Anatomy of Ruin (Anatomy After Dark #1)

CHAPTER 1

ANDREI P.O.V.

The silence in here is almost respectable.

It’s the kind of heavy, dead quiet you only get in places that the rest of the world has completely forgotten about, the kind of hollow void that swallows sound before it even hits the walls.

I stand in the exact center of the derelict kill floor of this abandoned meatpacking plant, my twelve-thousand-dollar bespoke charcoal suit absorbing the dim, flickering yellow light of a single overhead bulb swaying on a frayed wire.

I am perfectly still. A monument of dark elegance planted right in the middle of decaying rusted overhead tracks, crumbling brick, and the stench of fifty-year-old animal fat.

In front of me, Vasily whimpers. The sound is pathetic, a wet, reedy little noise that gets muffled by the vast emptiness of the space, but it still grates on my nerves like nails on a chalkboard.

I slowly rotate the heavy gold signet ring on my right pinky finger, dragging the pad of my thumb over the engraved crest, checking the metal for any microscopic dust that might have settled there since I stepped out of the car. There is none.

"Stop making that sound, Vasily," I say, my voice totally flat, not a shred of elevation in the pitch. "It's beneath a man of your former standing."

He doesn't stop. He just keeps making that wet, choking noise in the back of his throat. I take a slow, measured breath through my nose, my lungs instantly burning as the frost-tipped air hits the tissue. I catalog the plant’s decay with a clinical eye.

The peeling lead paint curling off the walls like dead skin.

The way the industrial grease on the meat hooks hanging from the ceiling has congealed over the decades, turning into a thick, black sludge that looks like dried tar.

I find it all completely, predictably tedious.

I'm standing in a monument to slaughter, looking for some kind of spark in my chest—anger, disgust, the thrill of the hunt, anything at all—and there is just a flat, grey, endless fucking boredom.

I don't even remember exactly why we dragged him out here.

Was he skimming off the shipping routes or snitching to the feds?

It doesn't matter. The result is exactly the same, and the result is me wasting my fucking evening in a freezer.

I pull my shoulders back, feeling the slight, satisfying resistance of the silk lining inside my jacket. I adjust my posture just a fraction of an inch to ensure the drape remains perfect over my chest.

"This place was built for slaughter," I tell him, watching his knees shake against the concrete. "At least it's honest."

Vasily looks up at me with bloodshot, terrified eyes, his mouth opening and closing like a dying fish on a dock. The cold is radiating up through the soles of my shoes.

"Forty-two degrees," I observe, the words hanging in the air like ghostly ribbons of steam. "Efficient for preservation, miserable for a conversation."

I finally lower my gaze fully to take him in.

The man is an absolute ruin. Snot is streaked down his upper lip, his face is a bruised, swollen mess, and the expensive silk blend shirt he’s wearing has been violently torn at the collar.

I don't look at him with hatred. Hating him would require energy.

I look at him with the exact same level of interest I might show a cracked piece of sidewalk that I need to step over so I don't scuff my shoes.

The more he vibrates with frantic, primitive terror, the more I become an unmovable object. He is chaos. I am order.

I step forward, closing the distance between us. He flinches violently, squeezing his eyes shut like he expects a kick to the teeth, but I just reach out and calmly flick a piece of invisible lint off his left shoulder before stepping back entirely out of his reach.

"You’re sweating through your shirt, Vasily," I note, shaking my head a fraction. "It’s an expensive blend. Shame."

He lets out a ragged sob, his chest heaving. "Andrei, please—"

"Look at me," I interrupt, the command slicing through his panic like a scalpel. "Not at the floor."

His jaw trembles, his teeth chattering so hard I can hear them clicking together over the high-pitched whine of a nearby power transformer.

A single tear carves a clean, pathetic path through the grime on his cheek.

It’s disgusting. He begins to babble. It’s a desperate, incoherent flood of Russian and English, a verbal diarrhea of pure desperation.

He’s begging for his children’s sake, promising he’ll take his family and disappear to a village in Siberia, offering names of other traitors in the organization, swearing blind loyalty to the Bratva until the day he dies.

I don't listen to a single fucking word of it.

I listen to the cadence of the begging. It's the same rhythm every single time. It's a formula.

I lift my hands and check my cuticles in the dim light, finding them perfectly manicured and satisfactory.

"Suka, be quiet," I say, dropping my hands back to my sides. "Your voice is echoing, and it's giving me a migraine."

He chokes on a sob, his chest hitching. "My girls, Andrei, my little girls, they don't know anything, they need me—"

"Do you think you’re the first to mention your children?" I ask him, genuinely curious why they all think this is the magic bullet that will suddenly give me a heart. "It’s the third verse in the traitor’s anthem. Get new material."

While he continues to weep on the wet, slapping concrete, my mind fully disengages from the reality of his impending death.

I look down at my left wrist and focus on my cuff.

The stitching on the edge of the French cuff is off by a fraction of a millimeter.

It's barely visible to the naked eye, but I see it.

I feel a genuine, hot surge of annoyance toward my tailor, Mr. Moretti, that completely eclipses anything I've felt toward the traitor bleeding on the floor in front of me.

Moretti is getting sloppy. He's getting old, his eyes are going, and I'm paying him thousands of dollars to dress me like a king, not a fucking street-level thug who buys off the rack.

I adjust the tension of the cuff with my opposite hand, sliding my fingers over the tactile smoothness of the high-thread-count wool, ensuring the gold link is perfectly horizontal.

"I pay Moretti too much for this level of incompetence," I murmur to myself, though the acoustics of the room carry the words to Vasily.

"What? Andrei, please, I'll give you everything!"

"You’re boring me, Vasily," I tell him, my voice devoid of any warmth. "That’s your true sin tonight."

I lift my left wrist with a slow, deliberate grace, pulling back the sleeve of my jacket to stare at the face of my Patek Philippe.

The ticking of the sweeping hand is totally silent, but the weight of the platinum against my skin is grounding.

I can feel the mechanical heart beating inside the casing.

Right now, the movement of that tiny second hand is the only thing in this entire freezing, rotting room that feels actually alive to me.

Time is running out. By checking the watch, the universal signal has been given. Vasily's time is officially up.

I tap the sapphire glass of the watch once with a perfectly manicured fingernail.

"Two minutes past the hour," I announce to the empty room. "I have a dinner reservation at eight."

"No, no, no, wait, wait—"

"I hate being late," I talk over him, not raising my voice but letting the steel in it crush his panic. "It implies a lack of control."

I don't look at Vasily anymore. My eyes shift to the side, cutting through the heavy shadows and the oppressive darkness in the corner of the kill floor to where Yuri Lebedev stands. Yuri is a shadow among shadows. He is leaning casually against a rusted iron pillar, his arms crossed over his chest, a suppressed pistol already gripped loosely in his right hand. He hasn’t moved a muscle in twenty minutes.

He has been standing there, breathing the freezing air, waiting for the cue.

He is a perfectly calibrated killing machine, completely devoid of curiosity or moral hesitation.

Yuri shifts his weight slightly, peeling his back off the pillar. The thick leather of his shoulder holster creaks just once in the absolute silence.

"Yuri. Are you awake?" I ask, my tone conversational.

Yuri looks at me with dull, unimpressed eyes that look like chips of dirty ice. "He's still talking, boss. Do you want the long version or the short one?"

I look at Yuri’s posture. He is relaxed.

He doesn't give a fuck why Vasily is on his knees, and he doesn't give a fuck who gets the territory once Vasily’s brains are mopped off the concrete.

He only cares about the angle of the shot and the backstop behind the target.

To me, Yuri is a well-oiled tool. He is no different than the Patek on my wrist or the engine in my armored Mercedes.

A very expensive, very efficient piece of equipment.

I give a microscopic nod toward Yuri, a gesture so slight an untrained eye would miss it entirely.

"A tool is only as good as its maintenance," I say, my breath pluming in the cold air.

"I'm ready," Yuri grunts, uncrossing his arms.

"Keep it professional, Yuri. No theatrics."

Vasily hears the exchange and completely loses his mind.

He misinterprets my calm demeanor as hesitation.

He scrambles forward on his knees, his bound hands reaching out desperately for the hem of my trousers.

My eyes flash with a sudden, sharp, violent coldness.

I don't move my upper body, but the atmosphere in the room drops another five degrees.

I pull my right foot back exactly one inch.

The leather of my custom sole squeaks sharply on the grit of the concrete floor.