20. DANTE
TWENTY
DANTE
"Last chance, Sergei," I say.
Grigory is in the corner of the room, wiping a bloody knife. Luca is guarding the door, one hand resting on his holster.
Sergei knows he's going to die. His face is busted. He's spat out more than three teeth since we started, and a pool of blood is forming within his irises towards the center of his pupils. He squints at me. He must be seeing a red blur.
"All this war... all this death... for a boy?" he says, spitting a gush of blood onto the floor. "You're shedding too much blood. You killed my brother. A good man. All for him?"
I don't react. He laughs a gurgling sound.
"His blowjob must be worth gold to be worth all this. Is that why you're burning the world down? For a whore you could buy in?—"
He doesn't finish the sentence. Somehow, the first blow lands on its own. The metal crowbar against his jaw. The bone lets out a crackling snap, twisting. Spewing those dirty words about Nyx without knowing a damn thing. Trying to provoke me with that. He succeeded.
I don't follow with lucidity. There are bone cracks, skin colliding with metal.
The crowbar is stained red. My head doesn't register it—it's all automatic and boiling.
My body burns. He was going to tell me to get another one in a brothel.
That there are whores everywhere. That he 's not worth so much. That Nyx is replaceable.
This is the limit.
My vision darkens, and I can only see the color red with the body beneath my blows. It's the second time today. I'm losing my mind.
I don't know if ten seconds or ten minutes pass. My palm throbs with the friction, I breathe heavily with the force of each impact, and I feel a gooey sensation. It spreads across my face, my hands. It drips onto my clothes.
I don't know what brings me back. But, eventually, the fog dissipates. My body stops.
Sergei has turned into a red mess. His face is shapeless. The chair is broken. I'm drenched in blood.
Again.
I take a deep breath. Grigory is looking at the floor, avoiding the grotesque form slumped on the chair.
I let the crowbar drop.
Luca is the first to move. I hear him behind me, with slow, almost cautious steps. As if I were a wild animal. I feel him at my back, keeping a safe distance. He says nothing for a moment before extending a clean cloth.
I accept it. The tremor in my hands doesn't stop. I wipe the clean white cloth across my face, and it returns stained crimson. I wrap my hands, wiping the excess blood from them until I have a soaked cloth.
I turn around. Luca's face is tense, tight. I walk past him.
"Clean this shit up," I say.
There's no answer. My men walk more silently around me. They're afraid to irritate me. They know I'm losing my mind.
I leave the hall. Dmitry waits for me on the other side of the warehouse, immune to the noises due to the distance. When I enter, he's standing, his back to me, speaking softly on the phone with Svetlana. He glances over his shoulder when he hears my footsteps.
His eyes drop from mine to my hands, to the splashes on my face, to the dark stains on my shirt collar. His calm is unshaken. He covers his phone's microphone and says, "Another suit for the laundry. I see your conversation with Sergei was productive."
"Waste of time," I complain.
Dmitry points with his chin to a small bathroom near the door. "Go wash your face."
Without a word, I go.
My own image in the mirror stares back at me: sunken eyes, stained shirt, dried blood on my skin. I haven't slept in too long. It's really starting to affect me.
I turn on the faucet and splash cold water on my face. The water running down the sink is pink. I wash my hands, and the crimson dissolves, disappearing down the drain. The feeling doesn't go away.
"Donya."
I see Dmitry appearing at the door through the mirror. He's no longer on the phone with our sister.
"We have an alert from Atlantic City. It's a strange anomaly. The IT team can't explain it."
He extends a tablet screen to me as I dry my hands. An idiocy. It's even offensive to think that, in the midst of all this, Svetlana finds it a priority to inform us about a goddamn technical error. I glance at the screen.
ALERT: Anomalous payment activity. Three (3) low-value ($1,000) jackpots triggered in a 90-second sequence in sector 4.
I almost laugh in contempt. That's it? For three thousand dollars? I bite my tongue not to send him to hell. I keep reading out of reflex.
Affected machines:
ID 778 - Siberian Storm
ID 781 - Ace's Ant
ID 783 - Lucky Loot
My first reaction is contempt. Stupid names. What's the relevance of this to a security alert? Svetlana is losing focus, drowning in useless data while I'm getting my hands dirty for them.
I almost push the tablet back to Dmitry, but something holds me. An annoying detail.
The repetition.
Siberian Storm. Ace's Ant. Lucky Loot. All with a single initial.
What the hell is this?
The word Dmitry used: anomaly. Strange.
It's... almost theatrical. And there's only one person I know who turns chaos into theater. Who communicates through riddles and contempt.
Nyx.
I stare at the letters again. He knows I'm not a technician. The message is something even an animal like me can see. The pattern.
S.S. A.A. L.L.
The obvious.
Siberian Storm. Ace's Ant. Lucky Loot.
S. A. L.
Blind rage finds a target. A name.
Sal.
That son of a bitch Nyx, alive, points his finger directly from the grave they dug for him.
"It's him," I say without thinking.
Dmitry frowns. "Who?"
"Sal," I say, pushing the tablet back to him. "It's Sal. All along."
Dmitry takes the tablet, scanning the machine names, and I see the moment he understands. "The initials..."
"All resources," I say. "Redirect everything to dig him up. Send the IT team to comb through everything again—emails, calls, cards, and logins. Check his car records, the history of all his credit cards, and security camera footage from every place he stepped in the last week."
Dmitry doesn't hesitate. He nods, already with his phone to his ear, while making parallel communications on the tablet.
I walk past him. Back to the entrance.
A name. A target.
I open the door.
"Call me when you have an address. I'll go get him myself."
The smell of gunpowder and clean gun oil clears my head. I load my Vektor. The metal is familiar, fitting in my hand like an ancient weight.
My target has a face. A face I see with every shot that echoes through the concrete firing range.
Where is he?
My cell phone vibrates on the bench beside me. Dmitry's name glows on the screen. Finally .
I answer on the first ring. "Speak."
" We found him. Sal, " Dmitry says hurriedly. " He made a mistake. Used a burner phone to call his wife's number and kept the call too long. Our team triangulated it. A roadside motel in Jersey. Route 46. "
He sends me the exact address. I hang up without another word.
Twenty minutes later, the Escalade slides off the main road. The roadside motel is about an hour outside the city, with a dimly lit, dilapidated parking lot. The neon sign flickers, dying and coming back to life.
Luca, who has been silent beside me the whole time, already knows what to do.
He gets out of the car before me. I watch him walk to the small reception window, where a bored night clerk watches TV.
The conversation is short. I don't see money changing hands.
Just the sheer bulk of Luca's body and the look on his face.
The clerk hands over a master key without asking questions.
"Room 2B" is all Luca says once he's back.
Room 2B is at the end of an open-air corridor that smells of mold and cheap disinfectant. We don't knock. Knocking gives time to think. To react.
Luca inserts the master key.
I push the door open and step inside.
The room is a coffin. Unmade bed, a half-eaten pizza in a box on the floor, the dusty smell of tobacco. And there he is. Sal. Thin, pale, with wrinkled clothes and messy hair.
He turns. He sees me standing in the doorway, with Luca behind me, and freezes. The blood drains from his already pale face. The cell phone he was holding shatters on the linoleum floor.
He opens his mouth, perhaps to scream, perhaps to beg. No sound comes out. He knows why I'm here. He knows what I've done to men for far less.
I step into the room. Luca closes the door behind me. The click of the lock is Sal's death sentence.
He scrambles backward, tripping over an empty pizza box. Panic disfigures his face. He starts to explain before I say anything.
"Mr. Volkov, please! They forced me!" he exclaims. "They were going to kill me, they showed me pictures of what they do... I had no choice!"
Pictures . His excuse is so weak it's an insult. I might have thought a little before disfiguring this bastard's face if the Malakovs had his family, but they didn't even need to. His cowardice was enough. He sold himself out to save his pathetic hide.
"Are you afraid of pictures , Sal?" I say. I take a slow step toward him. He cringes.
I lean down, bringing myself level with him, and he tries to pull away. Cornered. I see sweat running down his face, his crooked glasses sliding down his nose, his pupils dilated with fear.
"Today, Sal, I saw a man, alive and conscious, with both legs broken and every one of his fingers torn off.
His jaw broke on the second kick. It hung loose.
And even then, he tried to speak. I couldn't understand a damn thing.
We cut his knee tendon like it was rubber.
He still tried to stand. Thought he was going to escape.
Do you know how many pieces we sent him to the Malakovs in, Sal? "
Sal lets out a low moan. He doesn't have the courage to look at me. The smell of his sweat is acidic, soaking the cheap T-shirt clinging to his body. His chest rises and falls too fast. He can't answer.