Chapter Vadim
Vadim
For days no one tortured Tolam.
He sat strapped to a chair and watched what we did to the other two men.
We gave him water. Enough food to keep the mind sharp and the fear sharper.
Anticipation, I had found, was its own cruelty—far more efficient than anything my brother’s hands could produce in the early hours.
Let him watch. Let him count the days. Let him wonder why he had been left untouched when the men beside him had not.
My brother moved towards one of them with the clay pot. Tolam’s eyes were drooping. I leaned over and slapped his face. The sound was vicious even through the beard, flesh meeting flesh with the certain flatness of a man who had stopped flinching at the right moments.
“Stay awake,” I said quietly. “You’ll want to see this.”
Bogdan held the pot flush against the man’s stomach while Konstantin arranged the coals with the patience of someone who had done this many times and found no reason to rush.
They glowed orange in the dim room, the only warm light in it.
Konstantin tugged away the dividing lid, and for a moment there was nothing—just the heat and the dark interior of the pot and the man’s ragged breathing.
Then the sounds began.
First begging, the words tumbling over each other, none of them coherent enough to answer. Then crying, ugly and broken. Then screaming, the kind that fills a room and stays there long after it stops.
The rats were hungry. We had seen to that.
“You began a war that you could never win,” I said, raising my voice just enough to be heard over the noise. “Why?”
Tolam dragged his gaze from the table to my face. His jaw worked.
“You killed my family,” he hissed.
“You tried to kill mine.” I thought of my father’s face, grey with dust, utterly still. “How convenient of you to forget.”
“You were supposed to die.” Another shriek from the table made him flinch despite himself. His hands flexed against the restraints. “It should have been you.”
I considered that. It was not the first time someone had said it to me.
“There are three starved rats eating their way through your friend,” I said. “You’ll be next. All I need is a name.”
“Nobody helped me.” His chin lifted, a last performance of defiance. “I did it all myself.”
I looked at him for a moment, then turned and signalled to Bogdan, who crossed the room and poured me a drink without being told what or how much. Eleven years, and the man still knew.
I settled into my chair.
It would be a long night. The enjoyable kind.
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“Go home, brat,” Konstantin said, wiping his hands on a rag. It did little for the dried blood staining both of them to the wrist.
I stood, turned to Tolam and yanked his head up by a fistful of hair.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
His eyes were flat. Devoid of anything that might once have been called life.
“You killed my sons,” he croaked, his voice low and ruined.
My grip tightened.
“And you killed mine,” I said. The word came out quieter than I intended. Not a snarl. Something worse than a snarl.
“I’ll keep him uncomfortable tonight, brat.” Konstantin’s voice behind me. “Go home.”
I held Tolam’s gaze for another moment, then released him. His head dropped.
There would be no sleep for Tolam tonight. Konstantin would see to that with the particular dedication of a man who considered discomfort an art form.
I walked out.
Tikhon fell into step behind me. Bogdan was already at the car, already in the driver’s seat, the engine turning over in the cold.
The early morning air hit me like a wall—bitter, clean and invigorating in the way that only comes before dawn when the city hasn’t woken yet and the night hasn’t fully released its grip.
We pulled away from the industrial estate.
A new acquisition. Unremarkable from the outside.
Only a handful of people knew what was inside it or who.
That was the problem sitting at the back of everything else.
Someone within the brotherhood had been feeding information to a man who used it to put a truck through my wife’s car. A member of my own hierarchy. Patient enough and careful enough to have gone undetected for long enough to cause this much damage.
It still irked me in the way that only betrayal does—differently from an enemy’s attack, deeper, more personal, the kind of thing that makes you review every conversation and every room and every man you thought you knew.
I stared out of the window.
The first light was beginning to find the edges of the sky, a thin line of grey against the dark. The streets were empty. The city slept. Everyone slept.
It took considerably more vodka for me to sleep these days.
I watched Chernograd pass in the dark and calculated how long it would take Iskra to heal. How long before I could claim another child.
That's what this was.
A fight for survival of the Dragunov genes.
My heir.
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The house was silent in the way that only holds in the hours before anyone has a reason to move through it. The stairs creaked beneath my feet—each step familiar, the particular groan of the third from the top that I had stopped noticing years ago and noticed now.
At the landing I paused.
Radovan, at his post outside her door. He straightened when he saw me and stepped aside without being told.
I turned the brass knob and pushed the door open.
Her perfume met me before my eyes adjusted to the dark.
Something warm and faintly floral—entirely hers, entirely distinct from anything else in this house.
In an instant I was pulled back into the intensity of the breeding months.
The way she had opened for me. The way she clenched around my cock, milking me dry, her body doing what it was designed to do even when her mind had decided otherwise.
I stood over her.
The covers were pulled high, her hair spread across the pillow—that golden hair I had used as a harness on more than one occasion. In sleep she had that quality again. The one she lost the moment she knew I was watching. Small. Still. Entirely unguarded.
I could see the edge of a bruise above the covers. Fading but still there.
Her body would heal. The bruises would fade and the womb that had failed to hold what I put there would be ready again.
Then I would be back.
To claim what was mine. To replace what had been taken from me.
I stood there longer than I intended.
I didn’t drink that morning to sleep.