Chapter 18 - Viktor
The fact that the Yuris get a medical professional in to fix me up just enough doesn't feel like a kindness. Actually, it’s pretty crystal fucking clear that the purpose is to keep me alive and conscious for the express purpose of dragging all of my secrets out of me.
Though I am not privy to a mirror, I suspect I look like a slab of raw meat. I feel more pulp than whole. All the open wounds are caked with sticky, drying blood. I suppose that means they're not fully open yet, still open enough for salt to sting.
That's far from the first, foremost, and only reason I refuse to cry out no matter what they do to me.
Unfortunately, whichever one of them I'm confronted by takes that as a personal challenge.
Motherfucker, I think, my vision is a series of black spots.
I guess I should be grateful my wrists are bound behind my back. At least I’m not falling over. At this point, I’m not sure I could get back up.
“Why did you come after her? What was the fucking point?”
He’s so fucking dramatic. “I didn’t touch your wife. If you weren’t an idiot, you’d be able to fucking see it.”
“You’re fucking lying.”
“I mean, you could ask her father again, except—ah, yep, you killed him, right? Sad.” I tut, shaking my head, mocking.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Iosif Yuri snarls in my face, pinching it to keep my head from lolling. “Why the fuck did you target my wife?”
I’m sure if they weren’t mostly swollen shut, it would feel more useful to roll my eyes. “You’ve said that twice already,” I point out flatly.
Probably not the smartest choice, in hindsight.
The back of his hand whacks the side of my face, the force of it threatening to snap my neck. Nadya won’t be pleased when I tell her that her brother has her backhand beat—not in technique, but certainly in the weight and span of the hand itself.
I spit the blood right in his face. It hits his jaw, splattering there in slaughterhouse-pink. “You hit like a pussy, Yuri,” I sneer.
“Iosif.”
Another brother—Leonid, this time, distinctive as Nadya is from the lineup with his buzzed hair—sounds off from behind him.
It works to keep Iosif’s hand. He neatly, forcefully, steps away from me.
Turning away, as if the very sight of me is a trigger for him.
I’m not gonna lie, that’s its own fucked-up kind of satisfying.
And hey, I’d even consider being grateful for ol’ Leo’s interjection if he hadn’t been the one to rip off two of my fingernails earlier. But alas, despite Iosif flitting in to save me once Nadya clarified I hadn’t been forcing myself on her, they’d made sure to confirm, just for good measure.
I probably shouldn’t take it so personally. I’ve done worse to fuckers over less than my rap sheet of offenses. Unfortunately, my decaying conscience is just fine being a fucking hypocrite. Oops!
It doesn’t change anything about how this was always going to go.
I’ve been stashed in some dank, freezing, nondescript room in some random fucking warehouse, and in a way, I was always going to end up here.
I’ve got no real feelings about being wrong about who’s looking down at me while I’m bound to the chair.
The chair itself, I’d made peace with the highly likely possibility of.
Because my brain isn’t occupied by useless fear, most of its capacity is devoted to maintaining that absence of it. Or, to be accurate, as much of its capacity as I can spare while I am playing my fucking mind worrying about Nadya.
I don't need to possess the ability to read minds.
I see the way these men look at me, and it's not so different from the way I've been eyed all my life.
This genre of distrust, malice, scrutiny, and exhaustion is achingly familiar to me.
A kind of discomfort that embodies the numbness they speak of when they lie and tell you that time heals all wounds.
“You need to take a break, Bratan,” Leonid says, cupping the back of Iosif’s neck and knocking their foreheads together. It isn’t meant to hurt or admonish. This is camaraderie. The Yuri way.
It makes me want to fucking puke.
“Ohh, how sweet. My black fucking heart just melts over all this gooey bullshit,” I drawl.
The brothers whip around simultaneously, their matching grey eyes searing with poisonous hatred. Eyes that match hers, too, the only ones that have a splash of blue to them, as if even Nadya’s eyes couldn't make up their mind about just one color.
“Remind me again why I can't fucking behead him?” Iosif demands.
Dutifully, the other one says, “Because Trif said to stand down.” He slides a glance my way. “For now, at least.”
They knock their heads together and begin muttering harshly. But they drift far enough away that their exchange is no longer audible to me.
Which is just fine. The silence is the perfect prerequisite to the darkness that encroaches and blurs the edges of my consciousness, reeling me toward the sweet black bliss of nothing at all.
***
There’s a cool, wet rag swiping roughly at my battered face. It fucking hurts, enough to make me whine while my guard is down. The sound of it disgusts me. But it’s done now.
“Drink,” a voice commands.
Once I manage to force my eyes open, I see that it’s Trifon Yuri lurking in front of me.
Ah, the would-be patriarch of the Yuri clan.
He reminds me, perhaps unfairly, of Anton.
And not just because both occupy the enviable position of Pakhan.
Both exude a particular commanding self-righteousness that, in my opinion, is extremely fucking punchable.
His lazy blink while he considers me is a prime example of it. I may as well be a fucking worm on the goddamn ground. Yet, as if out of habit, which I suppose is what it is, I remain silent and still beneath his piercing perusal.
An eternity must pass before, softly, he says, “You have made things very hard, Viktor Zakharov.”
Despite the cut-up lip, a sardonic smile stretches my mouth. “I know I have. But it's been fucking fun, hasn't it?”
As swiftly as my smugness had reared its head, the gentle, almost paternal shake of Trifon’s head made it gutter out. “No, you misconstrue me. I meant that you’ve made this hard on yourself. You didn’t have to.”
“I wouldn't presume to know what I have to or don’t have to do if I were you,” I scoff.
His smile is fairly placating. “Ah, but you aren't me, are you? You are the idiot who got caught and is bound to a chair, talking shit, because he is delusional about a disproportionate sense of control that doesn't actually exist. Though I will admit that you've got me curious.”
“Well then,” I taunt, “life goal accomplished.”
“What I'm telling you, Viktor, is that you've got approximately five minutes to convince me why I shouldn't fucking disembowel you, right here and right now. Please, tell me that you are at least fractionally more interesting than a common, petty thief with an uninspired hunger for that which does not belong to you.”
I'm distinctly aware, in the moment the bark of hysterical laughter expels from my bloodied mouth, that this is likely the last nail in my coffin.
Even still, there is no staunching it. I do laugh and laugh and laugh, like a fucking madman, until ribs that I'm positive are significantly cracked reduce me to a wheezing, coughing mess.
I swear, if I had the hands to spare, I'd be wiping these tears of laughter from my face.
The howls of my deranged amusement, on the bright side, have at least reached the superior condemnation of the Yuri leader’s face.
“Man, this is just going to fucking kill you,” I share conversationally.
He doesn't even have to say anything. I can see it in his face, the trepidation that has eclipsed all of his self-assuredness.
Fucking gratifying, I don't even make him ask.
“You see, she does belong to me. I don't know about petty, but I'll admit it—I stole your littlest, sweetest baby sister.
And, to be clear, when I comment on her sweetness, I'm talking about the way she tastes.” Again, a dark, cold laugh escapes.
“And the funniest part about it, though I'm not sure you will be able to appreciate it just yet, is that I didn't even know she was a Yuri when she begged me to fuck her.
I did that, with her enthusiastic consent, because I actually see her and appreciate her for the walking magic trick she is.
I don't know what to tell you... I just had to make her my wife.”
Every drop of color abandons the face of the man in front of me. I'd say it's like I've killed him, for all that he suddenly shares the pallor of Casper the fucking ghost.
Maybe I should have at least questioned whether it’s really just Trifon and me. Probably. I’m not convinced I wouldn’t end up precisely as I do seconds later—with my chair shoved over, taking my busted ass with it when it topples over.
Even my own wince can’t keep my humor at bay.
What’s a man to do? Irony is fucking hilarious when it’s on your side once in a blue moon.
“Bullshit.” Valentin Yuri makes his appearance now. I could get away with resenting the fact that he gets to be a proper second-in-command to his brother. It would probably be a better story. Mostly, he’s just fucking annoying.
“It was actually you who inspired me,” I inform him. “That’s your modus operandi, isn’t it? You want a woman, you take her. You need her under your protection—your name, your banner? Marry her. She’s a Zakharov now.”
I get to see, in real time, what it looks like for them to realize there’s no checkmate here.
I am unafraid, venom coursing like steroids in my blood. I let it infuse my words as I jeer, “There’s a copy of the papers in the office. In the warehouse, you found us. You don’t have to take my word for it.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Trifon exhales, the wind knocked out of him. “I am going to take your head off, and I am going to serve it to your big brother on a platter.”
I snort, and blood trickles down my throat. “Good luck with that. He’s not really my brother, and he won’t care.”
“He’s—what?” Another one of them squeaks.
Jesus, did the fucking Yuris have nothing more to do with themselves than procreate? There are too fucking many of them.
“You must be the youngest brother,” I drawl to the visibly younger-looking version of the tall, light-eyed, and dark-haired brood of Yuri men.
I know his name, but I can’t quite recall it.
I’m fucking tired. Almost too tired, even, to enjoy the way they put their heads together and convene, their distress so goddamn palpable it seems to cook all the molecules of air in the room to a bitter, charred odor.
With a sigh, I let my cheek rest against the ground. I could die this way. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go out.
“You morons aren’t as good at watching me as I am at watching you, huh?” I mock drowsily.
My lethargy finds itself dispersed at the slammed collision of Valentin Yuri’s boot into my fucking guts. Automatically, I gag. I guess it’s a deranged brand of fortune that I’ve already puked out anything that was in my stomach earlier. It had actually been fun watching them clean it up.
The organic tears that now pour down my face at the simple, reflexive fact of physical pain don’t bother me.
“Now, now,” I groan at the screaming protest of my ribs. “That’s no way to treat your new brother-in-law, is it, Val?”
“You won’t be anything at all once I rip you to fucking pieces, you motherfucking rat,” he roars, kicking the chair until I’m flat on my back. My body bucks up on instinct, straining to lessen the weight on my arms. They’re going to fucking break. Shit.
“You can tear me limb from fucking limb,” I bellow. “How the fuck are you going to get me out from under her skin?”
Sooner or later, they’ll have to face that they fucking can’t. If they can’t hear it from me, they’ll have to hear it from her. Her, their precious youngest member, whose audacity they underestimate.
I guess that leaves my life squarely in Nadya’s hands.
Funnily enough, I find that I don’t mind it at all.