ANYA — Solntsevo Dockyards, 1047
The warehouse number doesn’t match the delivery slip, but Anton keeps insisting it’s building seven, loading bay C, and that I need to sign off on something immediately, so I push through the metal door.
The smell hits me first, and it’s wrong. My hand tightens on the door frame before I even understand why my body is reacting.
It’s freezing in here, and my breath fogs in front of my face while condensation drips somewhere in the darkness.
Voices echo from deeper in the building. Russian, low. And one of those voices belongs to my husband.
Except I’ve never heard Roman sound flat and cold and empty, like someone reached inside him and scraped out everything human.
Turn around, my brain screams at me. Turn around and walk away, and pretend you never came here.
But my legs keep carrying me forward anyway, around the corner of a shipping container, and then I see it.
Roman is standing over a man who’s zip-tied to a chair.
It takes me a few seconds to catch up with what I’m actually looking at, and when it does, my stomach drops so hard I have to grab the container wall to stay upright.
That’s Roman. That’s my husband in a blood-spattered white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his cufflinks placed neatly on a metal crate beside him. There’s a man in that chair with half his face beaten in so badly I can see the bone through the tissue damage.
Zygomatic fracture, probably comminuted, given the displacement. Orbital floor likely compromised. The swelling pattern suggests repeated blunt force trauma over at least twenty minutes based on the color gradation of the bruising.
Then the man makes this wet, desperate sound that isn’t a word, just pure animal suffering.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit.
Industrial zip ties on his wrists. A metal crate sitting open with pliers and wire cutters, and electrical tape, all laid out in a neat row.
Boris is smoking near the loading bay like this is just a normal Tuesday. Ilya is scrolling through his phone. Neither of them is looking at the center of the room, and there’s a third guy by the door holding car keys.
“Eighteen,” Roman says, and his voice is so flat that my skin actually crawls. “Eighteen men heard you question whether I’m fit to inherit. Eighteen witnesses to your suggestion that I’ve gone soft for my university wife.”
The man in the chair—and oh God, I recognize him now, that’s Alexei, I’ve seen him at dinner parties, I’ve watched him toast Roman’s health—tries to answer, but Roman is already picking something from the crate.
Pliers.
“We’re going to count them together.” Roman crouches in front of the chair and rolls his shoulders once, loose and easy, settling into a stance that looks way too natural.
His watch is sitting on the crate beside his cufflinks. He took it off before he started.
Alexei is babbling now, Russian and Ukrainian and something that might be Chechen all tangled together, promises and prayers tumbling out of him. “Gospodi pomilui—please—proshu, ne nado—I’ll do anything—”
Roman grabs his left hand, spreads the fingers, and positions the pliers around the nail bed of his index finger with the same focus I’ve seen him use when he’s tuning his violin.
The veins in his forearms stand out against his skin.
He pulls.
The sound is exactly what the physics predicted—that wet, tearing noise of keratin separating from the nail bed, tissue ripping away from living flesh—and Alexei’s scream hits a frequency that makes my teeth vibrate.
I’m going to be sick.
Roman drops the nail on the concrete and wipes the pliers on a linen handkerchief with his initials embroidered on it, folding the cloth neatly, then moves to the next finger.
“Seventeen.”
I try to say something, anything, but my throat has locked itself shut, and all I can do is stand here with my hand pressed against my mouth while Boris lights a fresh cigarette and checks his watch.
Roman extracts the second nail, and Alexei passes out, his head dropping forward. Someone produces smelling salts that are strong enough to make my eyes water from across the room. Alexei jerks awake, gasping, sees his ruined hand, and starts screaming again.
“Romka,” he chokes out, “Romka, pozhaluista—”
He’s using Roman’s childhood name. This isn’t some stranger; this is someone who watched Roman grow up, who maybe held him when he was a kid, and now he’s got blood bubbling between his fingers while Roman looks at him with absolutely nothing in his eyes.
That’s when Roman sees me.
The pliers slip from his hand and clatter against the concrete.
For one single heartbeat, his face cracks open, and I see something underneath the mask that looks like pure terror.
Then the mask slides back into place so fast I almost think I imagined it, and he retrieves the pliers, passing them to Boris without a word. Then he’s walking toward me. The same steps that ate up distance yesterday when he backed me against the lab bench and kissed me.
Except yesterday, I wanted him closer.
Now every step feels like watching my marriage collapse in slow motion.
His shoes are handmade Italian leather. He walks through blood without even looking down.
He stops close, but says nothing.
“What did he do?” I rasp.
“Questioned my fitness to inherit at a gathering with Chechen representatives. Said I’ve gone soft. That I’m distracted by my university wife.” He doesn’t soften anything. “Eighteen men heard him. Vadim set the deadline.”
I know enough about Bratva culture to understand what that means. If disrespect is public, punishment has to be public too. Eighteen witnesses mean eighteen lessons.
“So you’re torturing him.”
“Yes.”
One word. He doesn’t try to make it easier to hear.
Behind him, Alexei is sobbing prayers in Russian, the same Russian my mother used to speak when she tucked me in at night, and now it’s spilling out of a man whose face is destroyed, while my husband stands in front of me looking like we’re discussing dinner plans.
“How many?” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “How many have you done this to?”
Roman holds my gaze without flinching. “Enough.”
The answer hits me harder than a number would have.
“I can’t—” But I don’t know how to finish that sentence.
Roman watches me for a second, then wipes blood from his wrist with that monogrammed handkerchief. “Building nine, East Bay. The centrifuge is there. Anton will drive you back.”
“Does it work? The torture. Does it actually stop people from questioning you?”
“No. They just get better at hiding it. But it satisfies Vadim’s requirement that I prove I can rule through fear.”
The man in the chair has degraded to these horrible animal whimpers, and Roman turns away from me, walks back to him, and takes a gun from Boris, custom-engraved with the Volkov crest.
He checks the chamber with hands that don’t shake at all.
Alexei sees the gun and starts screaming in two languages at once, words tumbling over each other in that specific way people do when they know they’re about to die. “Please—I’ll do anything—ya sdelayu chto ugodno—”
Roman raises the gun and aims at Alexei’s head.
“Don’t.” The word comes out of me before I can stop it. “Roman, don’t—”
He doesn’t lower the gun, just says, very quietly, “Close your eyes, solnyshko.”
I can’t. My eyes are fixed on the gun barrel catching fluorescent light, on the faded Orthodox cross painted on the warehouse wall, on the icon of Saint Michael visible through the office window.
Roman pulls the trigger.
The shot cracks through the warehouse. Alexei’s head snaps back, and the chair tips over and crashes to the ground.
Then silence.
There’s this small, ugly part of me that’s actually relieved the screaming stopped, and I don’t know what that makes me, but it scares me more than the blood does.
My stomach heaves.
I barely make it to the corner before I’m vomiting, everything coming up in a violent rush while my knees hit the concrete. I can’t stop. My body just keeps going until there’s nothing left, and I’m dry heaving over a floor that probably has worse things on it than my breakfast.
My vision starts going grey at the edges, and I think Roman says my name, and then everything goes dark.
* * *
I come back to the smell of blood and cedar and the sensation of being carried.
For a few disoriented seconds, I don’t understand what’s happening, just that I’m pressed against something warm and solid and moving. Roman is carrying me down a corridor with lights buzzing overhead, and his arms are tight around me.
I can smell the blood on his shirt. I can feel it dried on his forearms where they’re pressing against my back.
“Put me down.” My voice comes out hoarse, and my throat burns from the vomiting, and I’m struggling against his grip before I even finish the sentence. “Roman, put me down, I can walk, put me the fuck down—”
He doesn’t stop walking. “You passed out.”
“I don’t care, I can walk, I don’t want you touching me right now—”
His arms tighten for just a second, and his jaw clenches against the top of my head. He sets me on my feet in front of a door with his hands hovering near my elbows.
I step back from him so fast I almost trip.
“Don’t. Just—don’t.”
I can’t look at him long enough to identify what he’s thinking because every time I do, I see him crouching in front of that chair with the pliers in his hand, and my stomach threatens to revolt again.
The doors open, and I step outside and walk as far from him as I can get. Roman follows me with his right hand in his pocket and his face completely blank as he falls in step with me.
His wedding ring still has a streak of dried blood on it.
I stare at it for the entire walk to the car.
By the time we get back to the mansion, I’ve stopped shaking enough to walk on my own, but Roman stays within arm’s reach the whole time. I hate that some part of me finds that reassuring.