Riordan
Fluorescent lighting burned harshly overhead, illuminating a room buried deep beneath Allure.
Even if the room hadn’t been thoroughly soundproofed, the thrumming bass and deafening cacophony of club music and dancing would muffle any conspicuous sounds coming from our interrogation room.
Clear plastic sheets were draped over the walls to catch any mess Gregor made, but I hadn’t bothered to suit up before stepping in to relieve Ivan in entertaining our guest. I wanted to feel his blood as it spilled for the audacity of betraying our family to the Callahans and The Consortium.
When I’d been properly initiated into my father’s bratva as a teen, I’d had to work in various aspects of the family business, and I was an apt student.
The brotherhood ran in my veins, and like my father, I would do anything to protect it.
It had been a long time since I’d studied under the tutelage of my father’s most effective interrogator.
I’d moved on to bigger and better things.
While I had many skills, my passion did not lie in bloody wet work. However, I made an exception tonight.
The hammer in my hands was covered in blood, as were my clothes.
Tiny shards of bone flew into the air as I brought the hammer down on Gregor’s hand, where it was pinned to the table.
His fingernails had been removed days ago, but I found that wasn’t enough punishment for hands that had been raised against my family.
Ivan, similarly blood spattered, leaned against the far wall, wiping his hands with a damp cloth.
Unlike me, Ivan never wore a cover when he worked a target over.
He reveled in the mess of it all. Red dotted his bleach-blond hair and face, giving Ivan’s impish smile a sinister quality.
I brought the hammer down again and again, until Gregor’s hand was nothing more than a squishy flesh bag filled with blood and splinters of bone.
“Was that the hand he used to jack off with, do you think?” Ivan asked, tossing me his towel as I dropped the hammer back on the little mobile torture cart someone had helpfully supplied.
Carving information out of someone often took focus, and nothing was more irritating than stopping in your stride because the pliers you wanted were in another room.
“Oh, most definitely.” I snickered, wiping my hands as Gregor rasped out broken sobs. He’d lost his voice from screaming long ago, and it was difficult to say very much without any teeth.
My father and his most ruthless torturer, Andrey, had gotten the information needed to condemn Gregor embarrassingly quickly.
Gregor was a sniveling coward, and he spilled his guts about his involvement in The Consortium and the plans Roark was making in the shadows before we had the opportunity to literally spill his guts.
Indigo was right when she said she heard him talking with my bastard of an uncle, and by calling attention to Gregor when she did, she unintentionally warned us of a plot that could end the very legacy my father and I were trying to protect.
Gregor had only acted as he did, according to Gregor at least, because he was confident in his father’s position as one of the pakhan’s top brigadiers, his vory, to get him out of trouble.
He’d miscalculated, wildly. His father, a weathered, old first-generation immigrant from Kazan named Dima Popov, was eternally loyal to the brotherhood.
Popov was the pakhan of the California arm of our bratva.
He was also on his third wife and had no shortage of heirs.
When my father told Dima what we had discovered and proof of his son’s treachery, Dima told my father to punish his son as Mikhail saw fit.
Gregor had begged his father to help him, but Dima had eyed his son with disgust and spat, “I have many sons, but only one pakhan. You are no Popov.”
After we’d pulled every scrap of useful information from Gregor and he’d begged his father for a salvation that would never come, the real fun began.
I didn’t especially enjoy violence simply for violence’s sake, nor did I find sexual gratification in pain, but it’d be a lie if I didn’t feel a sense of grim satisfaction at every pathetic whimper and groan that we ripped from Gregor.
This sad excuse for a man had betrayed his family, his bratva, and contributed to the harm of my cousin and countless other innocent people.
Haunted green eyes and indigo hair flashed through my mind, and I found myself contemplating what other horror we could put Gregor through before we allowed him to die.
The door to the interrogation room opened behind me, and my mother entered just as I told Ivan, “Go find me the fishhooks. The barbed ones.” Ivan grinned as he used his tongue to play with his snake bite piercings.
“I like the way you think, sobrat,” Ivan crowed and left to find the hooks.
“Be careful, boyo,” my mother said from the periphery of the plastic sheeting. I tilted my head her way and leaned against the wall, crossing my blood-streaked forearms.
“Careful of what, Ma?”
She looked about the space, her hazel eyes assessing the scene before her with a detached, clinical gaze before turning on me, where they softened.
“The bloodlust, son. You inherited it from my side of the family, I fear, and I don’t want you to be corrupted by it.
” Her words lit a fire in my gut, resentment bubbling there at her implied comparison.
“I’m nothing like him,” I hissed. “I don’t hurt innocent people. I don’t get off on the pain and suffering of others, and I certainly would never sexually assault someone.”
My mother raised her hands, pushing away from herself.
“Calm down. I know you’re not like Roark, ye ijit.
I simply mean that it’s easy, when we’re righteously angry and feeling vengeful, to get lost in the violence.
Gregor deserves to suffer for the sins we know of and all those he left buried, but don’t forget what differentiates you from men like my brother.
If violence is necessary, it should serve a purpose or else you’ll become the very thing you seek to destroy.
Someone who hurts people just because they can, because it makes them feel good.
What purpose does this serve now?” she asked, gesturing to the quivering lump of broken man tied to a table.
I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw in irritation for a few moments before forcing my body to relax and my eyes to open.
My mother was right. We’d stopped torturing Gregor for information days ago, and now I was taking my rage and frustration out on a convenient target.
I rolled my shoulders and popped my neck, and gave my mom a reluctant nod of understanding.
We’d had our fun, now it was time to get back to work and find a way to rid the world of my uncle and the corruption of The Consortium.
Ivan came sauntering into the room just in time to hear the muffled pop of the silencer on my gun as a bullet blew the back of Gregor’s skull onto the wall behind him.
Ivan’s jaw dropped. “Goddamnit, Riordan! I had to search two fucking shelves to find those hooks.” He chucked the bag at me in a snit.
It bounced off my shoulder and landed in a pile of Gregor.
My mother popped Ivan upside the back of his head, in that humbling way only mothers seem to possess.
“Ivan Antonovich Federov!” she snapped, causing me to turn away to hide my snide grin. “Such language, is that how you speak before the wife of your pakhan?”
Ivan looked sheepish. “I apologize, Mrs. Petrova. I forgot you were standing there.”
“What every woman longs to hear, how forgettable she is,” my mother said sardonically. She made a gesture with her hand, waving Ivan’s comment aside. “There was a reason I came down here. Your father has been speaking with Duke Abbott, and it seems there’s been a development.”
“Let me grab a shower, and I’ll be right up,” I tell my mother, who nodded and left Ivan and me with what remained of Gregor.
Ivan called our cleanup crew to deal with the mess and fist-bumped me before he left to clean up. I stayed, gaze fixed on Gregor’s corpse, and wished that it was Roark’s instead.
For far too long, our alliance with the Irish mob had continued, the lack of proof of their involvement in Tatiana’s disappearance and mutually beneficial business keeping a bond afloat that I was fully prepared to sever.
Out of respect, I’d give my cousin a turn with him first, but before Roark Callahan drew his last breath, I’d make sure he understood that fucking with the Petrov family was the worst mistake he ever made.