is one thing Kotya has left me in the dark about. We can offload four women on our current contacts, but if we’re going to expand, we’ll need more people who want to buy.
I guess he doesn’t trust me that much after all. So much for me still being his right-hand man.
I transfer the money to the seller, with the guard watching carefully. Once he gets the okay from his boss, he nods.
That’s it. The transaction is over. This stage of it, anyway.
Nikolai and I walk out of the container yard and toward where we’d parked our vehicles. I can’t wait to get on my bike and roar down the road. I contemplate not even wearing a helmet so I can feel the wind whipping in my hair—but my hair is short now, so it won’t even do that properly.
“Thanks for all the help,” I say sarcastically.
He makes a rude sound. “You can go tattle to Konstantin about how I didn’t do enough with his human trafficking gambit if you want. I really don’t give a fuck.”
My hands clench and I turn to face him. “I thought you were his new right-hand man? That you were taking care of all his shit while I was gone? But I guess you’re all show. Can’t do any of the actual hard work.”
“Hard work?” Nikolai barks out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. You tell yourself that I didn’t help because it was ‘hard work’ and not because it was totally fucked—which you already know, so why the hell are you bitching at me? Maybe you have a stronger stomach than I do.”
I stare in disbelief. The anger and the rage that has been coiling in my stomach all day rise up, and I storm over to Nikolai and grab his shirt collar. “You’re disrespecting Kotya now? You’re going to go against his orders?”
“I didn’t go against his orders,” Nikolai snaps at me. “I still helped. I didn’t help as much as you did, because I was going to lose it if I tried. Maybe you think I’m a waste of space for it. I don’t really care. But I have some scruples.”
“You are a fucking waste of space!” I shout, right as I punch him.
He’s so startled that he takes it right in the face, and blood spills from his nose. For a second, I don’t think he’s going to retaliate, but then he throws his own punch. I dodge it easily, but he comes in for a second blow.
Both of us have been in our fair share of skirmishes, and I’m so pissed that I don’t hold back. All of my anger from being left out, from being left behind while I was in prison, threatens to spill over.
I go for him with an angry yell, aiming for his throat the way Kotya had taught me all those years ago. There’s no point in fighting fair, Kotya had said. Nobody ever gets ahead by fighting fair.
And this is what we’re doing now, right? Not fighting fair. Ripping off naive young women who want a better life, but instead we sell them to a worse one.
This is how to get ahead in life.
He blocks the blow, but I launch another attack, then another—and while we might’ve been evenly matched before prison, I’ve been in enough altercations to where he can’t quite match up.
“What the fuck, Yuri!” he shouts.
“You!” I shout back. “Fuck you! You don’t get to pretend you aren’t part of this!” I send out a roundhouse kick to knock him on his back.
He shouts and falls backward, slamming his head into the concrete road.
Nikolai doesn’t move.
I freeze.
“Nikolai?” I ask, breathing hard. “Get up, you son-of-a-bitch.”
He’s still for so long that I start to worry, then he finally groans and my heart starts to beat again. He slowly sits up and looks at me, his eyes unfocused. “I think I’ll sit here a minute,” he mumbles.
I stare at him, my mind in complete disarray. The anger hasn’t dissipated, but I no longer feel like punching Nikolai.
I go to the motorcycle and pack the bag of passports into the small storage compartment under the seat. I pull my gloves on over my bloody knuckles.
“I’m going back to the house,” I mutter.
“You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with this, man,” Nikolai says, his words a little slow, almost drunk-sounding. “Not with me.” He laughs. “And now you have to figure out what you’re gonna tell Sierra about why we’re both all bruised and bloody.”
“Why do we have to tell her anything?” I ask despondently. “We’re fucking gangsters. This is what we do. Get into fights.”
He laughs again. “Yeah. Okay. I knew you were dumb, but I didn’t think you were delusional.”
I turn around, slack-jawed. “You knew I was dumb ? I don’t need to hear that from some two-bit Russian wannabe.”
His laughter cuts off abruptly, and he stares hatefully at me as he snaps, “You know, I was trying to make a joke. But you had to go there, didn’t you? Fuck off, Yuri. Go, ride off. You were never needed anyway.” He mutters something under his breath that I can’t catch.
I angrily pull my helmet on and swing onto the bike. “You’re the fucking dumbass.” I swear at him in Russian, and I catch his confused look—he didn’t understand half my insults, like I’d expected.
Let him stew on that.
I take off, the roar of the engine drowning out anything Nikolai might be saying. I’m going way too fast, winding recklessly through traffic.
Even that doesn’t calm my thoughts, though. I’m still a bundle of aggression when I get home. I storm through the house to my bedroom and slam the door shut.
Fuck.
I know it’s not Nikolai I’m angry at, but I can’t stop.
I look at myself in the mirror, with my new haircut and the tattoos up my neck. There’s one that reads loyalty , which I’d gotten after I’d made my silent pact to always support Kotya no matter what.
My eyes burn, but I refuse to cry over something this stupid.
There’s a quiet knock on the door, then it opens without the other person waiting for permission to enter. I’m half-expecting it to be Nikolai, but no. He wouldn’t have gotten here this fast, and he wouldn’t seek me out after what I’d said to him.
Instead, it’s Sierra, who’s tilting her head as she looks me up and down. “Wow,” she says. “Pissed someone off?”
I let out a dark chuckle. “Something like that.”
“Are you going to say something like, ‘you should see the other guy’?” she asks dryly. Her gaze sweeps over me again, and she frowns when she sees my hands. “Then again, you probably did do some damage. What happened, Yura?”
I shrug. “Got into it with some rivals.” I wonder if Nikolai will snitch on me. He would , with his shaky concept of loyalty and obedience.
Sierra sits down on the bed next to me and takes my hand gently. She rolls it around to look at my knuckles and inhales sharply. “I hope they deserved it.”
“ I hope so too ,” I whisper in Russian.
She frowns at me. “What?” she asks.
Of course she didn’t understand. It would be nice if she had. It would be nice if she understood a lot of things.
“Nothing. It was some mudak .” I pull my hand away and stand up. “I need to… disinfect this. Don’t want to get gangrene. Who knows where his mouth was.”
“Okay.” She stands up too. “I’ll help you. I helped Kyran with shit like that sometimes.”
Fuck, she’s so nice. I nod and follow her to my bathroom. The first aid kit is out on the counter already, from when I’d had to deal with the whipping.
That seems so long ago. Maybe I should ask Kotya to whip me again so I can get the endorphins and forget all these fucking feelings.
“Do you want to talk about why you’re so pissed off you’re slamming doors?” Sierra asks, so casually I don’t even realize what she’s asking at first.
“I got into a fight, didn’t I? Plenty of reason to be pissed off.” I turn on the water and wash my hands, watching the blood and dirt go down the drain.
“Okay,” she says, accepting those words so easily that I feel guilty about lying to her. “Let’s get you patched up.” She’s silent but efficient, and I wonder how many times she had to patch her brother up.
“Thanks,” I murmur as she wraps the bandages around my hands. “Coulda used somebody like you back in the day.”
Sierra puts the first aid kit away, erasing the reminder of the whipping, but I can’t dismiss the fight as easily. “Kyran never wanted me to help, but then, he’s a stubborn asshole,” she says, sounding wistful.
“I bet your brother got into more fights than I did,” I say. I’m suddenly jealous of Kyran, that he had Sierra there to patch him up and take care of him whenever the days were bad. All I’d ever had was myself, until Kotya took me under his wing—and I’m not going to go crying to him about a few scrapes.
She laughs. “Yeah. And even more that I don’t know about.” Her expression sobers. “He was pretty young when he got indoctrinated into this life.” She eyes me, and I can tell she wants to ask me something, but she shrugs instead. “I guess it’s the way it goes.”
“Is it? I don’t know how it goes for others.” I flex my fingers and watch the bandages bend around the movement.
“Stop that,” Sierra admonishes. She takes my hands into hers and kisses the tops gently. “Come on. Let’s lie down.” She smiles at me. “You don’t have to talk. But I’m willing to listen.”
No wonder I’d been attracted to her. I nod and let her lead me to the bed. I pull her close to me, and I breathe in her scent, letting it comfort me.
She’s probably fishing for something. Information, or sex, or whatever it is women want from guys like me.
I don’t care though. I’m glad to have her in my arms.
“I don’t like punching people,” I admit quietly.
She smooths her fingers through the longer strands of my hair. “You have to do a lot of violent things in this line of work,” she says. “Probably a lot of things you don’t like.”
I snort, and in quiet Russian, I say, “I don’t want to do any of this. I hate that he’s making me do this, but I can’t betray him either. And if we fail, if we go against his father, how can we protect you?”
Sierra gives me a strange look. “Now in English? I understood maybe two words.”
I shake my head. “It’s nothing. Only a famous Russian saying. I can’t translate it.”
She looks skeptical, but she doesn’t push. “How old were you when you started doing all of… this?” she asks instead. “You said you grew up in an orphanage, and… you found Kotya. What were you doing before then?”
I pull her closer against me. “Kotya saved me. I was… I had nothing. Kicked out of the orphanage. I had a shit job, could barely afford food and rent. But I always liked motorcycles. And I got it into my stupid head to steal one.” I laugh, even though the sound resembles a sob. “It’s a real bad idea to steal from a gang, Sierra.”
She keeps stroking my hair. “Yeah. Pa never told me the ins and outs of gang life, but I know he wouldn’t have tolerated that.” She shudders. “And he’s… I didn’t see him angry often, but he was really fucking scary when he was. Even to me.”
I remember how her brothers were to me, and neither of them compared to William Winters.
“Kotya stopped them from doing worse to me,” I say, burying my head against her shoulder. “I owe him so much. If not for him… even if I hadn’t died, my life would be nothing .”
“I’m glad he stopped them,” Sierra says. “I’m glad he brought you here, too.” She sighs. “I know things didn’t start out the best with us, and things are hard right now with… the pregnancy and all… but I do care about you, Yura.”
“Thank you,” I whisper, looking her in the eyes. Then I crack a smile. “Which is spasibo in Russian.”
She repeats the word. “And what’s ‘you’re welcome’?” she asks, offering a smile of her own.
“That’s pozhaluysta ,” I say.
“Poshalusta,” she repeats, and I wrinkle my nose at the accent.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she chides me. “I’m trying.” She leans in to kiss my nose, which is a surprisingly endearing gesture, then says, “You should get some rest. You’ve had a long day, I think.”
I wonder if she’ll be this affectionate when she sees the state Nikolai is in.
I’ll be grateful that I have her for now.