Chapter 15 #2
"Your sister's still alive, yes? In Moscow?" I let the words hang between us like a blade. "After I send her your head, I'll visit her. And I will make her balance your scale. Because nothing I do to you now, will ever be enough to erase the sin of touching her."
I nod my head at Scarletta, cowering in fear and covered in blood in the dirt.
Volk lunges, and the world slows to crystalline clarity.
His knife hand arcs toward my throat—standard prison-yard slash, predictable and desperate.
I pivot left, letting the blade whisper past my carotid by less than an inch, and my right hand closes around his wrist like a vise.
The joint doesn't break cleanly. I feel the tendons stretch, the ligaments tear, the small bones grinding against each other as I twist. The sound is wet, organic, deeply satisfying.
The knife drops into the mud.
Volk screams.
I'm hard.
Rock fucking hard.
My cock swinging heavy between my thighs as I drive my knee into his solar plexus. The air leaves his lungs in a whoosh and he doubles over, and I bring my elbow down on the back of his skull with enough force to split skin.
Blood.
His blood this time.
It sprays across my chest, hot and copper-bright, and my erection throbs in response.
This is what I am.
This is what I've always been.
The mask of civilization, the suits, and board meetings, and calculated charm—all of it falls away when I'm doing what I was born to do.
Volk tries to rally. Credit where it's due—the man survived for thirty years in the trafficking underworld, eliminated witnesses, evaded every law enforcement agency on three continents. He knows how to fight dirty.
His thumb goes for my eye socket.
I catch his hand and break two fingers, the bones snapping like dry twigs. Then I break two more. His screams echo off the bamboo walls, beautiful and raw, and Scarletta is sobbing somewhere behind me but I can't focus on that right now.
Can't focus on anything but this.
I drag Volk to the center platform, to the eye bolts I installed for restraining Scarletta. The irony isn't lost on me.
My cock bobs against my thigh with every step, flushed and leaking, and I don't care.
Don't care that she's watching.
Don't care about the helicopter getting closer.
Don't care about anything except making this last.
"You thought the children would forget?" I hiss in his ear as I force him face-down onto the platform.
I secure his wrists to the bolts with the leather cuffs meant for my little writer. They're too tight, but it doesn't matter. He's not going to need circulating blood for much longer.
The hunting knife lies in the mud where he dropped it. I retrieve it, test the edge against my thumb. Sharp enough. Barely.
A dull knife will hurt more.
I start with his Achilles tendons. The blade saws through the first one with a wet, gristly resistance, and Volk's scream tears through the jungle, scattering birds from the canopy above. His legs spasm uselessly, feet flopping at wrong angles, and my cock twitches in response.
The second tendon takes longer. I go slower deliberately, feeling every fiber part beneath the blade, watching his body arch against the restraints in agony.
"Five hundred and fifty-three children." I tell him, still in Russian, as I move to kneel beside his prone body. "That's how many we confirmed. How many were there really, Dimitri?"
He's crying now. Sobbing in Russian, begging in Russian, promising money, connections, information. The usual currency of the desperate.
I don't want any of it.
I want his suffering.
The knife traces down his spine, not cutting, just promising. His back muscles clench and release, clench and release. I'm so hard it hurts, pre-come dripping onto the platform beside his hip, and the sight of it makes me groan.
"I'm going to cut out your heart. But not yet."
I begin with his fingers. The ones that signed trafficking orders. The ones that touched children. I take them off at the first knuckle—index, middle, ring, pinky—and his screams blend into one continuous howl of agony.
Somewhere distant, a woman is crying. Scarletta. I should check on her. I should comfort her. I should be the protector she needs.
But the knife is in my hand, and Volk's blood is warm on my skin, and my cock is so fucking hard I can barely think.
I move to his other hand.
Thumb first this time. The bone crunches under the dull blade, requires sawing, requires effort, and Volk's voice breaks into something beyond screaming—a high, thin keen that sounds almost inhuman.
Beautiful.
More fingers fall. The severed digits scattered across the platform like obscene confetti. Blood pools beneath him, black in the jungle shadows, and I stroke myself once, twice, unable to resist.
The helicopter noise has faded. Or maybe I've stopped hearing it. The world has narrowed to this platform, this body, this righteous act of destruction.
"Time for castration."
I release the wrist restraints and roll him onto his back. His face is gray, shock setting in, but his eyes are still aware. Still terrified.
Good. I want him conscious for this part.
His cock is shriveled, his balls contracted. Fear has made them small.
The blade presses against the base of his scrotum.
"Пожалуйста." Please.
I cut.
The sound he makes isn't human. It's something primal, something that comes from the deepest part of the brainstem where language doesn't exist. His body convulses so violently the blood fountains from his groin, arterial spray painting my chest and stomach crimson.
My hand finds my cock again. I'm stroking in earnest now, slicked with his blood, and it's wrong, so fucking wrong, but I can't stop.
Don't want to stop.
This is who I am.
His screaming has dissolved into wet gurgling. I've nicked the femoral artery—he'll bleed out within minutes if I don't cauterize. I could save him. Prolong this.
I choose not to.
Instead, I watch his eyes dim as I jerk myself faster, harder, my balls drawing tight against my body. His mouth moves soundlessly. Prayers, maybe. Curses. It doesn't matter.
His last breath rattles out just as my orgasm hits—a violent, full-body shudder that tears a groan from my throat. I come across his chest, across the ruin I've made of him, rope after rope of come mixing with his cooling blood.
The release empties me.
I kneel there, panting, my softening cock still in my blood-slicked hand, staring at what I've created.
Justice.
This is justice.
The jungle gradually reasserts itself. Bird calls. Insect hum. The distant thrum of a helicopter that seems to be circling rather than landing.
And behind me, barely audible over the ambient noise—
Crying.