2. DANTE
TWO
DANTE
The smoke from my Cuban cigar hangs in the air, heavy and sweet, mingling with the smell of blood, sweat, and shit. It's a familiar aroma. A scent I associate with a Tuesday morning. With a progress report.
The son of a bitch on the floor writhes and whimpers.
His dark trousers, once immaculate, are now soaked in urine and something else I'd prefer not to identify.
His eyes fill with panic, just wet slits.
He doesn't see the door, doesn't see the window, doesn't see a way out.
He only sees me. Or what he thinks he sees.
A devil, maybe. But I'm just a man. A very, very pissed-off man.
"Say it again, Anton," I say. I stay calm; my men handle the noise. Luca knows precisely where and how to hit to maximize pain without breaking him early. It's a talent. A talent I compensate well. "You don't know anything?"
Anton shakes his head, his face a bizarre grimace of pain and denial. He tries to speak, but Luca just knocked out a tooth. Anton drools blood and spit.
"I swear... I swear to God, Mr. Dante... I don't know shit about this Nyx. I'm just a low-level programmer. They paid me to install some things, some code... but I don't know who this guy is! I really don't know who's responsible for the leak! For the love of God!"
My patience is a taut string. It's about to snap.
I bring the cigar to my lips, drawing in a cloud of bitter smoke, to remind myself this is just a job .
The flames in the fireplace crackle in the corner of the room, a cozy sound for a private hell.
My estate, a private haven where discretion reigns, holds me.
A place where discretion is law and screams don't travel beyond the walls.
"Luca," I call out, without taking my eyes off the worm on the floor.
Luca stops. The iron bar ceases its rise and fall. He's breathing heavily, sweat dripping down his forehead. He's a big man. An ox. And loyal. Loyalty is everything in this business.
"Tell him what happens to liars who cross me—especially when the cost is high. When it compromises the safety of my family."
Luca approaches Anton, who shrinks away. The man is a data broker, selling sensitive client information to whoever paid the most, crossing lines that should never be crossed. I know. I've hired him myself a few times.
When you sell information on the Volkov family, you sign your own death warrant.
"You've been warned, Anton," Luca growls. "We don't like lies. And we'll squeeze you dry until we're sure there's nothing left."
Anton chokes on bloody saliva. Luca, responding swiftly, stops Anton with a hard kick to the shoulder, silencing any further movement. A dry snap. Anton screams, a high-pitched, almost feminine sound. I don't even blink.
"I don't know anything!" he pleads again in a hoarse whisper. "They just... they just asked me to install things! I swear! I don't know who leaked it! I'm just the guy who does the job!"
I close my eyes for a second. This mess gets inside my head. That hacker—Nyx—cost my family dearly before. That hacker... he never left my mind. He has to be working for the Malakovs.
My tech team talks big, but it's not enough. They talk about firewalls, encryption, backdoors. Words. I need a face. A real name, a real address. A bullet.
I open my eyes. My calm is dangerously close to running out. "After years with the Malakovs, you don't know their top hacker, Anton?"
"I... I don't know! I don't know who's behind it all! I just got orders, a few lines of code... I'm not the brain, I'm just the arm!"
I let out a cold laugh. "A useless arm. Is that the best you've got?" I raise my cigar. The tip glows red. "I don't deal with useless arms."
I give Luca a nod. He understands. He raises the iron bar again, and Anton lets out a whimper of despair. I lean forward, watching, analyzing every movement, every contraction of pain in the man's body.
I don't take pleasure in the pain of others. Despite the brutality, I remind myself this is the only language they understand. It's necessary.
The dull, metallic thud of the iron bar meeting bone is familiar.
"He's got nothing," I say as Anton twitches on the floor. "He doesn't know shit."
Luca pants, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. "He's a piece of shit, but he seems genuinely scared of what he doesn't know."
I nod, my eyes still on Anton's body. I trust Luca's instincts. He's a good reader of people. Not of minds, but of fear. Anton's trembling confirms his fear; a sign he's genuine. He's not lying, or at least not entirely. Which doesn't change the fact that he's still useless.
"Get him out of here," I order. "I don't want to see his face again. Solve the problem."
Luca and another one of my men, Marco, drag Anton out of the room. He's unconscious now, a dead weight. I crush the cigar in the crystal ashtray.
I lean back, knowing that as long as the leak remains, my world remains vulnerable, and I won't rest until I find the root and break it. Frustration is eating at me. How do you catch someone who leaves no trail?
The door opens again, and Sal, my lanky, tired-looking cybersecurity head, comes in. He definitely doesn't look the part, but he's been with this family for long enough.
"Anything, Sal?" I ask, not looking at him. I see him approaching in my peripheral vision.
He stammers when he speaks to me, as if we haven't known each other for years. "M-Maybe. Ruslan found something... atypical."
"Atypical how?"
"We went through Anton's computers, hard drives, the cloud. Nothing directly links to the source of the leak. But Ruslan, he was in the logs of a server Anton used now and then. And there, well hidden, was some ASCII art."
I sigh. I'm not in the mood for this. "And what the fuck is ASCII art?"
"It's a picture made with letters and symbols, an image formed by text. And Ruslan noticed something. It wasn't just any art. It was a code. A hidden pattern."
I lean forward. "A code. What does that have to do with our problem?"
"Ruslan was about to give up, Mr. Dante.
But in college, I wrote a program that scans for patterns in what looks like random digital data.
It functions like a fine-toothed comb. This ASCII art contained a distinct pattern, nearly like a digital signature.
Deep within the tangled symbols was a repeating pattern.
Like a subliminal message. And when I managed to isolate and decrypt that pattern. .. it formed the words 'find me.'"
He spoke so quickly and hesitantly that I could barely keep up. Details aren't important now. The message, however, interests me. "Who the hell left this fucking message?"
"He used a 64-character grid, which is kind of unusual.
.. in the source code, he left spaces as 0xA0 instead of normal spaces, and that's not standard.
.. which tells me he wrote this on a specific machine, probably a Unix terminal with a custom locale, w-which would match other service patterns from Nyx. .."
The name. Nyx. The ghost that haunts my reports—that's Nyx.
"Fucking Nyx."
"It's his brand, Mr. Volkov. It's very specific, and we can exploit it."
I stand up. Sal takes a cautious step back. "How the hell is some stupid digital art supposed to lead me to a ghost?"
"I-I narrowed the search by cross-referencing it with entry logs on the Onion network mirrors, and I ran a script that looks for this specific encoding pattern, a-and I ran the parser on the last 72 hours of access on the relay nodes he used, and there's a terminal pattern with the same encoding parameters with a specific local DNS showing up three times?—"
I rub my temple. Too much technical detail. "Sal."
He stops talking instantly and drops his gaze, realizing he's crossed a line.
"The summary," I demand. "In terms I understand. We have this Nyx's DNA. And we can use it to hunt the bastard. Is that it or not?"
Sal nods, swallowing hard. "Yes. That's exactly it, Mr. Volkov. We can. It's his fingerprint."
"Good," I say. "Then start hunting. I want this son of a bitch. I want him before he even thinks he can hide behind a screen."
And I always get what I want. No matter how elusive, I'll find him in the end.