Prologue #6
“Fuck you, Viktor!” I screamed, the name detonating out of me like a gunshot.
I didn’t care that it wasn’t Chapo’s name.
I didn’t care who heard it. I had never called him Dad.
Not since the day he decided Amy was expendable.
Not since he turned her into collateral damage for his empire, his enemies, his sins.
If he were standing in front of me now, I wouldn’t hesitate. I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t warn him.
I would empty an entire magazine into his face and keep pulling the trigger long after it clicked empty.
Tears poured down my cheeks—thick, burning, humiliating.
My body convulsed against the pole as I strained forward, muscles screaming. The zip ties bit deeper into my wrists, slicing skin until warm blood slicked my hands and dripped down my fingers.
I welcomed the pain.
It was the only thing anchoring me to reality.
Somewhere to my left, Elena sobbed—loud, broken, hysterical. I didn’t look at her. If I did, I knew I would lose what little control I had left. I would try to kill her with my bare hands, restraints or no restraints.
Chapo watched it all in silence.
That was the worst part.
He didn’t rush me. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t savor it openly. He simply observed, eyes dark and intent, like a scientist watching a reaction reach its boiling point.
Finally, he spoke.
“Grief,” he said thoughtfully, as if tasting the word. “It strips a man down to his bones. You can tell who someone really is once you take everything else away.”
I lifted my head slowly.
My face was wet. My chest heaved. My vision tunneled until all I could see was him.
“If you think this breaks me,” I rasped, voice shredded, “you don’t understand what you’ve done.”
Chapo smiled.
“Oh,” he replied softly. “I understand perfectly.”
He stepped closer, boots crunching through dried blood on the floor.
“This,” he said, gesturing lazily toward Amy’s ruined body, “is only the beginning.”
And I knew—without doubt—that whatever walked out of this basement, if I walked out at all, would not be the man who had entered it.
Al-Chapo rose from the stool with unhurried grace, as though nothing in this room demanded urgency—not the blood soaking the floor, not the corpse bound upright in a chair, not the broken man chained to a pole in front of him.
He approached slowly, leather soles whispering against concrete. His hands were clasped behind his back, posture relaxed, almost courtly.
He stopped inches from me, close enough that I could smell tobacco and something faintly sweet beneath it—expensive cologne, utterly out of place in a basement of death.
He studied my face the way a butcher studies meat. Not with hunger. With calculation.
“I see potential in you, son,” he said softly, almost kindly. His voice had dropped, intimate now, meant only for me. “Raw. Unpolished. But strong. Strength like yours is rare. Wasted, usually, by men who think loyalty is owed to flags and promises.”
He circled me once, slow and deliberate, like a predator deciding where to bite.
“I will train you,” he continued. “Strip away what is weak. Forge you into something legendary.” He gestured vaguely at the room—the guards, the weapons, the machinery of terror humming just beyond the walls. “All of this can be yours one day. My empire does not die with me. It evolves.”
He stopped in front of me again, eyes locking onto mine.
“The next most wanted man in America,” he said with a faint smile. “It has a certain poetry, no?”
I laughed.
It came out wrong—hoarse, broken, halfway to a sob. Blood dripped from my split lip, spattering onto the floor between us.
“You think,” I rasped, “I’d ever serve you?”
He leaned closer.
“Technically,” he murmured, “I did not kill your sister.”
The words hit harder than any punch.
“Your colleague did,” he went on calmly. “She made a choice. She chose her grandmother over Amy.” His eyes flicked briefly toward my sister’s body, then back to me. “Choices have consequences. That is a truth you understand very well.”
Something inside me snapped.
I spat—blood and saliva flying from my mouth to splatter against his pristine sandals.
The guards stiffened.
Chapo didn’t even blink.
He looked down at the mess at his feet, then back at me, expression unchanged. If anything, he seemed amused.
Behind him, two guards grabbed Elena by the arms and hauled her upright.
She’d been crumpled on the floor, a shaking wreck, eyes swollen, face smeared with Amy’s blood.
She looked smaller now. Younger. Like a child who had done something unforgivable and didn’t yet understand that there was no undoing it.
“Where are you taking me?” she sobbed, twisting weakly against their grip. “You promised—you said I’d go free! You said—please—please, let me go!”
Her voice cracked completely. She reached out toward me once, fingers trembling, but I turned my head away.
I couldn’t look at her.
The guards dragged her toward the side door. Her cries echoed down the corridor, fading with each step until they dissolved into nothing but memory.
Silence rushed in to fill the space she left behind.
Just me.
The monster.
And my dead sister.
“Just kill me,” I whispered. The words felt scraped raw from my lungs. “You took the only person who mattered. Just end it.”
Chapo regarded me for a long moment.
“No,” he said simply. “Death would be a mercy. And I am not a merciful man.”
As he spoke, memories I had buried deep surged forward, sharp and merciless.
I was ten. Amy was seven.
Summer in Virginia, cicadas screaming in the trees. She’d wiped out on her bike at the end of the gravel drive, skin torn open, blood running down her shin. She tried to be brave, but her lip trembled.
I carried her piggyback all the way home while she laughed through her tears, her arms locked tight around my neck as if letting go might break something fragile between us.
“My knight,” she’d called me, her voice thick with pride.
That night, she fell asleep on my bed, clutching my hand like it was an anchor. In the dark, barely awake, she whispered, “You’ll always protect me, right, Rus?”
And even though I knew she was already drifting, that she couldn’t hear me, I whispered back anyway, “Yes.”
I remembered when I was fifteen and she was twelve, our parents fighting again.
Father shouting about duty, about sacrifice.
Mother crying quietly, like she didn’t want the sound of it to exist.
Amy slipped into my room after midnight without a word and crawled under my covers, cold and shaking.
We stayed awake until dawn, whispering about running away—somewhere warm, somewhere far.
Maybe California. A place where no one would turn us into weapons. I promised the darkness I’d get her out.
I remembered when we shipped out for Greece.
I was twenty-one, and she was nineteen.
Langley—the briefing room smelled of burnt coffee and ambition. I walked in and saw her standing among the new recruits, hair pulled tight, jaw set, trying so hard to look like she belonged.
She spotted me and her face lit up.
“Surprise, big brother!” she’d stage-whispered, throwing her arms around me.
Later, in the armory, she’d held up a flashbang like it was a toy. “When we grab Chapo, I’m gonna yank out one of his gold teeth and sell it on eBay. Limited edition terrorist memorabilia. Retirement fund secured.”
She laughed like we were heading to summer camp.
Amy never worried.
Not once.
Not until the end.
“Ruslan!” Chapo’s voice snapped like a whip. “Fucking listen when I speak.”
I lifted my head slowly.
Every tear was gone. Burned away.
“If you keep me alive,” I said, each word carved from ice and hatred, “I will be the end of you. I swear it on her blood.”
For the first time, Chapo’s smile faltered—just a fraction.
Then it returned, wider than before.
He laughed quietly.
It wasn’t loud or cruel. It was soft, almost amused, like a man indulging a child who didn’t yet understand the rules of the world.
“I don’t think so,” Al-Chapo said, shaking his head. “You mistake hatred for freedom. Hatred is a leash, too.”
He stepped closer again and placed two fingers against my chest—tap, tap—right over my heart. The gesture was almost paternal. Almost gentle. That made it worse.
“First,” he continued calmly, “I will break you. Strip you down until nothing remains but instinct. Until your loyalty belongs to me alone—like a dog that answers only its master’s voice.”
His eyes gleamed with anticipation, not anger. Craftsmanship. Pride.
“Then,” he said, lowering his voice, “I will rebuild you into a legend.”
He turned away from me as if the decision had already been made, as if my fate were no longer worth his direct attention. He addressed his men without raising his voice.
“Every morning,” he said, precise and methodical, “twenty lashes with the electrified cane. Full charge. I want him conscious for every one.”
A guard shifted his weight, already picturing it.
“One loaf of stale bread at dawn. No water until noon. Two small bowls of cold beans at dusk—if he finishes his labor.”
He began to pace slowly as he spoke, enumerating my future like items on a ledger.
“Strip him naked and march him through the back gardens daily. Let the others see him. Let him labor beside the hostages on the cathedral construction—breaking rocks, mixing concrete, hauling stone. Twelve hours minimum. More if he collapses.”
My jaw clenched so hard I thought my teeth might shatter.
“At night,” Chapo went on, “chain him outside on the gravel pit. No blanket. No mattress. Only stones beneath him so sleep never comes easily.”
He stopped pacing.
“Brand the soles of his feet once a week,” he added thoughtfully, “so every step reminds him who owns him.”
Then, almost casually:
“And if he speaks without permission—pull one fingernail.”
The room was silent.
The guards nodded in unison. Not one hesitated.
“Understood, boss.”
Chapo turned back to me one final time. His gaze lingered—not with malice, but curiosity. Like he was wondering how long I would last. How I would break.
Then he walked out.
The metal door clanged shut with a finality that vibrated through my bones.
I was alone.
Alone with the guards.
Alone with the chains biting into my wrists.
Alone with my sister’s body.
Amy still sat slumped in the metal chair across from me, head tilted forward at a wrong angle, hair matted dark with blood. The concrete beneath her was slick now, soaked through. Her blood had begun to pool, creeping outward in slow, uneven fingers.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Each sound landed like a hammer inside my skull.
I stared at her until my vision blurred, until the shape of her became unbearable. My chest seized so hard I couldn’t draw breath. The pain hadn’t even started yet—the lashes, the brands, the cold—but I already knew none of that would compare to this moment.
Because pain could be survived.
This couldn’t.
I threw my head back and screamed.
It ripped out of me—raw, animal, endless. A sound of pure loss, stripped of language or dignity. My throat burned. My lungs spasmed. Still I screamed, until my voice shattered into hoarse, broken gasps and nothing came out anymore.
The guards didn’t move. They didn’t mock me. They just watched.
Eventually, there was only silence.
Only the slow, wet drip of my sister’s blood hitting concrete.
My life was about to become hell.
But hell had already taken everything that mattered.
And somewhere deep beneath the grief—buried so far down it terrified me—I felt something else begin to form.
Not hope.
Not mercy.
Something colder.
Something patient.
Something that would one day crawl out of this pit and come back for its maker.