Page 2 of Ruinous Need
“NO. NO.”
The man is a wreck as soon as I emerge from the shadows. It’s pathetic to see.
There’s a jolt of recognition as our eyes meet.
His hands claw at the stony floor of the cell as he scurries away until he hits the cold metal bars and curls against them. As if that will save him. He lets out a sob.
Coward. Though I’d expect nothing less.
Georgy Vontov is not the man he once was. The shaking, soft figure in a suit was once someone I looked up to. Even admired.
He sat at the old Pakhan’s right hand, part of the Council. The group that runs the Russian mafia in this city.
Powerful. Untouchable. One of the gods.
Then, when things changed, when I made sure there were consequences for the way they’d used people’s lives like pawns, he ran away. So many of them did, with their rotten empire stretching to every corner of the globe and safe houses dotted across it.
Tracking them down is like trying to exterminate rats.
We’ve been hunting Vontov for years alongside the others.
I’m an assassin with a specific task. Tracking down the slippery bastards who were on the old Pakhan’s council, so I can kill them one by one.
Fine, it’s a task I assigned myself. Vengeance for my best friend Lev.
Slowly, more slowly than my rage demands, we’ve been working our way through these stragglers. They’ll get what they deserve.
“Georgy,” I haul him up by the collar of his shirt. “Where are the rest of you hiding?”
“Please, please.” He’s shaking with fear. I release him, and he scrambles back to the corner.
“I’ll keep you alive as long as you take to tell us.”
At the first touch of the blade to his skin, he gives a piercing scream.
By the twentieth, he is silent, pale, slumped to the ground in a heap. The dark stone floor is wet with blood.
“Georgy,” I ask him again. “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to say?”
He shakes his head, his lips pressed together in a line.
I have to say I’m surprised. A coward like him — I thought he’d sing like a bird. Maybe the stragglers are more organized than we’d thought.
Someone like Georgy Vontov only stays quiet if he believes the reward is big enough to warrant it.
I put down the knife and settle back onto the chair, wiping the blood from my hands on a black cloth.
I watch him as I turn it over in my head. Where he’s likely to have come from. Where the rest of them are hiding. What they’re plotting, out there in the darkness. How I can get to them.
Whether any of it will ever be enough to satiate the never-ending need for revenge that feels like a red-hot coal lodged in my chest.
The sound of the bolt clicking startles me.
“Semyon,” I look up to see my cousin’s tall, thin frame in the doorway. He’s wearing a crisp grey suit, his blonde hair slicked back and his fingers gleaming with rings.
Since becoming the Pakhan, he likes to dress the part.
My cousin has never dirtied his hands with the sharp end of Bratva work. He’s the epitome of an heir who feels entitled to power but doesn’t want to work for it.
