Chapter Forty-Seven
Reaper
The room we’re in smells like a mix of ammonia, urine, and week-old fish.
My eyes water. My lungs burn. My body aches, screams, bleeds from the barely patched hole in my shoulder.
Tank shifts, the muscles in his shoulders straining as he tries to find a more comfortable position, which isn’t the easiest thing to do when your hands are cuffed behind your back, and those cuffs are linked by chain to an overhead bar that keeps you hanging just a bit above the ground, putting all the weight on parts of your body that sure as fuck aren’t meant to take that weight for long.
He plants a toe, lifts himself up, and releases a small sigh of relief.
That he’d let out such a clear admission of pain — or the absence of pain — sends a shock of worry through my gut.
“This isn’t how I imagined I’d be spending my last day.”
“Me neither.”
I don’t shift. But I’m not hanging, just chained to the floor like a disobedient dog.
My wound throbs, hot. It’s infected, or soon will be.
The pain burns my shoulders, my spine, my neck, but I let it; I’ve felt plenty worse — done much worse to myself — and I want this pain.
Deserve this pain. Relish this pain. Because I earned it.
And at least while I’m alive for however long it is, I can live knowing that at least I helped save one person from my mistakes, and that somewhere out there, Adriana is still alive.
I’ll be dead, but she’s alive. She’ll have a chance for a full life; to build a family, to catch criminals, to find peace, whatever it is her heart desires. I want that for her.
That thought makes me smile.
“Bianca ain’t going to be too happy with me for dying,” he says.
“I imagine she won’t.”
“Was planning on taking her on vacation.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. She doesn’t know about it yet. It was going to be a surprise.”
“That’s nice. Where are you taking her?”
“Maine.”
“Maine? Why Maine?”
“I was looking over her shoulder one day while she was just sitting on the couch scrolling through her phone after a really hard day. She was dog-tired, in a sore mood, and didn’t see me watching her at first. Noticed she was looking at some pictures of lighthouses, and she had this smile on her face, like they were sending her somewhere happy.
Fuck, that smile just did something to me.
Few of the lighthouses she was looking at were pretty notable, so I noted them, looked them up and found out they were in Maine.
Booked us a cabin out there by the ocean, and I’m going to take her to up and down the coast to these little towns to see all these lighthouses. ”
“Sounds nice.”
“Hope she’ll like it. Of course, it’ll be a solo trip for her, considering I’ll be dead. Hope the damn lighthouses will make her happy while she’s mourning my death.”
“I’m sure she’ll love them.”
“I’ll miss her. Won’t miss the idea of going through a bunch of small towns, though. Small-town people are friendly and chatty and want to put their noses in your business and care about things like what your name is, where you’re from, and if you’re having a nice day.”
“Those fucking bastards.”
“Fuck them. Silence is a lost art.”
The door to our concrete, fish-and-ammonia-and-urine-stinking hellhole opens, and the older man who led the group of Russians who took us prisoner enters. He’s smiling. I’ll bet the stench in here reminds him of home. Tank and I go quiet.
“Mr. Volkov is so happy to finally have you here, DeMarco.”
The man’s voice drips over me like engine sludge, and his smile droops and hangs from the edges of his sunken, sallow face.
“I didn’t realize the debt I owed Volkov was worth all this,” I say.
“After a while, it wasn’t about the money. At some point, the expense — the lives, the effort, the time — meant that he, no, we, were required to bring you in.”
“Is this a fucking honor thing?” Tank says.
“And opportunity,” says the sludge-voiced man with the face of a microwaved zombie.
“Your cavorting with those fucking Triads provided us with more than enough reason to put into motion something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
This debt of yours, Reaper, and the way you’ve handled it… it’s been a fucking gift.”
“Merry fucking Christmas, Boris.”
He blinks. “How did you know my name?”
“It’s a gift that I have.”
Boris blinks his beady eyes, smiles, then takes a knife from the pocket of his jacket. The steel shines almost silver in the dim light of our piss-soaked tomb. He advances, kneels in front of me. His breath makes the room smell like a florist’s shop.
“Ruslan said that I get fifteen minutes with you before he wants to talk to you. Do you know what I can do with these fifteen minutes?”
“Give me a really lackluster handjob?” I say.
Tank snorts. “Or deliver a monologue that’d make me want to talk to one of those ‘Save the Children’ people on the street-corner rather than listen to another fucking second of your bitching?”
Boris's face darkens, the knife twitching in his grip. "You think this is funny?"
"I think you're taking way too long to get to the point," I say. "Either start cutting or start talking, but quit wasting my time with the dramatic buildup. We both know how this ends."
He presses the blade against my cheek, just hard enough to dimple the skin without breaking it. The steel is cold, sharper than it has any right to be. "You killed three of my men."
"Only three? Fuck, you must be senile because it was way more than three."
The knife bites deeper, drawing a thin line of blood that runs warm down my jaw. Boris leans closer, his microwaved-diaper breath making my stomach churn. "Those men had families. Children."
"So did the people you've been terrorizing for years."
"This isn't about justice, DeMarco. This is about respect. About showing the entire fucking city what happens when you cross the Bratva."
I meet his eyes, see the hunger there. He wants me to beg, to break, to give him something he can savor. Instead, I smile. "Then get on with it, Boris. Clock's ticking."
He draws back, studies my face as if he's reading sheet music. Or at least, he would be reading my face if the old bitch were wearing his glasses. Then he stands, walks over to Tank, whose breathing has gone shallow and controlled. "Maybe I’ll start with your friend here. Maybe I’ll make you watch. "
"Leave him out of this. You know I’m the one you want to stick your thing in."
"Ah, there it is." Boris's smile spreads wider. "Ricky DeMarco cares about something after all."
Tank's voice cuts through the stench and tension. "Don't give this piece of shit the satisfaction, Ricky. He's gonna do whatever he's gonna do, anyway."
Boris backhands Tank across the face, the sound echoing off the concrete walls. Tank spits blood, looks Boris dead in the eye, and grins. “Is that all you got, grandpa? My woman hits harder than that. Fuck, one punch from her and you’ll be pissing your fucking Depends."
I can't let Boris focus on Tank any longer. Time to redirect his attention where it belongs.
"Hey, Boris," I call out, my voice carrying that edge that's gotten me into trouble more times than I can count.
"You sure you know how to use that knife, or is it just for show?
Because from where I'm sitting, you look like the kind of guy who'd cut himself trying to open a fucking packet of dried prunes. "
Boris freezes mid-swing, his head turning toward me with predatory slowness. The knife gleams as he straightens, and I see exactly what I wanted — his full attention locked on me instead of Tank.
"You want to play, DeMarco?" He moves back to me, kneeling again, the blade dancing between his fingers like he's done this dance a thousand times before. "I was going to make this quick for you."
"Please spare me the fucking lies. There’s no way an old limp-dick like you could even go fast.”
The first cut comes without warning — a precise slice along my collarbone that parts the fabric of my shirt and the skin beneath like they're made of paper; the pain is immediate and sharp, but I've been craving pain for so long that it feels almost like a homecoming.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, taste copper, but don't give him the satisfaction of a sound.
Boris studies my face, looking for cracks in my composure. When he doesn't find any, he makes another cut, this one tracing the curve of my ribs. The blade moves with surgical precision; he knows exactly how deep to go, how to maximize pain without hitting anything vital. Not yet.
I think of Adriana somewhere out there, breathing, living, free.
The thought gives me strength even as Boris finds another spot to explore with his knife — the tender skin just above my hip bone.
He's an artist with that blade, I'll give him that.
Knows exactly how to cut to maximize pain without hitting anything vital.
The cuts burn and throb, but I hold on to that image of Adriana. Safe. Alive. Away from all this blood and madness.
I manage a smile.
Boris frowns.
He shifts position, and I see him studying my hands, my fingers. That's when my stomach drops, because I know what's coming next. The knife moves to my left hand, positioned just above the knuckle of my pinky finger.
"Let's see how quiet you stay when I start taking pieces."
The blade slides between skin and nail bed, and the pain explodes through my nervous system like liquid fire. This time I can't hold back — a sound escapes me, somewhere between a grunt and a growl, but I clamp my teeth down hard enough that I taste blood.
Boris grins wider. "There we go."
But he's not done. The knife moves to the webbing between my fingers, and he cuts with methodical precision, creating a network of shallow wounds that scream with every heartbeat. My vision blurs at the edges, but I force myself to stay present, to stay conscious.
The blade goes further up into the flesh of my hand.
Then he twists it.
And I howl.
It’s then the door to this piss-stained tomb that reeks of fish, ammonia, and the old man’s rotten breath flies open and a man — so tall, gangling, gaunt, with a face like a skeleton wearing a too-tight mask of withered flesh — enters.
He’s wearing a finely tailored suit that must’ve cost a fortune to get tailored to fit his unnatural frame.
His eyes meet mine, and all I can see in the cone of pain that consumes my vision is his inhuman smile.
The blade stops. Withdraws. And Boris takes a step back and inclines his head at Ruslan Volkov, who still has not taken his eyes off me.
His mouth opens, and a voice like the echo of a dying man’s whisper comes forth.
“Ricky DeMarco, how I have waited for this moment. The pain I have gone through just to get you here in this room with me has been nothing short of extraordinary. And yet, that pales in comparison to what I am going to do to you.”