The Death Dealer (Love Like A Loaded Gun #1)

Chapter 1

Dmitry

Iwalked through the side door of the gutted cathedral at three in the morning and felt the Moscow wind slice straight through my coat.

Fifty-five winters in this frigid city had taught me the cold wasn’t an enemy anymore. It was the only thing that still felt honest.

Snow hissed against the broken rose window, against the saints whose faces had been shot out by drunks or soldiers or both. One candle burned on the cracked marble altar, throwing weak gold designs that didn’t reach the corners.

That was where Viktor Lebedev waited. He didn’t turn when my boots crunched over shattered glass. He wore a black cashmere coat, collar turned up, and had his gloved hands clasped behind his back like a saint who’d traded salvation for sin.

He finally turned and faced me. The scar that split his face from his right ear to the corner of his mouth caught the candlelight and looked even more distorted.

“Ty opozdal,” he said without looking. You’re late.

“Ya nikogda ne opazdyvayu,” I answered. I’m never late.

He laughed, low and harsh. Viktor was sixty-two years old and still hungry enough to kill for a bigger throne. He took two steps toward me and held out a photograph.

I looked at the man staring at the lens, face stoic, bloodlust in his eyes.

Andrey Ivanov.

Fifty-eight. Fat jowls, beady black eyes, and the same shark smile I’d memorized the year this man’s daughter was still in diapers.

“Pyat' millionov amerikanskikh. Polovina segodnya perevodom. Polovina kogda on perestanet dyshat',” Viktor said. Five million American. Half today by transfer. Half when he stops breathing.

I didn’t touch the picture. I’d carried that face behind my eyes for thirty-eight years. I knew every pore, every wrinkle. I knew the stench of rot that clung to him like cheap cologne. It was the same rot that had filled that basement all those years ago.

“Ya ne delayu tselyye tela,” I told him. “Ya delayu chasti. Vyberi chast’, kotoruyu khochesh’ v podarochnoy upakovke.” I don’t do whole bodies. I do pieces. Pick the part you want gift-wrapped.

Viktor’s scar twitched, but other than that, his expression remained still as stone. “Khorosho. Yazyk, togda. On lzhet slishkom mnogo.” Fine. The tongue, then. He lies too much.

I almost smiled.

They’d called me The Death Dealer since I walked out of a basement with five dead men’s fingers lined up in a cigar case.

Thirty-five years of taking souvenirs.

“Prezhde chem ya soglashus’,” I said, “ya khochu koe-chto.” Before I agree, I want something.

“Ty ne v polozhe—” You’re in no—

“Ya vsegda v polozhenii, chtoby uyti.” I’m always in a position to walk.

Viktor’s eyes narrowed, calculating. Finally, he took the drive and pocketed it and the photograph. “Chё tebe nado?” What do you want?

“Ya ego zamochu za tebya, no informatsiya tol'ko u nego.

Mne nado vytyanut' yeyo pered tem, kak ub'yu, tak chto mozhet zatyanut'sya dol'she tvoego dedlayna.” I'll kill him for you, but I need information that only he has.

I have to get it out of him before I take him out, so this might take more time than your deadline.

The words came out flat. Just facts, like reciting a grocery list written in blood.

Viktor studied me for a long second before he responded. “Ladno. Glavnoe, chtoby delo bylo sdelano, delai s nim chto khochesh'.” Fine. As long as you get the job done, do with him what you want.

I nodded once. Viktor was old school and produced the contract. It was on thick cream paper, already signed in Viktor’s spidery Cyrillic. I took my knife and sliced the pad of my thumb, pressing it to the paper in a perfect, bloody print beside my name: Dmitry Myasnikov.

But to the world, I had no legal name. I was known to those unfortunate to have heard of my reputation as just The Death Dealer.

My cell buzzed with the first wire transfer. I’d get the rest once the job was done.

“Gala zavtra vecherom,” Viktor said. “Rublyovka dacha. Chornyy galstuk. Ya organizoval formu ofitsianta. Okhrana strozhe, chem pizda devstvennitsy, no ty proskochish’.

” Gala tomorrow night. Rublyovka dacha, Andrey’s estate.

Black tie. I arranged a waiter’s uniform.

Security’s tighter than a virgin’s cunt, but you’ll ghost through.

I said nothing after his crude instructions, and turned to leave.

“Yeshchyo odno, Dima.” One more thing, Dima.

The nickname dug deep. I paused under the broken arch.

“U Andreya yest’ doch’. Zoya. Dvadtsat’ tri. Simpatichnaya shtuchka. Izbalovannaya. Esli ona vstanet u tebya na puti—” Andrey has a daughter. Zoya. Twenty-three. Pretty little thing. Spoiled. If she gets in your way—

“Ya ne ubivayu zhenshchin.” I don’t kill women.

“Ya i ne prosil tebya,” he said, smiling thinly. “Prosto ne day yey sdelat’ tebya glupym. Krasivyye veshchi tak vliyayut na muzhchin tvoyego vozrasta.” I wasn’t asking you to. Just don’t let her make you stupid. Pretty things do that to men your age.

Fifty-five years old and the words still landed like a boot to the ribs. Pretty things. Just like my mother when they broke her on camera. I walked out without answering.

Outside, everything was a white blur. I lit a cigarette under frozen statues and watched the snow devour the cherry. Time had threaded silver through the black at my temples, but my eyes were still winter-gray and empty.

My body was heavier now, thicker through the chest and shoulders, muscle layered over muscle like armor plating. Scars crossed every inch of my skin that the ink didn’t cover.

Tattooed across my chest in brutal Cyrillic was НЕ ПРОЩАЮ—I do not forgive.

The past rose. I was seventeen the night I heard my mother screaming in the apartment we couldn’t afford.

They dragged us to the basement where I saw two animals waiting.

They zip-tied me to a metal chair, taped my eyelids open, and made me watch from behind the camera as they destroyed everything good and pure about my mother.

She begged for mercy in the voice that used to sing me to sleep when the violence was right outside our window.

Ivanov never showed his face on film, but I saw his reflection in a mirror, adjusting the tripod, laughing, telling the actor to drag it out because “the client paid extra for tears and for the son to watch, the sick fuck.” And then he’d laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

When it was over, it felt like days, weeks, had passed, like I had been in a hell that was never-ending. They left the tape in the VCR and walked away like they hadn’t just destroyed my world.

I sat in the dark until sunrise, wrists raw, piss cold on my thighs. And all I could see right in front of me was the carnage of the horror they forced me to watch.

I buried what was left of my mother in an unmarked grave outside Sergiev Posad. Then I learned how to kill quietly and never looked back.

I’d nursed that hate for thirty-eight years, letting it fester like a wound that never heals, because Andrey Ivanov wasn’t just some street rat I could gut in an alley.

He was a ghost in the machine—buried deep in the Bratva’s web, shielded by layers of corrupt agents, private armies, and Rublyovka fortresses that made storming them suicide even for a death dealer like me.

I’d stalked his shadows from afar, piecing together his empire of flesh and film, but striking alone would’ve ended with my head on a pike and his sins buried deeper.

Viktor’s offer changed that. He gave me resources, intel, and a clean in through the gala. Not to mention five million to carve justice slowly and make him feel every second of what he stole from me.

Without it, revenge was a whisper. But with it… a scream that would echo through Moscow’s underbelly.

I finished my cigarette and kept walking. The city was drunk and asleep. Neon bled red onto the ice.

A homeless man held out his hand and offered me a smile that I didn’t return. I gave him a wad of cash, anyway. It was enough to keep the cold from claiming him tonight. Mercy for the weak; none for monsters.

I’d stopped at a flower stand earlier that day. I bought twelve white roses, long-stemmed and perfect. White like innocence. Like the lies Andrey fed his spoiled daughter, no doubt.

Back in my Taganka shithole, I locked the door, stripped off my coat, and opened the safe behind the loose brick. Passports. Bricks of cash. Guns. And one cracked VHS tape labeled in faded marker: “Lot #004–Svetlana M.”

I hadn’t touched it with bare hands in longer than I could remember. I didn’t need to watch it to know what was on it. I had the image burned vividly into my brain and had seen the horror firsthand.

I still saw my mother’s face. She’d begged more to save me from witnessing the horror than she had for saving her own life. Her first scream was still embedded in my bones, and I heard it in my soul every day since then.

I grabbed the VHS, wrapped it in plastic, and slid it into a padded envelope. I addressed it in neat block letters: A. Ivanov, Rublyovka.

No return.

Tomorrow, I’d deliver it in person. Along with something far worse.

I showered until the water ran cold, scrubbing until it felt like my tattoos bled. Thirty-eight winters had carved me into something the devil himself and his fire wouldn’t touch.

Once cleaned and dressed, I laid out tomorrow’s tools on the table like a surgeon: silenced Glock 19, ceramic knife, garrote wire, zip ties, chloroform rag soaked and sealed, and a tiny vial of Rohypnol just in case. I picked up my favorite scalpel… the one I used for my signatures.

I slept without dreams, the white roses on the table staring back at me, but all I could see was them painted in red.

Tomorrow, the king would lose everything.