Chapter Thirty-Nine
Livia
My confusion is only overridden by a fury so profound that I want to break through the glass and kill Yenin with my own hands. Hatred surges up in me and consumes every part of my being.
“You bitch, fucking cunt, you think you’re going to get away with this? Call your fucking bears off me, or you won’t live to see another day, you fucking bear whore. Do you know who I am? I fucking rule the world—” Yenin screams at me, spit flying from his mouth, his eyes bulging with indignation and fear. I hear him clearly despite the glass partition separating us.
He has more to say, but he’s cut off when Mason puts a hand on his shoulder, and suddenly Yenin is doubled over in pain, and I can hear his tears and snot drip onto his pants.
I only notice a long steel table on their side of the room when Deacon moves toward it. My gaze flickers over the contents lined up along the table”s length. I see stun belts, stun guns, spiked batons and floggers, knives and throwing stars, hooks, nails, whips, and bottles with skulls containing, I don’t know what. There are so many other things I can’t name, like the array of apparatuses that look frighteningly medieval. Torture devices, I’m looking at torture devices.
“What do you want us to do to him first, Livia?” Deacon says.
My breath falters as I stare at him. And finally, I connect the dots. A part of me is stunned and speechless by Deacon’s, Callen’s, and Mason’s actions. I can’t explain it because it hovers at the edge of my thoughts, whereas the rest of me is consumed only with Faith and what happened to her.
Yet they brought this man to me. And they’re asking me what should happen to him first after directing my attention to a table of torture devices.
I look at Kirill Yenin. I see him as filth, the worst kind of human being on earth.
I want him to die. No. I want him to suffer.
I lift my attention to the three men who know every part of my body, and then I turn my head and peruse the table of torture instruments once more. It doesn’t take me long to see that accompanying the standard devices is a gun that looks eerily similar to the one Yenin used. A cane that looks familiar as well.
“Punch him in the face,” I say, my voice frosted. The instant my command is given, Callen wraps his hand around the bundle of jewelry around Yenin’s neck and plants his fist straight into his face.
“Again. Again. Again.”
I relish the sound of Yenin’s cries as his face gets bloodier and bloodier.
“Punch his stomach.” Mason follows my command. I tilt my head, and I think of my cousin and everything he did to her. “Again,” I say. Yenin is on his knees now, begging them to stop like the coward he is. Faith never begged him. She had more pride than he would ever have.
Mason lifts him by his hair and punches him so hard in the stomach that blood spurts from his mouth, and then he drops him to the ground, the same way Yenin dropped Faith.
“Cut his clothes off.”
I watch with indifference as they cut off his clothes, deliberately slicing into his skin the same way he did with Faith.
He’s crying uncontrollably now. Begging me for forgiveness. Naked, they allow him to crawl to the glass, to me. He’s pleading with me, his hands leaving bloody handprints on the glass.
I look down at him without an ounce of pity. For a moment, I wonder who I’ve become. Is this me?
“Gun,” I say. I watch as Yenin gets dragged back away from the glass, and while Mason keeps a knee to the middle of his back, Callen breaks his fingers, and Deacon shoves the gun up into the only hole he has.
It doesn’t end there for him. And I watch every single bit of it.
His screams will never replace the dead look in Faith’s eyes when I caught her looking at the camera.
When it’s all over, and Yenin is nothing but a lifeless heap of human waste, my gaze drifts over to the men who did that for me.
For the first time, I start to tremble. I want to go to them. I want them to hold me. But I can’t because Faith was upstairs, fighting for her life, no matter what Doctor Sandland promised me.
I turn away from them, and the instant I walk out of the door, Veronica is there. She takes me back to Faith.
I’m unsure how to tabulate my feelings. I thought I wouldn’t have the stomach to watch a man being gruesomely tortured—a hundred times worse than everything he did to Faith.
I heard his bones crack one by one. And his screams still ring indifferently in my head when they do to him what he did to Faith with his gun and a cane. I didn’t even flinch when they sheared off his pubic hair and deliberately snipped his penis.
I didn’t look away when his body was bent like a contortionist when they made him drink bleach. That was for what he did to Faith when he urinated on the wounds he gave her. I made sure to put it into my memory how he begged for his life. How sorry he was. And then I felt an unbelievable calm sail over me when I nodded surreptitiously to Deacon’s silent question to end his life, then watched his Deacon break Yenin’s neck. His dead body hit the floor with a satisfying thud.
Of all the different sides of me that they’d brought out of me, this side—this emotionless, stoic woman who can look death in the face—I don’t know if she’s the real me. I think she is. I think she was born the day I found my mom, with her skull crushed lying in between her flowerbeds.
But I’ve been away from Faith for too long and I can’t get to her fast enough now.
When I get to her, I don’t leave her again, not for a moment. I don’t think about what happened in that glass room with Deacon, Callen, and Mason. And Kirill Yenin.
Faith is my only priority right now.
Veronica brings me a fresh set of clothes. Another pair of track pants, a hoodie, and underwear. I allow myself ten minutes to take a shower in the bathroom that’s on the same floor as Faith. Veronica also makes me eat, but this time, I barely look at the sandwich.
“They want to know that you’ve eaten, darling girl. Can you do that for them?”
I glance at the older woman as if she said some magic word that snapped me out of my hypnosis. They have no right over me anymore.
“Livia,” Veronica says, her tone serious and stern. “You must know how much they love you. They may not be the kind of men who can say it in those three little generic words, but if you ask them to, they will burn the world down for you. They already did.”
I frown. There’s something there on the edge of my mind that’s been bothering me, and I couldn’t place it before.
Oh, my god.
I pull out my phone and read Demi’s message to me. Kirill Yenin had a no-harm protection order in his name. Without the majority share of votes on the Global Underground Six, they’ll be ousted.
They burned down their world for me.