Chapter Twenty-Eight
In which there is good news, and bad news.
Oksana…
Vadim drives us to the storage units himself, his hand resting possessively on my thigh. I put mine on top of his. "Thank you for not treating me like a fragile princess,” I say. “Thank you for trusting me to be able to handle it."
He glances at me and then back at the road.
"It's your right," he says in such a matter-of-fact tone that it sparks a glow in my chest. After a lifetime of being told how useless I was by my father, how weak women are, having this terrifying man's respect, where he takes it as a given that I can handle the darkest side of our world, is everything.
"I recognize that in the civilian world, your husband knowing that you can handle watching torture and interrogation is maybe not the greatest affirmation," I say wryly. "But in the Bratva, it's a sign of strength."
"You survived our capture as a ten-year-old," he says, lifting my hand to kiss it. "You, my bride, are capable of anything."
It's then that I realize that I have fallen in love with Vadim Turgenev, the Angel of Death. I think I have always loved the boy who talked to me that night in our cells and gave me a reason to hold on.
The storage units are on Chicago's South Side. They are a series of unprepossessing gray metal buildings, meant for larger industrial equipment.
We head for the far end, where the gates are higher and each corner is bristling with cameras. Four guards, bundled in heavy jackets, are walking around the largest building. Vadim pulls up to the closest door and stops, looking out the windshield and tapping his thumb on the steering wheel.
"You may leave at any time," he says. "Ivan will take you home."
"Understood," I say. We walk into the building hand in hand, like we're on a date and oddly, it feels like one. My nervous anticipation morphs into fury when I see the Rossi brothers, chained to metal chairs that are bolted into the ground. Their mouths are taped, eyes bulging with rage.
Ivan greets us at the door. "I'm sorry, boss. Ma'am," he nods to me. "I had to tape their mouths; they wouldn't shut up for three goddamn hours." He nods at one of the other guards, who's pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Boris there has a migraine."
I notice that the Rossi brothers didn't get here completely in one piece.
There's a giant gash across Marco's forehead that looks like it's been carelessly taped closed with the same duct tape used on their mouths.
Don Rossi's left eye swollen shut. The stump from Vadim shooting off his hand has been dressed just enough to keep him from bleeding out.
We stroll over to them. They fall silent when they see Vadim, and then, they scream, violently rocking back and forth in their chairs against the chains when they see me.
Ivan halts the muffled screaming by delivering a vicious punch to the stomach for both of them. "You will show respect to Mr. Turgenev and his wife, am I clear? If you don't, we will start cutting off body parts." He rips off the tape, and they both burst into an enraged mix of Italian and English.
"I'll fucking kill you! I'll kill you!" The Don is screaming. "My family will come down on you- all Cosa Nostra will join us!"
I notice that my husband doesn't look unduly concerned by his threat. "Maybe," he acknowledges. "Or they'll continue doing they're doing now. Laughing at you. A gutless, dickless fuck who wasn't man enough to treat his family well."
Marco bursts out, "Your woman meddled where she shouldn't. She had no right -" Vadim's fist hits his jaw with a crunch that sends blood flying across the room.
Ivan leans closer to me. "Oh, I think he broke Marco's jaw with that one.”
"Yes," I agree. "It looks like it's sagging there on the left. Maybe that's because he's missing teeth?" Sure enough, Marco spits and two molars go flying.
"It is a given," Vadim says, "that you will both die."
He waits patiently as a torrent of begging, pleading, and attempts to buy their freedom burst out again. "You struck my wife," he says. "You threatened to kill her. You will die. It is up to you to determine just how long that takes."
My husband smiles now, and it's a type I've never seen before.
Horrifying, even to me, his grin stretching wide, feral.
He looks like a shark closing in on a seal, showing every tooth.
"I can make it last. I can keep you alive for a very long time," he says, leaning closer to them, speaking slowly, almost intimately.
"Your mind will break before your body does, but there's no comfort there. The agony is always there."
Marco breaks first. "What do you want?" he howls. "We can work with you. We can –"
"Shut the fuck up!" Don Rossi screams.
Vadim doesn't say anything, staring at them until Marco's pleas die off, and his shoulders sag. These pigs have always been so arrogantly confident that they could talk or buy their way out of anything. I don't think it has occurred to them until now that they're going to die here.
I smile.
The Don sees it, screaming again, veins bulging in his forehead, straining against his chains. "Your life is over, puttana! What's planned for you is beyond anything your psychopath husband can deliver."
Vadim's fist drives into his ribs. He's wearing brass knuckles, with sharp, gleaming points.
When the Don screams, it's high, and shrill.
Almost inhuman. I'd come across a rabbit in a snare once while riding my horse on one of the forest trails.
I clumsily released it, crying for its suffering as its terrified brown eyes watched me. I don't feel any empathy for Rossi.
"You mentioned the others," Vadim continues dispassionately. "Who?"
"We're not the only family she's fucked with," Marco says, with an odd sort of dignity. He's glaring at me, chin held high. "We were contacted by the Irish. There are others. Ten families."
Now, a slight grin spreads across the Don's face as if he's holding in some brilliant strategic move that will make us all fall to our knees, weeping. "We hired the hunters."
Spinning his brass knuckles on one finger, Vadim asks, "Who."
The Don watches his moving finger and his confidence suddenly withers. Slipping the brass knuckles back on all his fingers, Vadim raises his fist. "The- the Black Kynigós Group!" Rossi yelps.
"Shit. The Greeks," Ivan murmurs with a frown. I'm guessing this isn't good news.
Vadim drives the brass knuckles into Rossi's shoulder, and even from here, I can hear the bone crack as he howls. My husband turns his attention to Marco, who's shaking in his chair. He's realizing his information is not going to help save him.
"The hunters say they don't have any names yet," he gurgles from his ruined mouth.
"But they’re close. They say that it's women from crime families who know how our world works.
The hunters found a couple of the operatives.
" He stops, groaning for a moment as the cut on his forehead splits open again, sending little streams of blood down his face.
"They weren't much help. They couldn't get the names of the people in charge, but it gave them a direction.”
I'm breathing shallowly, trying to think of the people we’ve worked with, who disappeared from our network. Who might have died for us.
The high whine of a drill starting up and a chorus of screaming and begging joins it. It barely registers for me. A team of hunters, a dangerous one from Ivan's reaction. It takes me a while to blink and come back to the here and now. Marco's missing an eye, his brother, an ear.
"We would have been the ones to solve this," the Don says bitterly. His words are mushy. "Lana contacted me. I would be the one to catch and crush these puttanas!"
Lana and the others? Their deaths were too easy, I think bitterly.
They deserved more than just a quick bullet.
I will always judge women more harshly. Maybe it's because I've seen the brutal byproducts of what men can do too many times, but to know that another woman could look upon the suffering of a mother or a child, and find a way to make a quick buck out of it? It's unspeakable to me.
"What else do the hunters know?" Vadim asks. One of his men is turning something over a brazier, the metal is glowing a sullen red. Marco can't take his remaining eye off of it.
"The women in charge, they say they had it narrowed down based on proximity," Marco says.
Frowning, I try to understand how they could do that. We've flown all over the country, and three times into Europe to extract women and their families.
"They narrowed the base back here to Chicago," Marco says, flinching, as his brother spits another bloody globule at his face. "They've been tracking the women who fit the profile who are around this region."
We've been so careful.
It feels like there's a hand on my throat, choking me. "Ivan, I have to call Yvette."
He looks over to Vadim, who nods, watching me with concern, before taking me over to a little office built into the corner of the building. "You can speak here without fear of being heard," he says before closing the door.
When my cognitive function came back online after that soul-stirring sex with Vadim - and it took a while - I'd called Yvette so that I could reassure her that I was safe, and that Vadim knowing about us was definitely in our best interests.
Her phone only rings once before she grabs it. "Oksana," she says, half-panicked again. "Are you -"
"Wait, stop, I'm fine. But this is important, and it's not good," I say urgently.
"Our geographical spread has been so wide for the people that we've been able to rescue, it never occurred to me they could narrow us down by location.
But somehow, they pulled enough factors together to know that the ringleaders are women from crime families, and that they operate from this area. "
"Merde!" Yvette curses. "There's more, isn't there? I can tell."
"Manny Rodriguez, our transportation guy for the West Coast, we thought he'd just dropped out, right?" I ask.
"Yes?" she says. I hate the misery creeping into her tone.
"I think they got him," I say, my eyes wet. "They say their men captured two of the operatives."
"Sales batards diaboliques! Evil sons of bitches!" she shouts. I pull the phone away from my ear, wincing. "But he wouldn't have known anything, no one knows each other. That is why we run it this way." Her French accent is getting thicker.
"Yvette, take a breath," I swipe the back of my hand against my wet cheeks. "There's more. Some of the men whose wives got away found each other, they hired a team of hunters. That Irish dick -"
"Murphy? Oh, yes," she spits. "His ego couldn't bear that his wife escaped him."
"He contacted the Rossi's, and there's also someone from one of the cartels, I'm not sure what other men are involved yet."
She's muttering in French; I bite my thumbnail and wait. "What's the name of the team?"
"I don't know anything about them, but Ivan did. The Black Kynigós Group," I say. I cringe as glass shatters in the background.
"We are fucked, Oksana," she says urgently. "These men, they're monsters. They can find anyone." She lets out a humorless laugh. "I studied some of their tactics when I first started rescuing women to find a way to counteract husbands looking for them."
"That was brilliant," I say.
"It changes nothing now," she says bitterly. "We should have known some of these bastards would find each other. What are we going to do?"
Gritting my teeth against a furious scream, I try to think. I know that she's been speaking with two new women seeking help. "We stop everything for now," I say bleakly. "Just for now."
"I will tell the new ones that we have not forgotten them," she says. In a whisper, she asks, "Do you think that your husband would help us?"
Turning to look at him, I see that he's put a bullet hole in the Don's knee, then casually stepping on it, leaning in as the man blubbers and squirms.
"He despises them, I know that much," I say. "Not just for what they did to me. He's questioning the Rossi brothers. Once he's pulled every scrap of information from them, let's try to put it together and see what we know."
"Agreed," she sighs.
"Yvette…" I say hesitantly. She's alone, I know she's estranged from her family. "Do you think you should go on vacation for a couple of weeks? Maybe say that you're going somewhere for the holidays? I could ask Vadim to send a couple of bodyguards with you."
"I have my own," she says sharply. "I will consider it. Some good has come of this. Without your husband's intervention, everything would be gone. We would be gone. I'm so sorry about Lana and those women. I'm a fool. It never occurred to me that they would turn."
"It's not your fault," I say. "How could you know?"
"I should have," she says tiredly. I can hear a slow shuffle that tells me she's in her house slippers, pacing the length of her Gold Coast townhouse. "We'll talk tomorrow."
"Good night," I say.
"And to you, au revoir," she says sadly.
Staring unseeingly out the glass window of the office, I fight my racing heartbeat, thudding angrily against my chest. I've seen Yvette enraged, determined, vindictive, even mean when it's called for. I've never heard that despair in her voice.
Four hours later, Vadim drives me home. We've both been awake for around thirty-six hours now, but my mind is racing, refusing to let me rest.
"Tell me about this Black Kynigós Group," I ask, watching the sunrise slowly illuminate the city.
"They aren't an organized crime family," he says. "It's more of a religious order. They have claimed their catch and kill rate is one hundred percent. I don't believe that, but it is close."
"They've made a religion around hunting down and murdering people?" I ask.
"Something like that." Vadim reaches out, taking my hand. I'm learning that he likes that, touching me, or my hands on him. This remote man who regards everyone else's touch with distaste, craves mine.
I want to ask him about the charity, about the women we help disappear, if he would help us. It's larger than just us, I know. This would mean putting the entire Turgenev Bratva in the line of fire.
Especially if this group catches me. I shudder, and he glances over before turning up the heat until it's blasting through the vents.
"Better?"
"Much better, thank you." I find a smile for my lovely husband and lace my fingers with his.