Chapter 13
Misha
The skinning knife was like an insect crawling underneath Black’s skin. The man choked, twisted, and screamed so loudly Misha’s ears started aching, but hanging head down off a meat hook in the shed, with his hands tied to a large stone that kept him less mobile, he had no way of escaping the torture as Grim slowly separated his hide from flesh. The scent of fresh blood was overwhelming Misha’s senses as Grim worked, repeating his questions again and again. Black had fainted several times already, but he wouldn’t be spared the torture. A bit of icy water was enough to bring him back to Grim’s strong, bloodied hands and the hunting knives the owner of the cabin kept here.
Bob was hanging close by, untouched yet, but there was an angry bruise spreading across his forehead, and the gunshot wound he’d received during the shootout with Grim was like a gaping hole in his flesh. It twitched as he sobbed, spilling tears that rolled down his temples and onto the floor.
Watching the torture was … a strange experience. Nothing like the many horrors Misha had seen in the compound where he was kept. Thinking back to the many innocent prisoners mutilated, killed, and raped, he couldn’t help but think that the man’s suffering was just. That Grim was a hand of justice itself, bringing the torment back to the people who wanted to cause it. After all, what would have Misha’s fate have been if they’d abducted him? If Zero got him back, would he cut off Misha’s fingers? Arms? Would he skin him as well? Blind him? Keep him in a cell until he starved or went mad?
Misha had no compassion in his heart for men who worked for a monster like Zero. He imagined the many faces of his rapists instead of Black’s, and that made watching him squirm and cry all the better. Misha bit down on his lip and squeezed his fists, cooped up in a dark corner of the hunting shed, safe behind Grim’s broad back.
“You won’t cooperate, will you?” asked Grim, slapping Black’s face with his bloodied hand.
The wood beneath their feet absorbed all the excess blood quickly, soaking it all in, as it did all the times when hunters had skinned and gutted their catch here. Misha felt safe in his spot with a rolled-up blanket underneath him, and he couldn’t help but stare at the red sheen on Grim’s back. He had been wiping off the blood on his own body, smearing it onto his skin and leaving abstract traces every time he touched himself. He was steady and calm, as if separating a man’s skin from his muscle was nothing to him, as if the cries for help didn’t bother him one bit. And yet, knowing Grim was doing this for Misha tickled Misha’s pride.
Black coughed and shook his head violently. Misha knew why. Black would be dead if he told them anything. He would die in the gruesomest way imaginable or worse yet, become goods, have his family kidnapped and tortured. If the man had balls, he would not speak.
Grim relaxed and then grabbed Black’s shriveled dick and pulled on it while his hand tightened around the handle of a serrated blade.
“Kill me …” Black rasped with some bloody spittle dripping down his lips.
Bob started sobbing violently. “I didn’t know anything, I swear!”
Misha looked to Bob’s bruised, naked body, thinking back to when he’d been this vulnerable, available to be violated by anyone who had the money and connections to come and see him. “You accepted the job to kidnap an amputee,” he whispered.
Grim looked back with a small smile, and then, with a few precise pulls, separated Black’s genitals from the rest of his body and tossed them into the small metal tub, which he soon pulled closer to sit underneath the bleeding man.
Bob tried to pull away, but he had to know there was no way he could do that, and he swayed a bit in the air. “Oh no, God, no,” he uttered hysterically, screaming loud enough to drown out Black’s whimpers. “What kind of monster are you? This is insane!”
Grim touched the streaks of blood running down Black’s twitching chest from the raw flesh where his cock and balls had been. “I’m this boy’s guardian. You came here thinking the three of you were predators out for prey. That’s what you get for not knowing your place in the food chain.”
Misha’s insides felt a little warmer when he heard Grim being so protective of him. He’d never had a real guardian. Always on his own. As a little boy, with alcoholics for parents, he had never known safety. But now he was getting to taste it for the first time.
Grim turning the knife to Bob was enough to have him start talking again, though the man was barely intelligible through his violent sobs. “I will talk, I will! Ask, and I will answer!”
“How did you find us?” asked Grim calmly and pushed Black’s body into a gentle sway over the tub.
“A chip. There’s a chip in his stump. We could only catch the signal every now and then, so it took a while.” He spoke so fast it took Misha a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying.
Misha screamed out and looked down to his stumps in terror. “Where? Where? He’s tracking me! He’s been tracking me all along! No, no, no.” His fingertips roamed over the many scars as his breath became erratic, and soon it was his fingernails scratching at the stump. “Take it out! Take it out!”
Grim moved closer, and he quickly grabbed Misha with bloodied hands. “Don’t. Please, stop.”
“He could be tracking me now! Like I’m some fucking lost lamb.” Misha tried to pull his hands back to the stumps, but Grim’s steady grip wouldn’t let him.
“Calm down. He thinks those fuckups are dealing with it. We have several hours to spare. It will be fine,” said Grim, leaning down so he could look into Misha’s eyes. It was awfully quiet all of a sudden, and when Misha briefly looked back toward the meat hooks, he saw blood dripping from gashes across Black and Bob’s throats.
“Please, I need it out. He left something in me. I’m going to puke. It’s like Satan’s seed, and it’s in me, so he knows where I am.”
Grim squeezed his hands tighter, staining them with the blood of their attackers. “We will take it out. There’s no chapter here, but in Charleston, they have a doctor on call.”
“No, no! I can’t have it in me—” Misha’s windpipe clenched so tightly he couldn’t breathe anymore. He felt as if there was a tumor growing into his bone, ready to choke the life out of him when it was least expected .
Grim’s jaw muscles twitched. “You can’t just scratch it out. It’s dangerous.”
Misha managed to gulp half a breath. “Then cut it out. You have the knives. Just cut it!”
Grim shook his head and pulled Misha into his arms. “We don’t know where it is. I can’t do that. We will go to a doctor, and he will take care of it.”
“Even a doctor could be his spy! You don’t know!” He punched Grim’s shoulder and tried to pull away.
Grim looked into Misha’s eyes and squeezed his arms. “That’s why we’ll go to someone I can vouch for. It will be fine. I will bury them, get rid of the van, and we will go.”
Misha sobbed as if he were the seventeen-year-old weakling again, unable to fight for his life. He hadn’t known about the chip, yet now he could almost sense it throbbing under his skin like a live cockroach feeding on his fear.
He nodded, completely frantic on the inside. Maybe he could distract Grim and get to the knives? Slice the legs open and find the fucking thing? His fear of Zero was much bigger than his fear of blades.
Grim exhaled and rubbed his forehead, deflated. “Fucking hell. Those motherfuckers made such a mess,” he said and started quickly stripping down.
Misha’s nose was plugged, so he kept taking big open-mouthed breaths, eyeing the knives and waiting for the right moment.
Grim tossed his clothes to the floor and picked up a sheet of thick plastic, which he put close to the tub. With a bit of shuffling about, he dropped Black’s dead body on the sheet and gathered it around him.
Misha crawled closer, and when Grim was busy with Bob’s body, he snatched one of the daggers. Even now, with his goal so certain, he could hardly stand holding something this sharp, instantly thinking of how it could slice into his flesh and scratch against bone. He turned his back on Grim and put the blade against his skin, begging unnamed gods for the courage to go through with the cut.
“Misha?”
The question came like from behind a glass wall, muted, dull, the only object in focus being the one in his hand. He pushed the knife down, hoping that the chip would be in this stump, not the other. The first pang of pain made him hiss, but before he could do anything else, a big, strong hand clenched on his wrist so hard, he dropped the knife with a yelp.
Grim fell on Misha with a growl that didn’t belong in a human’s throat. The red streaks on his face and chest made him look even more like a wild beast as he pushed Misha against the wooden floor. “What the fuck are you doing, huh? I told you we’re gonna see a doctor!”
“It will be too late!” Misha yelled back. “If he comes for me, I’d rather kill myself!”
Grim’s handsome face twisted in anger. “Who? Who are you so afraid of?”
Misha slumped to the floor, the panic too much for his body to bear. “The man who took my legs. He cut them off with a hacksaw. And if he gets to me, he will cut me again. I can’t go through that, I can’t!”
Grim’s hands clenched on Misha’s even harder, and his eyes burned. “He did what? He ... cut them off? What?”
Tears pooled in Misha’s eyes until they spilled, and he wanted to laugh. Just when he thought he didn’t have many tears left in him, it seemed they were just locked in with his emotions, which now flooded out in gallons.
“I was healthy, and fit, and I had things going for me. And he took everything. He cut my legs and filmed it so other cruel freaks like him could watch. He intended to kill me, but I survived. Now that I think about it though, he did kill me. He murdered everything I was.” Misha let his stumps curl closer to his thighs and looked up at Grim, wondering if he could possibly understand what Misha was saying.
Grim was still and his eyes drilled holes in Misha’s neck as he took deep, heavy breaths. “Who is he?” he whispered in the end, finally looking into Misha’s face with a rage burning behind the calm grey of his eyes. It was so cruel, Misha longed to see it unleashed on everyone who ever hurt him.
“He goes by ‘Zero’,” Misha whispered, slightly calmed down by Grim’s intense stare. “He runs the organization who owned the base the Coffin Nails raided. He makes videos of torture. Distributes them on the dark web. He doesn’t know what mercy is. He’s sick in the head, and he ruined my life.”
Grim squeezed Misha’s hands, watching him fiercely. “And when I find him, what do you want me to do to him?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t want you to find him. He’s dangerous. He would hurt you. He destroys people.”
“He won’t see me coming. No one does,” said Grim, gently stroking Misha’s cheek with his fingers, which were sticky with blood .
“I want him to suffer. And then burn, until there’s nothing left of him.” Strangely enough, even though Misha doubted there was a chance for this to happen, saying it out loud made him feel better.
A shudder went through Grim, and he nodded, glancing into Misha’s eyes with a warmth that could melt the ice of fear around Misha’s heart. “He deserves what’s coming. He broke you, and he needs to pay.”
Misha let out a deep breath, and stroked Grim’s shoulder. “Thank you.”
Grim pushed his forehead against Misha’s and pulled him deep into the protection of his arms. “You’re mine now. All mine.”
And despite their relationship being something out of a nightmare, Misha couldn’t help but nod, hugging Grim tightly. “I am.”
Grim pressed a soft kiss to Misha’s temple. “You need to pack our things so that we can go quick, you understand?”
“Yes. I’m sorry I’m a mess. I’ll try harder.” Misha stroked Grim’s nape, and he didn’t even know when his breathing became even again.
Grim molded his face to Misha’s, brushing his hand over Misha’s back. “I need to trust you, okay? Don’t hurt yourself. I’ve got it.”
Misha sighed but nodded in the end. “I trust you.” And the weight of the words was like a heavy blanket over his shoulders. They mattered, he meant them, and he wouldn’t let Grim down.