Chapter Four
Callen
There’s a saying about bears. If you see a brown bear, pretend you’re dead. If it’s a black bear, stand up and fight. If it’s a polar bear, you’re already dead.
That’s exactly how I would describe us—me and the two men I’ve known all my life. The only men I trust with my life.
Deacon Walsh is definitely the polar bear. Mason Blackstone, he is the brown bear, and me—I”m the black bear.
If you’re meant to die and Deacon, the oldest of the three of us, is standing in your path, you’ve taken your last breath. There’s no pretending to be dead, running away, or staying and fighting. You’re already dead.
Mason, the youngest, is like a brown bear. You can pretend to be as dead as you want, but he’ll know, and then he’ll give you a chance to run because he loves the pursuit, and the fear you leave in your wake as you try to escape fuels him. He never loses sight of his prey.
I’m the black bear. Stand up and fight. Give me all you have. I believe everyone deserves a fair chance to fight for their lives. And if you’re smarter than me, faster, or stronger, then I deserve to die. That I’m still alive means I haven’t met my match yet.
I take a sip of my drink. It’s the kind of whiskey that’s expensive enough if you want to make a statement. And Kirill Yenin has a burning desire to show us how much money he has now. He also wants to show us that he has more power in his pocket than anyone else in the room. It’s not completely undebatable. We did arrive unarmed, after all.
We thought we were going to pay our respects to the Yenin family, but instead, we walked into a drunken party already underway. And we were the guests of honor, apparently.
His father, Boris Yenin, a man we actually liked and respected, died suddenly of a heart attack in his sleep a few weeks ago. And now his son, Kirill Yenin, is the new Bratva boss and now our business associate.
Kirill Yenin is a dangerous man. And this is how he wants to show us his prowess.
Not only did he take forced ownership of a replica of an English castle that belonged to one of the oldest and most respected and law-abiding families on American land, but he’s also made some interesting, or rather lewd, adjustments to the place, too.
He walks around waving his gun like it’s part of his hand, and he throws around cocaine like it’s fairy dust. He has also fired his gun three times already in our presence for being served the wrong drink. He’s quite interesting to watch.
He calls himself the new terror in town, the new god, but unless he announces the epithet that he is the new terror and the new god, no one will take a second glance at him. Poor thing.
But the rumors about him wanting to scare us out of the 5% extra we own of the Umbrella consortium appear to be true as of right now. Somehow or other, he heard we’re soft targets who come from old money, never mind that we sit at the table of the Global Underground Six.
He thinks we’re timid little pussies—his words—and we’ll quake in our bespoke suits, and our Patek Phillipe Nautilus watches if he points his gun at us since we came with no protection. He actually made a joke earlier about our blue blood. Gentlemen like us, with our perfectly groomed hair, and scent like fucking flowers don’t rule the world. We didn’t laugh.
Yes, apart from no guns on our person, we also arrived with no bodyguards. He has this impression that we hide behind a line of armed men 24/7 and can’t take a piss without a soldier pulling down our zippers and another aiming our cocks. Or how else are we in power?
I’m surprised Deacon didn’t just break his hand and shove his own fingers down his throat, gun and all.
Kirill Yenin must definitely be new in town or just plain stupid if he doesn’t know who we really are. But then again the elite Global Underground Six doesn’t involve itself with petty criminals like Yenin. We’re here because of his father, a good, sane man who was also friends with our fathers.
And the Umbrella Consortium which is what Kirill wants to own is such an infinitesimal aspect of our portfolio that it doesn’t even make it into our portfolio, but we like to have our strings everywhere all at once so we keep it in hand.
The ostentatiousness of my surroundings makes me snicker on the inside. Mason would call this a dick-measuring contest, with Yenin being the only contestant who signed up. Deacon would call him dead.
Me, I’m all right either way. I want to see what he can do and what he has planned to do to wrestle that 5% from us.
I bring my attention back to my surroundings, which were once the statuesque grand hall of the Walter-Smith family, known for their old money, and prestige.
Cigar smoke swirls in the air around me, and the scent of sex and money lingers on the near-priceless vintage furniture that Yenin decided to keep after all.
But around the entire hall, hanging from the ceilings, are metal cages. In them are women, swaying to the thumping music that comes from the walls. The women are naked except for two diamond studs sticking out from their nipples. Strings of neon lights are haphazardly draped over the crystal chandeliers and cast flickering shadows all over the place.
Sweat stinks the place up as bodies all around us dance, drunk and high out of their minds.
I can hide my boredom better than Deacon and Mason, that’s for sure, but it’s something that Yenin picks up on, and he isn’t happy.
“I see you’re ready for some real entertainment now, da?” he asks, smiling with an ugly evil glint. “Oh, before we begin, congratulate me. I’m the new owner of The Chryus.”
Well, what do you know?
The Tulip Group is a franchise of casinos all around the world. Eight hundred and three casinos in total, to be precise. They’ve been independent and squeaky clean since their inception. Righteously powerful, a massive juxtaposition given their type of business, and also completely incorruptible, which was a shame since they’d make the ultimate money laundering partner.
But they refused our offers. All done legitimately, by the way.
Until now, that is.
We’ve been in negotiations with them for over a year and are now just days away from taking over their organization.
The positions of their casinos around the world are near-perfect, but to make it perfect, money laundering with all the stars aligned would be the acquisition of The Chryus, the small casino in Chania that would link up the northern hemisphere of our future operations.
It’s not so much that Kirill Yenin was able to buy The Chryus; it’s why he bought it and why he felt the need to tell us he bought it.
Again, our expressions don’t change when Yenin delivers what he thinks is his ace card. It’s a non-issue because we can go around this, but we want to know how he knows about our plans, which is what keeps us here.
I turn my head to the left at the sound of a woman screaming. My gaze flickers nonchalantly over a man twisting her arm while using his other hand to rip off her clothes until she is naked, and then he puts a brown bag over her head and face.
The audience around me lulls and Yenin can’t sit still in his seat.
“You ain’t never going to see this kind of entertainment, brothers,” he says, wiping the white powder off his nose. “I’m going to give you the best fucking show in the world. And then you’re going to see that I’m not fucking around. I’m better than my dead father because I have all the fucking power in the fucking world.”
He expects us to say something again. Or at least shift in our seats and nervously glance at each other at the thought of our livelihood being at stake at the hands of a man with a .38 special, a bowl of grenades beside him, and a tattoo of a dolphin on his chest, visible now that all the buttons of his shirt are undone.
We don’t even blink, but we’re curious on the inside about this man now.
He waits a few seconds longer to see if we’ll say something. We leave him wholly disappointed and a little frazzled. Again.
We’ve never been at war with the Russians before, simply because Boris Yenin knew better than to cross us. He offered friendship and loyalty, and we accepted it. It’s a pity he died without naming his successor. I’m sure he would have chosen wisely.
Of his eight sons, only three vied for the seat at the helm of the Yenin Bratva, and Kirill killed them both.
Yenin brings my attention back to him from the woman with the brown bag over her face. He screams at everyone to shut up and sit down before he uses his blunt, filthy thumb nail, and presses a red button from a remote he pulled out of his pocket.
The sound of steel gates sliding open echoes around the room. I hear the roar first before I see the animal emerge from the glass enclosure. Yes, a glass-encased arena now disgraces the center of the grand hall of the home of the Walter-Smith family.
Ironically, it’s a bear.
My gaze tilts lazily around the room. Half of Yenin’s guests scramble up on their seats, ready to bolt. The others take out their guns.
“Comrades, relax; this is for the entertainment of our esteemed guests,” he says, nodding to us. “Let us all enjoy the spectacle.” He swaggers toward the encasement, rapping his gun on the glass and taunting the animal. But nothing he does so much as results in a squeak out of the bear, and his embarrassment shows.
He wants to put a bullet in the bear’s head for embarrassing him, but that would mean he’d need to get into the enclosure with the beast.
“Bring out the bitch!” he shouts as he makes his way back to his seat next to us.
A door on the other side of the enclosure opens. A henchman shoves the naked woman, with the bag over her face, into the glass-enclosed arena before it’s bolted shut again.
There’s an eeriness in the stunned silence that follows. Yenin shouts at her to remove the brown bag from her head.
She does so slowly. And when she faces the bear staring her down on the other side of the enclosure, no sound comes from her mouth, despite the scream I see pouring out of her eyes.
She turns around and bangs her fists against the glass. Tears and snot are leaking down her face now as she begs Yenin to let her out. She spews how much she loves him. How she would do anything for him. She’ll be his good girl, she promises.
She turns at the sound of a low, deathly growl from behind her. She doesn’t stand a chance.
By now, Yenin can barely contain himself. His gaze sprints between us and the girl in the cage with the bear. He doesn’t want to miss a thing—not what’s happening in the cage or what’s going on with our faces. He so desperately wants a reaction that he looks manic. Well, more manic than usual.
Blood splatters against the glass. She’s already dead. But the bear isn’t doing this for sport or entertainment. It’s hunger that drives it to tear the human body from limb to limb, devouring and swallowing her skin, bones, and organs.
Still, not so much as a whisper passes over our faces. This makes Yenin exponentially more agitated. He rises from his chair, sits down, and takes another hit of coke. The more unmoved we are, the more restless he becomes.
What does he expect us to do? Ask him not to feed an innocent life to a bear he deliberately starved for this occasion. Upend our guts on our hand-made leather shoes as the sound of her organs being pierced by the bear”s canines reaches our ears. Shudder in terror as she’s ripped apart like a piece of paper under his claws?
This man has no idea what we’ve seen. What we’ve done. What we’re capable of doing.
Subjecting us to the sport of the mauling and then the eating of a woman by a possibly diseased animal doesn’t even rank on our scale to elicit shock.
But then again, we don’t even have a scale.
Killing and kinks are the same.
It’s only novel the first time you do it.