Chapter 29 Bastian
BASTIAN
press /pres/: verb
I’m getting real fucking tired of clichés.
I spent my morning stopping to smell the roses, and now that night has fallen, I’m slipping through the shadows of yet another strip club as Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” blares through the speaker stacks behind the stage.
Zeke badly wanted to come, but I told him to stay home. I know my best friend would follow me anywhere, but it’s better for him not to see this. Let at least some stains remain on my hands and my hands alone.
I pass through a beaded curtain, up a set of stairs, down a hall, and through an unmarked door. Most of the bouncers know better than to stop me, and the five hundred bucks I pass to the one who gives me a wary glance is enough to convince him to look elsewhere.
I find a seat amongst the pools of darkness in the far corner of the private booth. I don’t have to wait long before my source’s intel comes good.
Harold Fitzgerald comes barging in with a girl clenched in his meaty claws. She’s sixteen if she’s a fucking day old, but that’s not the kind of thing I would expect to stop him.
It stops me, for just a second, though. That wide-eyed fear, the look that says she knows she’s in too deep but doesn’t know how to stop it, skin too young and too unblemished to be in a place like this at a time like this with a man like him… There are a million things screaming it’s wrong.
I clear my throat. “Harold. Fancy seeing you here.”
The man promptly looks like he shit himself. He scans around the room, beady eyes flitting here and there. But it isn’t until I rise from my feet and disentangle myself from the darkness that he sees who spoke. When he does, those eyes immediately open to their fullest extent.
“You… No. You’re— I’m— I saw—”
“Take a seat, Harold. You and I have a few things to discuss.” I gently pry his clammy wrist off of the girl’s waist and separate the two of them.
I hurl him behind me without much care. Then I hand her a sheaf of cash I don’t bother counting and jerk my chin toward the door.
“Get out of here, little one. Go through the front door and keep on walking. You don’t belong in a place like this. ”
She takes the bills in one trembling hand, looks at me, gulps, and then flees.
When she’s gone, I turn. Cowering in a heap in the corner of the red-lit room, Harold becomes every man who ever thought his money would keep him safe, and I become every consequence that ever came due.
He’s crying before I even touch him, which is disappointing in a way, because I’d psyched myself up for this.
I told myself I could do just enough damage to get what I wanted without crossing Eliana’s line—no permanent scars, Bastian—and yet this pathetic bastard is already falling to fucking pieces.
“You’re dead,” Harold wheezes. “I was there. I saw the casket. They—they lowered it into the ground. The priest said—”
“You should know better than anyone how easy it is to fake paperwork in this city, Harold. You’ve certainly forged enough of it yourself.”
Harold does what I expected him to do, albeit not quite this soon: He makes a break for the door. It’s a clumsy, desperate lunge that would be almost comical if the stakes weren’t so high.
I block him effortlessly. One hand plants itself against Harold’s chest and shoves. He stumbles backward, his heel catching on the rug, and he collapses into the leather seat with a graceless thump.
I point the knife in my other hand at his throat. “Don’t do that again.”
The blade gleams red in the swirling light, like it’s already wet with his blood. The bob of Harold’s throat as he swallows makes his flesh spill over the lip of his collar. Next item on my bingo card is for him to piss himself, but thankfully, he isn’t that far gone.
Not yet, at least. But the knife is sharp and the night is young and the music is plenty loud enough to drown out his screams, if he forces me to go that route.
“Let’s talk about a mutual acquaintance of ours,” I say, settling into the seat across from him. “Aleksei Izotov. Ring any bells?”
Harold tries to draw himself up tall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? He’s the most successful criminal in Chicago since Al Capone, Harold. I’d be very surprised if a filthy, double-dealing fuck like you hasn’t crossed paths with Aleksei on more than one occasion.”
“How dare you!” he cries out. “I’m a legitimate businessman! Whatever you think you know—”
“Harold, Harold, Harold.” I click my tongue in disappointment.
“I personally watched you pull out of Project Olympus hours before the ribbon-cutting gala. Billions on the line, and you waddled away like the building was on fire.” I rotate the knife in my grip, watching the blade glisten.
“Then, mysteriously, once all the problems were solved—problems Aleksei created, problems Aleksei fixed—you came crawling back to the table. Funny how that works, don’t you think? ”
His hands shake as he mops sweat from his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. “You don’t understand,” he finally whispers. “Aleksei approached me. I had no choice. You have no idea the kind of pressure I was under.”
Well, that was easy.
But it’s not enough. No matter how much Harold wishes it were otherwise, he and I have a long way to go before this conversation is complete.
I cross one ankle over the opposite knee and start cleaning my fingernails with the tip of the blade. The scrape of steel against keratin fills the gap between songs. Harold’s breath quickens as he watches.
“Let’s start with the money,” I say. “The shell corporations you ran Bratva cash through. The handling fees you skimmed off the top.” Scrape. Scrape. “I’m guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of three percent? Four? Tell me you didn’t get five, you wily old bastard.”
Harold’s eyes track the knife. “I don’t—”
I toss the knife to my other hand, then lean forward and bring it to rest casually against his knee. The point dimples the fabric of his trousers. “Try again.”
“Three!” he gasps. “It was only three percent. But it wasn’t my idea—Aleksei came to me with the structure already in place—”
“And the inside information?” I lift the knife and move it to hover over his exposed hand where it grips the chair arm. “Because you did sell inside information, didn’t you, my friend? About me. My finances. My timeline. All my little vul-ner-a-bil-i-ties.”
With every syllable, I tap the tip of the knife against his skin.
“You let the devil in, Harold,” I snarl. “Time to fess up.”
He starts spewing details, laying out the entire scheme.
It’s all painfully simple. It couldn’t have taken Aleksei more than an hour or two to dream the whole thing up.
Find a corrupt businessman. Grease his palm for a while as you slowly build a bear trap around him.
And then, just when he thinks he’s gotten the sweetest deal of his life, you press the lever and watch as the springs release the steel teeth and they puncture into every one of the bastard’s weaknesses.
Watch him squirm. Watch him bleed. Watch him beg you to let him out.
Harold’s nightmare is just another cliché.
It’s also just beginning.
Because it’s true that he let one devil in. But he didn’t realize that, now, another devil has come up from the depths of hell to sink teeth into his throat and rip, rip, rip until it’s his blood glowing red in the low light.
He thinks everything he’s telling me will save him. These lurid stories of shell corporations and wire transfers, of encrypted emails and offshore bank accounts. But it won’t. Nothing will. At best, it will delay the end.
But the end will come sooner or later.
Sooner, if I have anything to say about it. Much, much sooner.
I listen as he talks, but truthfully, none of the past matters to me too much.
It’s the future that concerns me. While his whole yarn spills out, I glide the knife gently up his arm, past the sensitive crook of his elbow, tracing over his shoulder, his chest, and finding a home underneath the hollow of his chin.
It wobbles dangerously with every breath he takes.
“There’s more,” he babbles. “Please, you have to understand! Aleksei has things on me. Photographs. Videos. From places like this, with girls who… who weren’t…”
He can’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.
“And I’m not the only one! He’s got a whole network—investors, politicians, all of us trapped by our own—” He gestures weakly around the room, at the velvet walls that have witnessed a thousand sins.
“City councilmen, too! And planning commissioners, so many… All of them feeding him information, money, whatever he asks for.”
My gut churns. Seems I’m not the only Izotov man who’s spent the last two decades building an empire.
“Where does he keep it?” I ask softly. “This evidence. This kompromat.”
“Safety deposit box at First National. There’s a storage unit in Cicero, too—I don’t know the number, but it’s on Cermak Road.” Harold is sweating bullets now. “He showed me once. Rows of files. Thousands of them!”
I grimace as I think about how the hell we’re going to get in there. Pulling out these poisonous roots will require a fucking excavator.
But first things first.
“Here’s what’s going to happen, Harold.” I lower the knife from his throat and watch the confusion spread across his sweaty face. “I’m not going to kill you tonight.”
His eyes dart between me and the blade. He doesn’t trust me. That’s the first smart thing he’s done yet.
“You’re going to get your hands on that evidence,” I continue. “I don’t know how and I don’t give a fuck, but you will find those files and bring them to me. Meanwhile, you’re going to keep playing your role like a good little boy. Aleksei will be none the wiser.”
Harold’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. No sound comes out.
“You’ll be my eyes and ears inside his operation. And when the time comes, we’ll hand everything over to the people who can use it.”