Chapter 3 Dmitry
Dmitry
Ikilled the engine three kilometers outside St. Petersburg and let the silence swallow the space.
The old slaughterhouse stood in the dark distance like a rotting cathedral. The red brick was weathered and aged, all the windows long since broken, and the loading bays hung open like the building was screaming for help.
I bought the property twenty years ago with blood money and turned it into a house of horrors. A tomb no one ever left.
Tonight, it would hold something I never planned on taking or keeping.
Snow hissed against the windshield. Zoya was still out cold, silent and unmoving. I climbed out, boots crunching on frozen gravel, and opened the rear door.
After removing the linens from the laundry cart, I stared at her. Zoya Ivanova lay exactly where I’d left her. Her wrists and ankles were still zip-tied, and her mouth sealed with tape, an obscene sight contrasting with the diamonds glittering at her neck.
Her chest rose and fell, slow and easy. The pulse at her throat fluttered like a trapped bird.
I brushed my finger along her cheek. Her skin was like silk and ice. Her ivory gown had ridden up during the drive, exposing the long, pale line of one thigh.
I lifted her as if she weighed nothing and carried her through the loading bay. The air inside hit like a fist. The memories of raw meat, bleach, and twenty-year-old blood were forever baked into the concrete and steel.
Chains hung from overhead rails, rusted meat hooks swaying in the draft. I walked past them all to the converted freezer room at the back.
Steel door. Biometric lock I’d installed myself. I unlocked it, and it opened with silent fluidity.
Inside, the walls were lined with stainless-steel tables, drains in the floor, and one drainpipe bolted to the far wall.
I’d killed in here, cleaned bodies, and carved them up for fun… to teach lessons about betrayal.
What was new for me was keeping someone alive here.
I laid her on the floor. The gown pooled around her like spilled cream. It was hard not to notice the way her nipples hardened against the cold in the air. The building wasn’t heated. It helped in keeping the blood flow to a minimum.
I sliced through the zip ties binding her ankles, freeing her legs just enough for limited movement.
But for her wrists, I replaced the flimsy plastic with metal handcuffs, snapping them shut.
I threaded a sturdy chain through the cuff links next, securing it with a padlock to the rusted drainpipe overhead.
The length was deliberate. It was short enough that she could stand up but her movement was limited.
Any desperate yank would only earn her bruises, the solid steel impervious to picks or raw force without tools far beyond her reach. I contemplated leaving the tape on her mouth but took it off. It didn’t matter how much she screamed. No one would hear her here.
She stirred after about half an hour, and I stepped back, leaning against the steel table and waited.
Her lashes fluttered. A low sound came from her, and in a matter of seconds, she jerked upright, chains rattling, eyes flying open. I stared at her blue eyes, hating that I felt anything but indifference when I looked at her.
She scanned the room before her gaze found me instantly. I watched as realization hit her in stages. And then she made a panicked, fear-stricken sound. Not a scream but one of a cornered animal that knew they were trapped.
I didn’t move, didn’t respond. But then, I felt powerful, feral, and took a step forward. She scrambled back until the chain snapped taut, knees drawn to her chest, trying to cover herself.
“Ty trushlivyy ublyudok!” she spat, voice hoarse from the chloroform. You cowardly bastard! Her Russian was soft and expensive, finishing-school perfect. Her father’s money—blood money—had paid for her upbringing.
I walked toward her, slow, measured, intimidating. My boots echoed around the small room, and she shrank against the wall, breath sawing in and out. My eyes drew down to her still hard nipples poking against the silk of her gown. I stopped and crouched, bringing us to eye level.
“Listen carefully, Zoya Ivanova,” I said in English, voice low. “You’re in my world now. That means my rules.”
Her eyes blazed, but she pursed her lips and said nothing for long seconds. Fire burned in her stare, and my cock twitched because of it.
“My father will—”
“Your father will watch,” I cut in but didn’t elaborate on what exactly he’d be watching me do to her.
I pulled a burner phone from my pocket, opened the camera, and hit record.
I saw the confusion on her face, but then realization took root and her alabaster skin turned a beautiful shade of pink from her anger.
I held it steady on her face, recording her tears, fury, and bruises her father had given her. I wanted that fucker to see all of it.
“Day one,” I said in a voice that was flat and cold, the lens now pointed at Zoya. “Your daughter is mine now. Watch her bleed for what you did to me and mine.” A rush filled me when I hit send.
The video uploaded to the same dark-web dead drop I’d been monitoring since 2005.
It was a private onion service, a server designed for extreme privacy, anonymity, and security.
Andrey had spun up on a bulletproof host in Ukraine.
No log in. No password. Just a long, static access token he’d embedded in the taunting note he mailed me with the original tape.
I’d memorized that sixty-four character string printed on the back of a Polaroid still from the video.
He thought it was funny giving the grieving son a direct line to his next “product preview”. I knew he got paid to taunt me, by a client who enjoyed the trauma of others and prolonged it.
Andrey was a fool, though. He never changed it. Never rotated the token. He imagined no one would keep checking for thirty-eight years.
I did.
Every month, I chained proxies, logged in through Tor, and watched the upload directory. He used it sporadically with client confirmations, payout proofs, and low-res previews for old buyers who still paid premium.
Arrogant motherfucker. Did he really believe no one held a grudge? Or maybe that no one would ever be strong enough or have the balls to take him on?
But I held on like a knife pressed to the throat, waiting for the right moment to push in and bleed them out.
The video finished uploading and completing, and I felt another wave, a rush of adrenaline that he’d see the proof of life and pain that The Death Dealer had finally come to collect.
Zoya lunged, chain yanking her up short, wrists bleeding where the cuffs bit in. “I’ll kill you,” she hissed.
I chuckled, a genuine one that I felt in my gut.
“I swear on God I’ll—”
I was on her before she finished the sentence. One hand collared her throat, not squeezing, just holding her still. My thumb pressed over the frantic beat of her pulse.
“Tikho, malyshka... a to Diler Smerti pridet.” Quiet, malyshka... or The Death Dealer will come.
She froze, breath coming in sharp little pants against my wrist. I let my gaze drag down her body, slow, deliberate. Over the gooseflesh, over the way her thighs trembled even though she tried to stop them. And then back up to those furious blue eyes.
I could have said so many things. I could have told her the truth about why she was here.
Paying for her father’s sins. Instead, I said, “You’re cold.
” I rose and pocketed the phone before shrugging out of my coat.
This minor act of mercy was only because hypothermia would end her too fast. It would ruin the long, slow bleed I needed for her father.
I draped the heavy black wool lined with shearling over her shoulders. It swallowed her whole, the hem pooling on the floor.
She stared at me as if I’d grown a second head but stayed silent.
I stood, stepped back, and pulled a silver flask from my back pocket. Vodka. I took a swallow then held it out. She didn’t move. “Drink,” I said. “It’ll warm you up.” She pursed her lips again. “Drink, or I'll pour it down your throat. Your choice.”
Her chin lifted, defiant, but her teeth were chattering, and she was a smart girl. She reached with chained hands, fingers stiff and clumsy from the cold, and took the flask. The first sip had her coughing and wheezing. The second and third, she acted like a pro.
Tears sprang to her eyes from the burn, but color came back to her lips.
I watched her throat work as she drank a little more, her long neck flexing and relaxing as she swallowed down, her pale chest flushing light pink from the fire of the vodka, her lips wet from drinking. I felt nothing I wanted to name.
When she was finished, I took the flask and took a hearty drink before pocketing it again.
“Why?” she rasped and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Why me?”
I let her question hang between us. I crouched again, closer this time, wondering how much I’d tell her or if I’d tell her anything at all.
In the end, I wanted her to know what a piece of shit her father was.
“Because when I was seventeen years old, Andrey took money to film my mother being murdered and made me watch,” I said with so much coldness, so much hatred in my voice, Zoya shrank back on instinct.
“And then he sold the tape to men who jerked off to her screams, blood, and her dying on a cold, stained concrete floor.” I curled my hands into fists until my knuckles ached and turned white.
“Because I have waited thirty-eight years to make him feel what I felt that night.”
Her face drained of color so fast it looked like the life had been siphoned out of her. Her blue eyes widened, pupils blowing, but she didn’t scream or sob. She just stared at me, at the man who’d dragged her into this hell, while her breath came in short, shallow bursts.
“No,” she finally said, voice barely above a whisper.
“That’s… that can’t be true.” She shook her head back and forth, her hair slapping her cheeks, as if she could dislodge my words.
“I knew he was bad. I knew the money wasn’t clean.
Drugs. Guns. People got hurt. People disappeared.
I told myself it was dirty business… but not this. Not what you’re saying he did.”
Her gaze flicked to the pocket where I’d slipped the phone then back to my face, searching for a lie. I stayed silent.
And the longer she stared at me, the more I let the truth show on my expression, the more final it all became to her. Doubt was already sinking in. I could hear the cold, heavy, irreversible reality filling her. She pressed her hands to her mouth as if she could hold the nausea down.
“I lived in that house,” she whispered almost to herself. “I ate at his table. I wore the dresses he bought me with that money.”
She closed her eyes for a second, as if she were trying to clear the words out of her skull. When she opened them again, her gaze lifted to mine, bright with fury, still edged with terror but now there was something harder underneath.
“If you have that tape,” she said, voice low and shaking but steady enough to cut, “prove it. Show me. Or stop lying to my face.”
I tilted my head and then slowly shook it. “Not yet.”
Her laugh was quick, bitter, and jagged, like glass breaking in her throat. “Of course not. You want me to sit here and wonder. You want it to rot inside me until I can’t think of anything else.”
I didn’t deny it.
She looked away, staring at the cracked and stained ground.
“I thought the worst thing he did was hurt people who crossed him,” she breathed.
“That’s what I convinced myself of, anyway.
I told myself the disappearances were business.
Debts. Rivalries. I never let myself think he…
filmed it. Sold it. Made entertainment out of people dying.
” Her voice cracked on the last word, but she swallowed it down. No tears. No pleading.
She just sat there chained, my coat slipping off one shoulder, and every breath she took sounding like it cost her something.
And in that silence, something shifted behind her eyes. It wasn’t surrender, not yet, but the slow, terrible cracking of a wall she’d built to keep the darkest truths from coming out.
Zoya wasn’t asking to see the tape because she wanted to believe it. She was daring me to prove she was wrong. Because if I couldn’t—if I was bluffing—then maybe her father wasn’t the monster I said he was.
And maybe she wasn’t the daughter of one.