Chapter 1
ONE
IGOR
PRESENT DAY
The headache I’ve been sporting all day intensifies as the skinny, naked girl in front of me begs for mercy.
They always do this. Yell and cry and beg. Like anyone will hear and stop taking whatever they want. Like I can save them. I can’t even save myself. The only mercy I can give them is death.
Her skin is almost translucent, her once healthy strawberry hair is now nothing but dry straws of blonde on her emaciated face. I remember when she was first brought to the compound and her blue eyes brimmed with life and fire.
That was six days ago.
In that short amount of time, they’ve turned her into a ghost of the lively girl she had been. It’s a game for them. Seeing how fast their product breaks. I never participated in her torment, but I’ve been made to watch. As I have every single other asset that came through these doors.
“Come on, Igor, show us what you can do,” one of my brother’s goons drawls behind me.
The men around snicker.
It’s not even funny.
My brother watches on, a faint amused smile on his lips. We may have been separated for over a decade, but he can’t hide the blankness in his eyes. He pretends he’s still the same Misha I once knew, but he’s dead inside. My brother is dead, just like the girl in front of me will soon be.
He’s now Misha Petrov, Pakhan of the Moscow Bratva, the most feared and deranged branch of the Russian mafia. And everyone will try to get in his good graces, because he’s the most sadistic and fickle of them all.
I glance at the five men gathered around my brother. They lounge on the sofas displayed around the sparse living room of the main house, beer in hand, and pants undone after what they did, like this is a regular Tuesday evening.
It is a regular Tuesday.
A shiver of disgust makes its way through me, but I know how to hide it.
I’ve had to. For three years now. They can never know that every time I watch, every time I’m left to feel powerless that I couldn’t save someone from their fate as nothing more than a human pet—and most often, much worse—I die a little more inside.
I guess I’m also dead. A living ghost like many souls inhabiting these walls.
The survival of the ones I used to love depends on my compliance.
Do they even remember me?
I immediately dismiss any thought of my past life. Nothing good can come of it. They’re safer if I stay here. Misha assured me as much and I believe him. I’ve seen his operation, his army. Lana and Julian wouldn’t stand a chance.
I take a slow breath in. Tune the hollers out as I stare at the girl in front of me with nothing left in my eyes.
I used to feel pity. I gave it all away already.
Retreating into my mind where everything is black and the world around me doesn’t have any weight is a safer bet.
For my sanity, and for this girl. She’ll be safer dead, although some don’t even stop at that.
That’s what they think I do, too. And I’d rather they believe it. It’s easier this way.
Before she can ask for the same thing one more time, I clasp my hands around her jaw and head. They’re so massive compared to her small frame. Her eyes beg me to see her. But all I see is pain.
I snap her neck without another thought, and hoist her onto my shoulder. She never hits the ground.
Shouts erupt around me.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” Arkadi yells, getting into my face.
He reeks of alcohol, his beady eyes full of hate.What he sees in my expression is enough for them to widen. He sputters and takes a step back, raising his hands in surrender when I let out a growl that’s more animal than man. Every kill gets me closer to the edge, and he knows it.
“Let him go, Arkadi. You know how he gets when he needs to take his time.”
My brother is right about one thing. I do take my time with my victims.
Time to clean their body and close their eyes, then dig a grave at the back of the shed that serves as my home on the compound, and bury them deep enough that my brother’s hounds can’t unearth them.
Sometimes, the men don’t call me by my name.
I’m grobovshchik—The coffin-maker. They don’t know Pushkin and how close to the truth they are, how my mind has already started its descent to madness.
I stay in the numb recesses of my mind because it’s safer for everyone this way.
If I were to succumb to the dark, I’d kill every last one of them.
And Misha would pull the trigger on whatever sordid plans he has for the people I left behind when he came back to claim me.
He told me in no uncertain terms that only my presence at his side assuage his bloodlust where the Morettis are concerned, and my death would mean war.
I can’t let that happen. Even if I long for death with every breath I take.
So I stay in the black hole my mind has created to keep everyone safe. It’s where I give mercy to Misha’s victims.
In three years, I only buried sixteen of them.
Any more would have been suspicious. Every single one of them sends me into a darker headspace I’m having more and more difficulties crawling out of on my own.
Maybe I don’t want to anymore. That place isn’t my mind protecting me and everyone, it’s a bottomless pit of despair carving what’s left of my soul to leave me a hollow shell doing Misha’s bidding.
When I push the door open to the dark night outside with my cargo on my shoulder, Arkadi is still mumbling. My brother cuts him off with harsh words I don’t stay to listen to.
The girl’s body weighs close to nothing but the weight of my conscience is an ever-present reminder that I still have one. I wish it didn’t exist.
Some nights like tonight, I wish I were more of a cold-hearted murderer, maybe even more like my brother. It fills me with disgust and shame that I envy my brother for something. At least without a conscience, I wouldn’t want to die every single step I take to the shed.
The lights on the windows of the first floor bedrooms illuminate my path, the manicured lawn and bucolic fountain with a sculpture of Venus on top a sinister contradiction to what happens at the main house.
I don’t glance behind me. I know some prisoners are looking out their window, aware that the monster took another soul. I prefer it that way. The ones who’ve been with us for a while know not to get too close to me, and tell the new arrivals quickly.
When I first came in, I tried to help and rescue a few people, especially the younger ones.
I saved two my first three months under Misha’s thumb.
Then I learnt the consequences are always going to be taken out on the assets, never on me.
My brother knows how to wield my guilt and shame well.
He calls it ‘toughening me up’. And what was done to them has bile rising at the back of my throat all over again.
I swallow and retreat once more. Dissociating is my only lifeline. The only thing that protects people.
It takes more effort than it usually does, but when I reach my door, I’m back into my head. Into the dark and cold place I’ve created inside.
The hinges creak as I step inside the place I sleep in.
The space consists of only one room, but the single bed is hidden behind a curtain to give me the illusion of privacy.
The shower and toilet are installed just outside.
It’s a constant reminder of how dire my circumstances are, but it’s better than sleeping at the main house.
Misha indulged me when I refurbished this place to be somewhat liveable.
I just couldn’t take the screams anymore.
I move through the steps like I’ve done so many times, on auto-pilot, unaware of what I’m doing.
I lay the girl down on the round wooden table in my living room, next to the metal kitchen sink and single gas ring next to it.
Her naked frame on the small table is grotesque.
I barely look anyway. I’m uninterested in flesh, which infuriates my brother, of course.
Everything and everyone is simply a commodity for him.
He said that’s the price he had to pay to get me back.
There was only ever one person that ignited my body and soul.
He’s long gone.
Before I start, I use my fingers to close her eyes. It takes a while because rigor mortis is already setting in.
I bend down to retrieve two buckets and a new sponge from underneath the kitchen sink, then stand and fill one of them half full with fresh water.
After I collect a black towel in the closet to the left of the room, where my bed is, I’m back at the table in just three steps and lay everything on a chair next to me.
Rigor mortis will make my work more difficult so I act quickly, wetting the sponge in the clean water bucket, wiping the blood on her body and squeezing it into the empty bucket.
Before long, the liquid is pink. A drop ripples on the surface.
I think they’re my tears, but I can’t be sure. I’m not fully present.
I take a tee-shirt of mine in my closet and dress her. It’s a small dignity. The only one I can afford.
The shovel rests against the wall by the entrance door, always at the ready.
My hands close around the handle, its shape familiar.
The cold air of the night has settled when I start digging, but I don’t feel it.
It can never rival the cold inside my chest, and the emptiness in my heart.
This part of the ritual almost soothes me, with the repetitive movements and the exertion of it all.
When I’m drenched in sweat, I climb out and go back inside the shed to carry the girl to her last resting place.
I have no words to give her. I finished school when I lived abroad, generously paid by my employer, and I learned to love reading, but I didn’t talk much. Julian was the one who was good with words. He loved Russian poets best. How ironic.
There is no rite I know and can offer. Growing up with the Morettis, I never went to church.
Pietro, Lana’s father and my employer—or gaoler as Misha would say—, always said that he didn’t see the point since he was killing so many souls.
Repenting would take too much time in this life so he was saving it for the next.
At the memory of them, nausea rises again, bringing me back to where I am, and what I’ve done. To the fate I can’t escape and the devil who owns me. I breathe in and focus to retreat into darkness again. It doesn’t come.
If my coping mechanism doesn’t work anymore, they are in danger.
And I will stop at nothing to protect them.