Chapter 57 Roran
Roran
It stopped.
The burning pain finally stopped.
I breathe through my nose, shallow and slow, because it’s the only way I still can.
My face is wet—tears, sweat, maybe blood—I’ve stopped keeping track.
My mouth is stuffed with a filthy rag, sour and damp and choking me.
Ivan jammed it in when I wouldn’t stop screaming.
I think I blacked out from it, not from the pain itself, but from the way it wouldn’t end.
And the worst part? I didn’t care.
Let him kill me. Just end it.
But he didn’t.
He dragged me out instead—right after getting a message that made him smile like he’d just won the fucking lottery—and chained me again, tighter this time, to some rotting chair on the second floor of this hellhole.
I sit there now, bound and gagged, staring out through a grimy, smudged glass window that overlooks the floor below.
The Red Dock’s main storage room—lined with racks of empty drug vials, still tucked neatly into their packaging like they’re ready to be shipped straight into someone else’s nightmare.
This whole place is massive. Way bigger than I ever imagined. Room after room, corridor after corridor—we passed so many I lost count. And now he’s left me here, like I’m a piece in some twisted play he’s staging. Watching. Waiting.
I don’t know what he wants me to see.
But I know it’s coming.
And I already feel my heart losing its rhythm.
Maybe he left me here because he didn’t know what to do with me. Maybe he’s waiting for the screaming to stop—for my body to just give in and shut down.
Maybe that was the plan all along.
And honestly? I’m not even sure which one I’d prefer anymore.
The rag in my mouth is taped in place, glued to my face with blood and spit. My jaw’s locking, aching so deep it buzzes through my skull. The metal around my wrists is cutting now—I can feel the trickle of blood pooling in the seat of my palms, and the chair beneath me creaks with every breath.
I can’t move. I can’t speak. All I can do is listen.
And wait.
Then—
Footsteps.
Not here. Below.
The floor beneath me.
I tense. My entire body locks down.
My head is angled perfectly to face the space below—whether I want to or not—and something inside me already knows... I’m about to witness something I won’t survive.
“The Italians found the place. We should take everything and leave,” a voice says from the floor below. I can’t see his face. The shadows are thick. But the fear in his voice is louder than anything.
Then Ivan’s voice chimes in. His voice like frost cracking stone.
“Not yet. They played Fedor for years. I won’t be played. And I have the perfect chance to show them—I'm the real nightmare they should’ve feared all along.”
His voice slithers into my veins like poison.
“Ivan... you’re not from New York. You don’t know the rumors…” the other man says, and I can hear it—he’s already regretting speaking.
“I don’t give a damn about rumors,” Ivan snaps. “I deal in facts. And I’m not handing over two centuries of Fedor’s work on this drug to their capo’s joke of a son in brand shoes. Let him barge in—I want him to. I’ll show him what survival really means.”
His laugh crawls up my spine and nests in my skull.
Malec is here.
And God help me, for the first time in what feels like forever—I should be terrified after what I saw in that alley.
But I’m not.
Because knowing he’s close?
I can finally breathe.
“Before he gets to this side of the building…” Ivan’s voice drips with venom, “bring her here. I’m going to kill two birds with one stone.”
A pause. Too long.
“She’s already here,” the other man says.
Who—
My eyes dart frantically, stretching as far as the chains allow. My chest tightens. My breath shortens.
No.
I see her.
Diana.
A limp, blood-slicked body being dragged across the floor below like discarded trash. Her face—
I can’t see it clearly. But her hair. Her build.
Her arm dangles at a wrong angle, torn and bruised and half out of its socket.
He’s dragging her like she’s weightless. Like she’s nothing.
And I break.
The scream that bursts from me is silent—
Choked out by the cloth in my mouth, but my body convulses with it anyway.
My vision floods. Blurs. I can’t breathe. Oxygen is gone.
Diana.
My sister.
My baby sister.
The only reason I’ve survived this long.
And he—he killed her.
She’s gone.
I thrash against the chains, something animal tearing through me as I try to get free—bones grinding, skin splitting—
I don’t care.
Blood pours down my wrists, down my arms. The chair groans beneath me. But I keep pulling. Keep fighting.
Because that’s my sister.
And I was too late.
Too fucking late.