Chapter 10 #2
I push inside, no time to waste. The smell hits first: stale beer, old cigarette smoke that’s somehow still clinging to the walls twenty years after the smoking ban, pine cleaner that never quite wins.
He’s in the back booth, same one he’s occupied since the real old school days. Gray hair now, thinner on top, but the shoulders are still wide, the eyes still sharp.
Kasper Karol.
The man who dragged me out of a Ukrainian basement at nineteen and taught me how to survive in this world instead of just dying in it.
I slide into the opposite seat without asking.
Kasper doesn’t look surprised. He rarely does. Somehow, Kasper always seems to know, it’s like he can sense things in the air. And this makes him a dangerous enemy. But a brilliant ally too.
“Vodka?” I ask.
He lifts his empty glass in salute. “Always.”
I signal the bartender—the same man who’s been pouring here since I was old enough to drink legally. Two doubles. Neat.
When the glasses arrive I push one toward him.
Kasper takes it. Waits.
I don’t know how to start, so I don’t. I just drink.
The burn helps.
Then the memory surfaces unbidden, as vivid as ever…
Twenty years ago. Fall. Brighton Beach boardwalk half-deserted, wind off the Atlantic cutting through my cheap coat like knives. I was twenty-one, cocky, green, convinced I was untouchable because I’d made it through two winters without getting killed.
I’d already seen many a man fall. And I was still standing. Maybe I was indeed untouchable, or so my youthful arrogance reasoned.
The target was a mid-level Armenian fence who’d skimmed too much from one of Viktor’s early shipments. Simple job: follow, wait for him to be alone, two in the chest, one in the head, walk away.
Kasper was running point. I was backup. He’d been doing this since before I was born.
We tailed the guy into a shuttered arcade under the boardwalk—broken pinball machines, dust, the smell of mildew and old popcorn. He was meeting someone. We waited in the shadows.
Then it went wrong.
The someone wasn’t alone. Three men. Armed. They knew we were coming.
First shot shattered the machine next to my head. Glass and plastic rained down. I dove behind a Skee-Ball lane. Kasper was already moving—low, fast, returning fire with the old Makarov he still preferred.
I popped up, squeezed off two rounds. Hit one in the shoulder. He screamed. Another bullet clipped my forearm—hot, wet, burning. I dropped, cursing.
They advanced, ready to wrap things up in the bloodiest way.
Kasper stepped between me and them like it was nothing.
“Stay down, kid.”
He fired four times. Precise. Clinical. Two bodies hit the floor. The third tried to run—Kasper put one through the back of his knee, then finished him execution-style.
Silence.
Blood on the concrete. My arm was screaming in agony. Kasper dragged me up by the collar like it was nothing.
“You hit?”
“Arm. Through and through.”
Kasper tore his scarf off, wrapped it tight around the wound. “Walk.
We made it three blocks before I nearly passed out. He half-carried me into a safe house, stitched me up himself with fishing line and vodka for antiseptic. Kasper didn’t yell. Didn’t lecture.
All Kasper said, once I could focus again…
“Next time you hesitate, you die. And I won’t be there to bleed for you.”
I never hesitated again.
But that was a long time ago. Now, back in the present, Kasper sets his glass down carefully. He’s older, slower physically, but I know his mind is as sharp as ever.
“You look like shit, Ivan,” Kasper says, his voice droll and dry.
I laugh—short, bitter. “I feel like it.”
He waits.
I drain my vodka. Signal for another.
Then I tell him.
Not everything. Not the ropes. Not the bench. Not the way Landon came apart on my fingers at dawn or the way his trust is starting to feel like a blade pressed to my own throat.
But I give Kasper the bones of it.
“Viktor wants him dead if the old man doesn’t fold,” I say. “Forty-eight hours. Max. Mikhail’s calling the bluff. Says he’ll have other kids, that he doesn’t care what we do with the boy.”
Kasper doesn’t blink.
“And you?”
I look at my hands. A scar from that night all those years ago still runs along the inside of my forearm—a thin white line, a marker of my history in this game.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I say.
Kasper exhales through his nose. Long. Slow.
“This is one problem you gotta resolve for yourself, kid,” Kasper says. “No playbook. No right answer. Just consequences.”
He leans forward and his voice drops.
“But whatever you choose… whether you pull that trigger or you don’t… you live with it. Every morning. Every night. Every time you look in the mirror. That’s the deal. Always has been.”
I see a look of empathy mixed in with Kasper’s straight talking. It’s like he knows what I’m going through but equally knows that he can’t overstep the mark and tell me what to do. He knows it’s a decision that only I can make.
I nod. Throat tight.
Kasper reaches across the table and grips my forearm—the same one he bandaged twenty years ago.
“You were a scared boy once,” Kasper says. “Behind the bravado you were so scared. But now you’re a man. Act like it.”
I swallow hard.
Kasper releases me.
I stand. Kasper always knows what to say and how to say it. I feel nothing but privilege for having a mentor like this in my life. I worry that he won’t always be around but at the same time I’m grateful to have a man like Kasper Karol in my here and now.
“If I don’t see you again…” My voice cracks. I clear it. “Thank you. For everything you’ve always done for me.”
Kasper doesn’t smile. Just lifts his glass.
“Get out of here, Ivan. Clock’s ticking.”
I walk out.
The door swings shut behind me.
Cold air. Gray sky.
My mind is made up.
There is no turning back now.