Razvan
“The numbers aren’t moving fast enough,” Gregor Vasik says for the second time in ten minutes. He leans forward, his expensive silk suit straining across his chest, smelling of heavy cologne and nervous sweat.
I don’t answer him. I don’t even blink. I just watch the way his pulse thrums in the hollow of his throat.
It’s a frantic, rhythmic little thing. If I reached across this desk and pressed my thumb against it, it would stop.
The world would be quieter. The ports on the Black Sea would still be there, waiting for a more competent hand to steer them.
Vasik controls four ports on the Black Sea and I need those ports and he knows I need them. So he uses that knowledge the way small men use whatever leverage they have, constantly and without subtlety.
“The numbers are moving exactly as projected,” Dmitri says from his position against the wall. He doesn’t look up from his phone. He sounds bored. “I can show you the projection again if the first three times weren’t sufficient.”
Vasik bristles, his face turning a mottled, ugly purple. “I am not a clerk, boy. I am a partner. I expect—”
I let him talk. His voice becomes a background drone, like a fly trapped against a windowpane. It’s a peculiar habit of my mind lately; the more someone demands my presence, the further I retreat into the archives of my own failures.
Five years. Five fucking years.
I look at the heavy gold signet ring on my finger and I don’t see the office. I see a rainy night in Moscow. I see a door that should have been locked and a woman who should have been dead.
She doesn’t exist.
That is the official conclusion of five years of hunting. Not a body, not a trail, not a single digital footprint in a world that records everything. She walked out of my compound with a cracked flash drive and a stolen phone and simply…dissolved. Like salt in the tide.
I’ve burned more resources than I will ever admit to my board trying to find her. I’ve had men in Moscow, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague. I’ve pulled favors from state intelligence agencies and called in blood-debts from the kind of people who don’t forget.
The answer is always the same. Nothing.
It’s an insult. It’s a glitch in the machine I’ve spent my life building. I can move tons of illicit cargo across three continents without a single customs agent noticing, yet I cannot find one woman who didn’t even have a passport when she ran.
“—Razvan? Are you listening?”
I bring my focus back to the room.
The transition is seamless, the mask sliding back into place before Vasik can see the gap.
I look at him, and for a second the contempt I feel is so sharp it’s almost physical.
He is a small man playing with large levers.
He thinks he’s important because he owns a few docks.
He doesn’t realize that in my world, importance is measured by what you can keep—and what you can find.
“I’m listening, Gregor,” I say. My voice is low, a calm contrast to his shrill demands. “I was just wondering if you realized that your left eyelid has been twitching for the last three minutes. You should see a doctor. Stress is a silent killer.”
“So like I said, the numbers are moving exactly as projected,” Dmitri says yet again, his voice scraping against the tension in the room like a dull blade. “I can show you the projection again if the first three times weren’t sufficient.”
Vasik’s jaw tightens, his face darkening to the color of a bruised plum. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Pity,” Dmitri says, and I can hear the smirk in his tone without even looking. “I’m the one with the numbers.”
I let the silence stretch, watching Vasik sweat. I want him to feel the vacuum in the room. I want him to realize that his life depends entirely on my continued boredom. Finally, I speak. “Vasik. What do you want.”
He leans forward, elbows digging into the mahogany of my desk, and his expression shifts into something oily. Greed is such a filthy emotion; it makes men look wet.
“We expand the operation. The ports give us infrastructure nobody else has on that coastline. We’re moving product, we’re moving money, we could be moving—” He pauses, turning his hand over on the desk like he’s revealing a winning card.
“People.” He leans in further, his breath smelling of expensive tobacco and rot. “Women and children, I mean.”
The air in the room doesn’t just go still; it dies.
To my left, Mike is a statue. I don’t need to look at him to know the exact millisecond the suggestion lands. I can feel the shift in his breathing, that specific, lethal quality of stillness that moves through him like a high-voltage current finding a ground wire.
Don’t, I think, a cold command directed at the man beside me. Don’t move yet.
“Mike,” I say. Just his name. A leash.
He stays put, but I can feel the vibration of his rage from two feet away.
Mike is a man who walked into my world on a single, iron-clad condition: we don’t touch the flesh trade.
No slaves. No kids. It’s the one line he refuses to cross, and right now this fat piece of shit is drawing a map across it and asking for directions.
I look at Vasik. My pulse hasn’t moved. “No.”
Vasik blinks, his tiny eyes darting. “You haven’t even heard the—”
“No.”
The word is a flat, heavy slab of lead.
Vasik sits back, his mouth curdling at the corners.
He thinks he’s being brave. He thinks he’s being a tough negotiator.
The fucking idiot. “I’ve heard things about you, Volkov,” he says, his voice gaining a desperate, bravado-fueled edge.
“The great Razvan. The Wrath. Men piss themselves when they hear your name.” He tilts his head, a sneer tugging at his lip.
“And yet here you are saying no to money. Saying no to expansion. What, are you afraid of women?”
I keep my hands flat on the desk. My fingers don’t twitch. If I let them move, I will reach across this desk and tear his tongue out through his throat. This stupid, arrogant, walking corpse. I say nothing. I just watch him dig his own grave with every syllable.
By the door, Lyosha has gone quiet. Not the quiet of a guard, but the quiet of a storm front five minutes before the tornado hits. He’s waiting for the signal to turn this office into a slaughterhouse.
“The most feared man in Russia,” Vasik continues, warming to his own suicide note, “won’t touch the most profitable business on the market.
” He leans forward again, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, disgusting whisper.
“Tell me something. After all these years of being so very frightening, does everything still work? You know what I mean. Do you still have a functioning dick or have the bitches—”
I feel the heat rising in my neck, a dark, pulsing roar. I could kill him a thousand different ways before he finishes that sentence. I could have Dmitri skin him. I could let Lyosha break every bone in his hands. I could let Mike, well, Mike would just end him.
I stand up.
I’m across the desk before his next breath can leave his lungs. I catch him by the collar with both hands, fistfuls of silk and sweat, and I yank him out of his seat. He’s heavy, a dead weight of useless meat, but I don’t care. I drag him into the center of the room.
The first hit lands on the bridge of his nose.
Crack. It’s a beautiful, clean sound. The kind of sound that settles the static in my brain.
Blood erupts instantly, a hot, dark spray that paints his mouth and chin before soaking into that pathetic, expensive jacket.
He makes a sound, a high, thin wheeze. It’s the sound of a man who has spent his life ordering violence but has never actually felt the cold, hard reality of a knuckle meeting bone.
He has no framework for this. No defense.
I hit him again.
This time it’s the orbital bone. I feel the socket give, a sickening, wet crunch against my knuckle. He goes sideways, his legs tangling in his own expensive pants, and I go down with him. I’m on him before he hits the carpet, my knee driven into his sternum, pinning his lungs flat.
I work methodically. Jaw. Ribs. Snap. That’s the third rib. He screams, a wet, bubbly sound, and tries to curl into a fetal ball. I don’t let him. I grab his hair and pull his head back, exposing the target. My fist splits his lip on the next one.
Blood is everywhere now. It’s on my knuckles, hot and tacky.
It’s splattered across my white shirt. It’s soaking into the Persian rug in dark, spreading blossoms. Vasik has stopped trying to form words.
He’s just making sounds, ragged gurgles that remind me of a dying engine.
I hit him until the gurgling slows to a whimper.
I straighten up. My knuckles are throbbing, a dull, satisfied ache. I stand over the ruined heap of him and breathe.
Say another word, you piece of filth, I think, looking down at the red mask where his face used to be.
He doesn’t say a word. He just leaks into my carpet.
I step back, the adrenaline beginning to cool into a hard, sharp clarity. I look at Lyosha. “Get him out.”
Lyosha doesn’t hesitate. He moves with the coiled energy of a dog finally let off its chain. He grabs Vasik by the collar, no more care than he’d give a bag of trash, and drags him toward the door.
Vasik’s heels leave two dark, glistening streaks through the blood on the floor. Dmitri watches the trail with the mild, detached interest of a man watching rain hit a windowpane.
Mike walks up and hands me a clean white cloth for my knuckles.
I take it, wiping the gore from my skin. I’m straightening my cuffs, adjusting the links until they are perfectly symmetrical, when the knock comes at the door.
One of the gate guards. Young, newer, and currently wearing the expression of a man who has done the math on his timing and found it deeply unfortunate. His eyes dart to the blood on the carpet then back to his boots.
“Sir.” He swallows hard. “There’s a woman at the gate.”
“Send her away.”
I turn back toward my desk.
“Sir, she says—”