Chapter 13 Ethan
ETHAN
I gave her the full twenty minutes like I promised. Then we started down the main tunnel leading away from the cell where I’d been keeping her.
Nick was nervous, past the point of trying to hide it. I’d second-guessed the decision to bring him more than once — I wasn’t sure the kid had what it took — but with Anton dragging his bad leg around like a fucking anchor, some kind of backup was a necessity.
“Have you ever been this far in here before?”
Nick’s voice practically cracked when he spoke and rage moved through my body like a wave.
What a fucking pussy.
“No.”
My anger only made me more annoyed. I’d worked hard to control the fury of my youth, that red wash of rage that could descend over the smallest and most random of things.
It had been a liability, had prevented me from seeing clearly, from making the kinds of connections you needed to make it in any business.
Dimitri had taught me that. He’d been the first — the only — one to see beneath my hotheaded exterior. He hadn’t avoided me like the other kids in my foster home, or the kids in Chess Club at Blackwell High, or the teachers who looked past me.
Those people had been afraid of me. I could feel it. Could see it in the way they edged away from me, the way they avoided meeting my eyes.
If someone had asked me about it back then, I would have said people didn’t like me. That they found me arrogant and off-putting.
It would have been true, but I knew now that it would have been an incomplete answer: people were afraid of me, even when I’d been a slightly chubby teenager with secondhand clothes and a meal card for free lunches.
Dimitri had taken me under his wing, had taught me that real power was bought with control and that discipline was a machine which built that control.
It was actually pretty simple: you did the things you had to do to get what you wanted.
You did them day after day, week after week, year after year, and little by little, you gained control over yourself, and then, best of all, over other people who saw what you’d achieved with sheer discipline and thought you were special.
And by then, you were special.
I was special.
Because the truth was, most people just didn’t have the discipline to get what they wanted.
They contented themselves with a life of mediocrity, not because they weren’t capable of more, but because they were too lazy to do the boring things — day after day, week after week, year after year — that would have gotten them what they wanted.
It was criminal really. A waste of human potential.
But there was a silver lining: the laziness of the majority made the discipline of the minority more noticeable.
The stories of our discipline — sleeping in the office for days at a time or completing a triathlon with a broken arm or starting a multibillion-dollar company with five hundred bucks — became legend, and that legend was a varnish over the truth: we’d just done the work no one else was willing to do, had taken the chances no one else was willing to take.
And in the modern world, that made us gods.
I was so deep in thought, so deep in my introspection about Dimitri and his mentorship, that I didn’t see the chain stretched across the stone floor.
I went down, catching myself with my hands, and hopped back onto my feet. All those agility exercises in the gym weren’t for nothing.
“You okay, boss?” Anton asked.
“Fine.”
“Did she do that?” Nick asked. “Use the chain to trip us up?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Fucking cunt.
I fell back a few feet as we moved farther into the tunnel. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure Maeve Haver had booby-trapped the tunnel with the chain, but I didn’t want to find out the hard way that instead of just running, she’d laid traps along the way.
Better to let Anton and Nick take the scout position. That was what they were there for.
I did my part by using the flashlight on my phone to cast a little light in the tunnel, although I was probably too far behind Anton and Nick for it to do them any good. The flashlight might be considered cheating by some, but it would be foolish not to use the tools at my disposal to win.
There was no morality in being a winner. You either did what it took or you didn’t. It was that simple.
I forced myself to focus on the thought of Maeve Haver as we reached a set of narrow stone stairs leading downward. That was a key component to achieving success: you had to see yourself winning. You had to feel it.
And I could see myself catching Maeve Haver.
I knew what it would feel like to stand over her while Anton and Nick stripped her again, knew what it would feel like to have control over her in my domain, where I could use her the way I wanted without worrying about the Butchers.
I even knew what it would feel like to throw her away when I was done. To watch Anton slide the needle into her arm and haul her body off to join all the other girls hard at work greasing the wheels (pun intended, haha) of the rich men who owed me favors for my discretion.
I’d just stepped onto the first tread of the staircase when the back of Anton’s head dropped away at the bottom of the stairs. He tumbled like a loose boulder, groaning as his body hit the stone floor with a thud.
“There’s a rope,” Nick said, bending to inspect the offending object. “I think she put it here.”
I didn’t like the way he used the pronoun “she” instead of Haver’s name. It made Maeve Haver sound like some kind of witch, like something supernatural was at work instead of just an average girl with an average family from an average place.
Nick and I stepped over the rope on our way down and I waited while Anton struggled to his feet, swearing in Russian every step of the way.
“You good?” It was the closest I’d get to asking if Anton was okay. It wasn’t my job to make sure Anton was okay.
He took a few halting steps forward, testing out his bad leg. “Yes.”
His limp was more pronounced now, although it was hard to say whether his fall down the stairs had made it worse or whether it had always been this bad. Beyond his work, I didn’t usually pay much attention to Anton.
That would have defeated the purpose of having Anton.
We came to a set of branching tunnels.
“Do you know where these lead?” I asked Anton. I’d put him on the job of scoping out the tunnels as a place to keep Maeve Haver. I had no idea what was down here.
He shook his head. “No time.”
I tamped down my annoyance. In Anton’s younger days, he would have scoped out every inch of the tunnels before we set Maeve loose in them. But he was old and getting sloppy, more worried about his bad leg than doing the job right.
A glance at Nick did nothing for my confidence. The kid looked like he was about to shit himself.
I needed to recruit when this was over.
“Let’s split up.” I tipped my head at the first set of secondary tunnels. “You two go that way. I’ll take the main tunnel.”
“You sure, boss?” Anton’s Russian accent was thicker when he was hurt.
I was already moving away from them. “I’m sure.”
We had all the time in the world. No one was coming to save Maeve Haver, least of all herself.