Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
Maxim
I tossed my keys to Gleb on my way into work that evening. He was one of few I trusted with my Mercedes, a car man like myself.
“Good evening, boss,” he stated in Russian. I wasn’t fluent, but I knew phrases. In any sense, Gleb spoke zero English so we had to communicate in some way since he did a lot of the menial tasks around here.
I didn’t always get a say when it came to my men, but Gleb was a good worker so I didn’t have any complaints. I nodded at him before taking the back door down into the basement. There was an actual funeral at Peters & Burg going on upstairs today, and I didn’t want to disrupt it. Things like that commanded respect.
“ Boss ,” Val, my head of security amongst other things, signed when I got downstairs. She had a clipboard in her hand. She signed around the clipboard. “ Nice night. ”
“ Is it ?” I signed back to her, and when her head cocked, I looked away so I wouldn’t see her hands. I didn’t need her sympathy.
She knew what today was.
Eventually, I had to turn around, and her clipboard was gone.
“ How was Lettie’s flight ?” she signed, and I let her know what my daughter said when she checked in with me a few hours ago. Lettie had texted she made it to New York just fine. She arrived without a scrape.
That didn’t mean I wouldn’t miss her.
Needing to work, I intended to get into it, but Val, short for Valerie, was there with her prodding.
“ You know her leaving wouldn’t have been so bad if you had a social life, Boss, ” she signed. She was one of the few people who could get away with saying such things to me. She escaped my blade when we initially met, and it took several men to find her when she did. I’d been assigned to kill her.
And now, she was the closest thing I had to a friend.
I didn’t do friends—dumb—and I especially didn’t do relationships. The only reason Val found herself in any semblance of the former when it came to my life was because she’d escaped my knife. That was no easy feat back when I was doing that kind of work, and I respected her for it. I’d gone to the pakhan about her after, asking for her life and if she could work for me. The Brotherhood could use someone like her, and our pakhan agreed with me back then.
As it turned out, Val did too. The man she’d worked for previously had sliced her throat in anger one day. He also cut out her tongue, silencing her for the rest of her life. At least when it came to her audible voice.
There was no silencing Val. She was quick to speak her mind, especially to me.
“ I didn’t ask for your opinion, ” I signed back. I stripped off my coat. “ Anyway, I fuck. I don’t do relationships. ”
Something she knew about too, since that was her MO when it came to women as well. I told her that, and she smirked.
Val laughed. “ I didn’t ask for your opinion, Boss .”
With the two of us in agreement about that, I nodded, and she followed me deeper into the basement. The place was deliberately sterile, which was the way I liked it. I needed it clean so I could concentrate, and it was to the point where it’d probably make most people sick.
I didn’t give a fuck, knowing my own triggers. I got off on the sight of blood and even worse on the smell. It heated my own blood and triggered the killer inside.
My animal.
I called it my vice, my demon. It could control me, but I didn’t give it control. I didn’t give anyone that.
“It’s a brother today.”
Val’s hands were moving when I turned around, and I saw her frown. The frown deepened. “Might be hard.”
I wished I could tell her it was hard for me to kill, but it wasn’t. Sure, there was some disappointment when it was supposed to be someone loyal to the Brotherhood, but that only egged on the killer inside me. I didn’t do well with betrayal.
I nodded twice, then found my way to the two-way mirror. I had to pass it in order to get into the interrogation room, but stopped immediately upon seeing who was already bleeding and sweating behind it.
He’d even pissed himself. A yellow puddle pooled around his feet on my stark white floor, but I was more unsettled by the man in the chair.
Ilya…
Blinking away, I faced Val. “ What did he do ?”
I signed normally: not rushed, nor fazed. Val was a killer such as myself. She knew tension.
She knew when something was off but, currently, she was distracted by the earpiece cuffed on her ear. She communicated with the rest of the staff from far away by using clicks or sometimes by playing text-to-speech from her phone. She let go of her ear. “ You know Natan. Never says ,” she stated, referencing our boss. Natan was pakhan of the Bratva here in Chicago. “ Must have been something bad. ”
Ilya hadn’t even come to me clean. He was already beaten, bloody. I worked in a certain way, and Natan knew that. I didn’t like my work messed with before I got it.
I moved my hands. “ What does he want from him? ”
Meaning, what information did Natan want. I wasn’t a hitman. We had underlings for shit like that. No, the work I did was different and only on high profile targets. It was an art really, torture.
I was the one that the head of the Bratva went to in order to get information from our enemies. I didn’t do bitch shit and hadn’t since I was in my twenties.
I earned that right.
“He doesn’t want anything,” Val admitted. Dampening her lips, she faced Ilya. “He just wants him to suffer.”
Suffering I could do. I was good at it. Great at it.
I nodded, again not fazed, and the moment Ilya spotted me he pissed himself again. The room also reeked of vomit and the stench burned through my lungs. I was highly sensitive to any type of smells and tastes.
I fought from gagging in the pungent room. The moment I was in Ilya’s presence, the fear emanated off him, his eyes wide.
He quivered down to his piss-soaked feet. Ilya had the look of a man who was seeing the Grim Reaper in physical form…
His executioner.
I went by many names in the Bratva, and that one was the most common. When men or women came to me, they didn’t enter back into society.
There was never anything left to go back.
Ilya knew this. We have both been in the Brotherhood for many years. Though we’d seen each other few and far between them. In actuality, I hadn’t seen him since I was a young man.
That had been on purpose.
I think it’d been on both our accounts. We’d had to do a job and, after, neither one of us made a point to see each other again. It wasn’t necessary.
I headed to my tools. Ilya’s moment of shock and awe had passed. He was screaming now, testing the limits of the soundproof room. We were deep underground where no screams could be heard.
Not even to the funeral upstairs.
“No! No! No!” The tears and sweat dripped in thick trails down his face. “Maxim, please no. Natan… Natan made a mistake.”
Our leader made no mistakes.
My tools in order, I headed toward the sink. I scrubbed my hands.
“You have to explain it to him, Maxim. You have to. Brother, please!”
There was no use in pleading here, and my brother knew this. There were no final chances. This place, my house , was where one went to die at the hands of the executioner.
I dried my hands then opened my tools.
“Maxim, I just couldn’t!” he shouted, his voice thick and charged with emotion. “The little boy…”
I turned, approaching. “Little boy?”
Ilya cringed. “I couldn’t, Maxim. I couldn’t.”
My mouth parted, words on my lips. Though, in that moment, I didn’t know what they might be.
They didn’t have a chance to form.
Val entered the room and, though she didn’t often watch me work, she was here now. Her expression was curious, her arms folded, and I could imagine that she’d watched me speak to Ilya from the other side of the two-way mirror.
I never spoke to the people I interrogated on a human level. I tortured for information only and didn’t care to do more. Didn’t see the point.
Val knew no talking needed to be done today. Only work. Her head cocked. She was finding something unusual about this situation, and I knew her well enough to know that.
“Brother,” Ilya started to say, but I lifted a hand.
I faced Val. “ Get Gleb in here and some others. I want this one strung up. ”
Val brought her hands forward. “ Sure thing, Boss. ”
“What are you saying? What is she doing?” Ilya pleaded, but Val was quick. She had men outside the door, then in the room within seconds. Gleb was amongst them. I stood back as they bound Ilya by the wrists, then hung him by them from the ceiling.
Ilya screamed. “Maxim?—”
“We have to make it hurt, brother. I’m sorry.” And I was, truly. I didn’t know what he’d done, but it was always disappointing when this happened to one of our own.
I ignored Ilya’s continued pleas while I had someone secure some bats. They were baseball bats with spikes, nails. It wasn’t often I had my men do something so barbaric. Actually, this particular form of torture was one I hadn’t done before.
I had to make a statement.
Many eyes were in here tonight, and I was fully aware of that. That was a big reason I wanted so many in here. They had to witness that I had made this hurt for Ilya before his ultimate death. Natan had to know his orders were being carried out.
One set of those sets of eyes were Val’s. She’d watched as the brothers strung Ilya up like a caught fish and didn’t turn away when I commanded them to swing to their heart’s content. Natan said the punishment needed to hurt.
And so it would.