21. LEO #3
Luca came for me a few hours after Dante followed Dmitry. Dante wanted me here. To witness this, to give me an example of what will happen to me if I betray him, or maybe just to show me .
Sal is miserable, pathetic. He's no evil genius. At most, a selfish coward.
Luca locks the door. I keep to the walls. Dante doesn't turn to me, and Sal doesn't lift his face. This place smells like a hospital. Disinfectant and cleaning products. It's unsettling.
"Do you know how much a man who's been with us for twenty years is worth, Nyx?"
He doesn't look at me when he asks. He looks at Sal.
I lean against the wall. The residual pains—partially devoured by the tramadol—are overshadowed by a morbid fascination. I like seeing Dante in his element. Giving orders, asserting himself, destroying.
"Twenty years," Dante continues, his voice low.
I understand why Sal is trembling. That voice makes me tremble too.
"It's a long time. Enough to know who we are.
How we operate. What we do with rats." Then his voice changes.
It's for Sal now. A real threat. "What did you think was going to happen, Sal? "
Sal shakes his head. He's crying, but he seems convinced he won't get out of here alive. I see the pistol in Dante's holster, the black polymer reflecting in the harsh lights of the basement.
"I-I helped, Mr. Volkov," Sal tries to argue. He stammers as always but finds the courage to look Dante in the eye. "I told you where he was. I gave you a way in… I helped bring Nyx back. I-I fixed my mistake, Mr. Volkov, please…!"
"You didn't fix shit," Dante says. He doesn't raise his voice.
That makes him even more threatening. "You cost me time.
You cost me men. You handed our greatest asset over to our enemies, and you think you deserve credit because you did what you were told at sniper-point?
I'm the fucking name that's kept you alive until now. You'd do well to remember that."
He pulls the pistol from its holster. The movement is slow, calm. Sal immediately panics, shaking his head. He weeps.
"No, no, Mr. Volkov, please…"
He struggles with his arms. They're tied firmly against the chair's rests. Dante pulls ammunition from an inner suit pocket—a gray magazine.
"I don't like knowing I'm about to make your wife a widow, Sal."
He slots the magazine into the pistol. A click. Sal begs. "Mr. Volkov, please, don't do this, I have children…"
"You should be grateful, Sal. I could do this in a much worse way. I'm going to kill you quickly."
Dante pulls back the slide. Sal's eyes go wide. The logic of his plea crumbles.
"Please… please, God, no, Dante, please, don't…" he says, to a God who hasn't set foot in this basement in a long time. He looks at me. Panicked. "Mr. Hays… Nyx… please! Tell him! I can be useful! I swear! I'll do anything! Please!"
Dante ignores the appeal. He stands up with the same calm with which he reloaded the pistol. He sighs with the monotony of someone who has executed countless men for far less.
He walks over to Sal, who is now sobbing uncontrollably. He stops in front of the chair.
Without rushing, he raises the pistol. The barrel aligns perfectly with the center of Sal's sweaty forehead. He pushes the safety down. Click.
I watch the scene unfold. Dante, perfect in his finality. The calm, the posture, the way the gun is a natural extension of his will. A god of death in an expensive suit.
But I don't want this to end yet. Not like this. There's a use for the rat.
I take a step forward, out of my corner of shadows.
"Dante."
Luca stiffens at the door. Sal stares at me with a renewed, miserable hope. Dante doesn't turn, but he doesn't shoot either. The gun remains steady, aimed at Sal's head.
I keep walking, slowly, until I stop beside him. So close I can smell his cologne. It's a nice scent, woody and ironic.
"Don't kill him."
Sal's hope is so desperate it's almost pornographic. He looks at me as if I were a merciful messiah. I am not.
"Give me one good reason," Dante replies, his voice low. He doesn't look at me.
I take another step. I touch the small of his back, feel the expensive fabric of his suit against my palm. He allows it. Unmoving, as if the touch were natural and I could touch him at any time.
Sal watches this. Confusion meets his hope, forming a strange dossier of hyperventilation.
"He's been inside their newest systems," I whisper.
I lean against him. "He knows the architecture, the protocols, and maybe some passwords they're too lazy to change.
Leave him to me. I'll turn him into a weapon we can point right back at them.
" I slide my hand further up his back. "Dead men can't talk. "
Dante is quiet. It's a long moment, and Sal looks like he's about to faint, closer with every second.
Then, slowly, the gun begins to lower. Not all at once. Millimeter by millimeter.
The hope on Sal's face is an ugly, desperate thing. When the barrel of the pistol finally points to the floor, Sal collapses into a sob of relief.
"Thank you," he chokes out, "thank you, thank you, oh God, thank you…"
"My boy thinks you're still good for something, Sal. Take a good look at him," Dante says. "He's your guardian angel now. You'd better pray he keeps finding you useful."
My boy. I have to bite the inside of my cheek hard to keep from moaning right here, in front of everyone. He's claiming me and it's fucking paradise. I lean in a little more, pressing myself against Dante's back, and Sal sobs, nodding way too fast.
"I-I will be, Mr. Volkov, thank you, thank you, thank?—"
A bang. An explosion of gunpowder.
The sound of the gunshot is deafening. I hear a sharp ringing, my body contracts and aches from the shock, and Sal screams an ugly, primitive, pained scream.
I didn't see what happened. Only the result: the smoke rising from the barrel of Dante's pistol, Dante holding it with a horrifying calm, and Sal's left hand, which had been tied to the armrest, transformed into a ruined mass of blood and bone.
The bullet lodges in the armrest of the chair. It almost goes through.
"Shut the fuck up," Dante says. "Let's make sure you never touch anything of ours again."
He doesn't even wait. He points the pistol at Sal's intact hand, and before Sal can beg him not to, he fires.
Sal's mind, his talent, his only use in this world… it all passed through his fingers. The code he wrote, the systems he hacked, the betrayal he committed. His entire identity was at the tips of his ten fingers, which no longer exist.
I lift my gaze from the disaster that was Sal's hands and look at Dante. He is holstering the weapon, impassive. His calm after an act of such intimate and calculated brutality…
I have never wanted a man so much in my entire life.
Dante turns, and I'm forced to let him go. I didn't want to. He turns his back on the man writhing in the chair and addresses Luca, who watches us with a stone-like expression.
"Take him to our doctor and stop the bleeding. Keep this piece of shit alive. The boy wants him for work."
Luca nods and moves to obey, gesturing for another guard near the door to help him lift the man who is now just a sobbing, bloodied deadweight of flesh.
Dante's attention turns completely to me.
"You," he commands. "With me."
He turns and walks toward the door. I follow him, one step behind, exactly where I belong.
The pain in my ribs is a distant throb now.
We walk down the stairs and corridors past the silent guards who pretend not to see us. He guides me with a certainty that makes me want to melt. I could follow him anywhere.
We stop at my temporary room—the same one a doctor shoved a needle into my arm. He opens the door and gestures inside with his chin. I step in. He doesn't.
"Don't leave until I tell you to," he orders. "Luca will come by later."
I want Dante to come in. To lock the door, to lay his hands on me. To hurt me.
"Aren't you staying with me, mister...? You blew a guy's hands off in front of me. You should comfort me."
Amidst his Don-like scowl, a deeper frown appears. Comforting me is an absurd idea for him.
"Don't fuck with me, Nyx."
And he's right. Seeing that had me more turned on than disturbed.
I bite my lip. "Then fuck me yourself."
The sound that escapes him is an irritated grunt mixed with a half-laugh. I see the corner of his mouth lift against his will. Took him by surprise.
"You're unbelievable," he says. I smile, my whole face protesting the movement, as he closes the door and leaves me alone.
I really wanted him with me. But now that he's presented me with a diamond collar— head of cybersecurity —this dismissal only postpones the inevitable.
He needs me. And, fuck, I need him.
The time passes. Someone brought me food— liquid food, as if I couldn't open my mouth.
Fuck it. I accept. I'm still floating.
My boy .
The words echo. A stamp, a mark. I sit on the edge of the bed, the expensive mattress sinking under my insignificant weight.
My brain is overclocking, analyzing the syntax of that moment.
Dante's calm, the way the gun seemed an extension of his will, the calculated brutality with which he destroyed Sal's hands.
Those hands betrayed us. They won't touch anything else.
And he did it for me.
The thought makes a low, dirty heat spread through my abdomen.
The door opens without warning.
It's Luca.
He enters holding a glass of water and two white pills in his tattooed palm. The doctor must have left instructions. The obedient soldier, always following orders.
He doesn't look at me. Not really. His gaze sweeps past me, focusing on the wall, the window, anywhere but the aberration sitting on the bed that he saw kiss his boss.
He stops at a safe distance, extending his hand.
"Painkillers," he says. His voice is a low baritone, flat as always, but there's a tension there, an edge that wasn't present before.