14. DANTE
FOURTEEN
DANTE
"You had no right to go in there, Svetlana! I told you, he's my problem!"
Svetlana tends to go behind my back, and every single time it's the same. I hate it. I hate that she steps all over me because she thinks she's smarter, more above it all, when Nyx requires so much more than a fucking MBA in economics.
"He's a crucial asset!" she snaps back. "I needed to evaluate his capabilities—what were you so afraid I'd see? That you beat him until he was purple? Those bruises are fresh, Donya."
The nickname irritates me. Svetlana reduces me to this, to brute force, and expects me to punch my way through every path. The way she says it grates on me. She thinks his marks are just my mismanaged brutality. She has no idea.
"I wasn't—I was protecting you!" I say. It's not worth explaining that Nyx provoked all of it. "He's not like the other assets. He's crazy. Volatile. You can't just talk to him..."
"Oh, I talked to him, Donya, and he didn't seem crazy, just fucking depressed."
Nyx, depressed ?
He might have self-destructive tendencies, but there's so much perversion in them that pinning the 'poor thing' label on him like Svetlana is trying to shove down my throat is impossible to swallow.
Dmitry, listening from the corner of the room, says, "She's right, Donya. He just saved us millions. We need to integrate him."
The intellectual duo. They always have each other's backs.
"You knew ?" I confront him, already knowing the answer. Fucking irresponsible. "You knew she was going to talk to that freak? You let her go in there alone?"
"She's not a child, Donya."
No. But dealing with Nyx is a task I wouldn't wish on anyone, let alone my siblings. Just imagining him putting on the same show for them that he did for me makes my blood boil with an unbearable heat.
"Your freak was perfectly articulate, completely lucid, and remarkably normal," she says. "Leonel was even polite."
The name hits me. So out of place.
"Who?"
"Our asset!" She exclaims, exasperated. "His real name, Dante! Did you not even read the initial intelligence report? My God, you're insufferable!"
Leonel.
Such a mundane name.
I must have read it. At some point. I just didn't register it. How could I call that thing such a trivial name? Nyx just felt right.
"You just… called him whatever you wanted?" Dmitry says, hiding a laugh, and I raise my voice.
"It's irrelevant! His name isn't the problem! His mind is the problem! His perversions are the problem! You saw what he did in 24 hours! Do you think that's normal for a Leonel?"
"He didn't seem bothered by my presence," Svetlana says, adjusting the lapels of her blazer. She sighs before forcing herself to calm down. "He was tired, yes, but efficient. He introduced himself, I gave him the drive. That's it."
It gets more unbelievable with every sentence.
"And you just… gave him the drive? You let him tamper with our data? He could be implanting anything!"
She glares at me. "He's in a locked room, Donya," she says slowly.
"And the drives are encrypted, analyzed copies.
He has no external access. He's perfectly contained.
And do you know the only thing he asked for, after agreeing to dissect every digital aspect of our goddamn organization, after being beaten with all your 'specific approaches'?
He asked for Luca to call a woman—a girlfriend , I don't fucking know—and ask her to water his fern. His fucking fern."
My vision blurs. Girlfriend ? He has a fucking girlfriend ? And he's worried about a fern ?
This isn't Nyx. This is… some domesticated idiot. My stomach churns, and I feel nauseous. He was letting me fuck his mouth while what? Thinking about a fucking girlfriend watering a fern?
"What?"
"His fern, Dante," Svetlana says, her voice rising again. "He asked Luca to make sure it was taken care of."
No. This image of innocence, of someone who just did what he did for money, that's not him.
I tense my entire body. She thinks I'm crazy.
"Ask Luca!" I yell. "Ask Luca what kind of man he is!"
Svetlana crosses her arms. She thinks. Luca is the most principled man in our business, a simple person. He was there. He saw.
"Fine," she says grudgingly. She taps her stiletto heel against the marble floor and walks over to the general staff intercom. She unplugs the phone and dials the code for Luca's line. "Luca. Please come up to the conference room."
I try to hold back the irritation of needing an outside report on this. Svetlana might see me as a brute, but Luca's word has to carry its weight.
Luca appears shortly, a nervous look on his face. He walks in, and I stare at him. You're dead if you fuck this up.
"Tell us about Leonel," Svetlana says. "My brother here seems to think he's some kind of monster. Is he?"
Luca looks at me. At her, at Dmitry. He's never seen us together in the same room, and his hesitation is obvious.
I clear my throat.
He flinches.
I'm not kidding, Luca.
"Mr. Volkov…," he starts, "beat him… and he… he liked it…."
That's it. That's the report from my best man. He just stands there, shaking his head, and Svetlana lets out a pure frustrated sigh, pressing her own forehead as if to relieve a headache. Dmitry lets out a choked sound, trying not to laugh.
Luca looks at me. He doesn't know why I'm warning him with my eyes that I will kill him, and it frustrates me even more.
"I-I mean," he stutters. Fix this shit. "I'm wary of him too, Mrs. Volkov, he's unpredictable..."
Svetlana stares at him. "Is he violent?"
"Uh… Negative, miss."
"Does he break contracts, agreements?"
"I don't know?—"
She turns sharply to me. "Dante?"
I say, "No, but?—"
"I just don't understand you, Dante. At all ."
I stare at my siblings, at Dmitry's barely suppressed laughter and Svetlana's genuine confusion. They deal with money and power, not with whatever the fuck Nyx is.
I can't tell them. I can't tell my brother and sister, who have always seen me as a force of nature, that a scrawny hacker with a fetish for pain has reduced me to a confused animal—how the fuck could I?
I can't tell them that he gets hard when I hurt him, and that the sight makes my own blood burn, or let them experience this.
Dmitry opens his mouth to say something, another logical and useless solution, but I raise a hand in a short, final gesture. There is nothing left to say. They will never understand.
Without another word, I turn my back on the two of them and leave the room. I need something to punch. Something that doesn't moan with pleasure when it bleeds.
The only place where the rage the world gives me can be converted into something productive, something that doesn't involve perversion, is the gym. Where a punching bag doesn't moan, doesn't smile, doesn't ask for more. Where the only thing that bleeds is my body.
My fists are wrapped, the skin of my knuckles long since raw before I even arrived here.
I throw my last punch with everything I have. The metal chain swings with the force of the impact, and I step back, breathless. I grab the towel from the floor, wiping the sweat from my brow.
That's when I hear the voice behind me.
"Svetlana is furious. She thinks you're a brute who solves everything with force."
I turn, seeing Dmitry leaning against the door in his impeccable suit, disapproving. He's calm, controlled, the complete opposite of me.
"She doesn't understand," I grunt, tossing the towel to the floor. "She thinks everything can be solved with an Excel spreadsheet."
"I understand even less. You've broken a man's hand for spilling a drink on your shoe, Dante. Since when do you care if an asset 'likes' to get beaten? What's so different about this kid?"
What's so different about him?
I know why Svetlana is furious with this idea—the idea that I just beat a man to force him to work for me. It's for the same reason I am. I'm disappointed in myself for making her think I would do that. Violate for the sake of violating.
So many times, I put myself up as a shield for her. More than I can count. Even before I was of age, while Dmitry hid in a crawl space under the floorboards, I offered myself and forced myself to take the violence for her, in the face of a Mr. Volkov altered by a sick rage.
He never needed reasons to hurt anyone—not even us. He broke two of my fingers with a wooden hammer. Fractured Dmitry's ribs and put out cigarettes on Svetlana.
She didn't like me trying to spare her from it, either. She grew to have an aversion to it after realizing I was also susceptible to the same violence as our father.
I remember it, too. I remember losing control for the first time.
Our father exposed us to how things work in the underworld from the cradle—my siblings and I saw executions that looked like animalistic attacks.
Deaths drawn out by the sadism of people who did little to deserve it.
I felt disgust. I know our line of work, and I know that things are like this, but my father didn't see it as work .
They weren't consequences of a wrong life and they didn't weigh on his shoulders. It was entertainment .
And I never thought properly about what that meant—how much he wanted me to follow in his footsteps—until I lost control.
A random person. An arrogant businessman at a meeting table with Svetlana and me.
An event, with people around; witnesses.
They were discussing business, and Svetlana was winning the debate—of course she was, she always wins.
But the idiot, with his ill-fitting suit and his smug smile, wouldn't stop interrupting her.
Calling her sweetheart . The irritation boiled in my stomach—the insolence.
The pure, arrogant stupidity of a sewer rat trying to win a strategic debate with passive humiliation.
He didn't see a Volkov. He only saw a woman.