Page 95 of Brutal Union
I am seconds from letting those forbidden words roll across my tongue when Sho pulls away from me.
“Scream if you need me,” he whispers into my hair, before turning back to Boris with a large smile. “Goodbye Boris, enjoy your final sunrise.”
My eyes dart to the small window being illuminated with the orange and pinks of the rising sun, as I listen to the soft creak of the basement stairs of Sho leaving the basement.
I stay where he left me, my hands still trembling faintly, as the weight of his absence presses against my spine. The warmth of his touch lingers along my hip, ghosting the spot where he’d held me as if his hand had carved itself into my skin. But now, the air is colder, harsher. The scent of blood and rot reclaims the room in his wake.
And in front of me, chained and quivering, is the man I once feared above all else staring at me like an expectant child.
The man who ruled entire cities with nothing but his reputation and a single word. The man who tore my mother to pieces—body and mind—and carved a legacy of violence into my bones. Now, he is nothing more than sagging flesh and fractured pride, bound to a wooden beam like a criminal from another age. His muscles twitch under broken skin, his chains groaning softly with every pitiful shift.
I walk toward him with the lazy stride of a queen walking down the aisle to her coronation. My steps land with a hollow, steady rhythm on the bloodstained floor, and the echo feels like a drumbeat of judgment in the silence. As I near him, he attempts to raise his head. The effort alone seems monumental, and when he finally manages to lift his gaze, his one open eye fixes on me with a murky desperation. There is no hate in it. No command, but he can’t stop the hatred flooding his pupils.
A bitter laugh coils in my throat before I even realize it's coming. I don’t try to hide it. I let it spill freely into the room, low and humorless. I stop just inches away from him, arms loosely folded across my chest, as I take in every broken detail of the monster who made me.
“I almost don’t believe it,” I murmur, my voice smooth and edged with ice. “Captured again. Stripped, gagged, shaking in your own filth. My, my how the mighty have fallen.”
My fingers dance along his chains, a small smile on my face.
“Papa,” I croon, the word soaked in irony and venom, “you used to walk through rooms like a god, remember?”
I drift closer, running my nails lightly down the rusted links that bind him, watching his skin flinch with every tap.
“Entire mafias bowed to your presence. Grown men pissed themselves at the sound of your name. You were bigger than life.”
I circle him again, moving with an assassin’s patience and precision, each step punctuated by the sharp click of my heels against the warped floorboards. The scent of stale blood and rot trails with me like a shroud. His head twitches toward my voice, but he doesn’t have the strength to follow. Not completely.
“Andwow…” I let the word drag from my lips like smoke, stopping just behind him, my voice dipping lower. “Look at you now.”
His chains shudder with sudden motion, jerking beneath my fingers. A wheezing, guttural sound bubbles up from his throat—a mixture of rage and desperation. It makes the gag twist obscenely in his mouth as he tries to speak through it, biting down as if he could chew his words back into power.
But it’s too late for that.
I lean in closer, my lips inches from the slick, crusted edge of his ear.
“Nikolia would love to see you like this,” I whisper, my tone rich with satisfaction. “I should warn you—we didn’t denounce him like you wanted. That fantasy of yours? Where we cut him out of the bloodline like a cancer?” I chuckle under my breath. “Didn’t happen. Because half or full, he’s still our brother. And unlike you, he actuallyearnedour loyalty, well after I roughed him up a bit.”
I round the chair and squat in front of him, my fingers curling delicately around the twisted wire securing the gag. His eye meets mine—bloodshot, feral, pleading. He grunts again, more frantic now, trying to communicate something through the wet gag that chokes his breath. Sweat pours down his ruined face, trailing through grime and blood.
I tilt my head, studying him. Then, slowly I wipe the soot off his cheek in calm loving strokes, like I am his endearing daughter, and not the assassin he has raised me to be.
“You want to say something, Papa?” I murmur, voice lilting with mockery. “You alwaysdidlove the sound of your own voice.”
The final twist of wire comes free with a brittle snap. I draw the blood-stained cloth from his mouth, careful not to flinch as it peels away from his split, bloated lips with a sucking sound.
His first gasp is ragged—raw like he’s been breathing through gravel. He coughs, spits blood onto the floor between us, and wheezes a breath that sounds half like a sob, half like a curse. When he finally finds his voice, it scrapes out of his throat like it was dragged over nails.
“N-Nadia…” he rasps.
“You said I was weak,” I continue, cutting him off and stepping behind him as I speak low into his ear. “You said I’d neversurvive without your name, your guidance, your rules. That I would be no better than my mother, conning men into loving me just so I could betray them. That I’d amount to nothing but a ghost of your shadow.”
I step back into view, crouching in front of him, tilting my head as I study his face. His jaw is slack, his lips cracked and bleeding at the corners. The gauze twisted across his mouth is dark with dried saliva and blood, sagging slightly from hours of muffled moaning. I don’t flinch. I don’t feel pity. Not even a flicker. Just a simmering, precise satisfaction.
“Funny,” I say, voice soft now, almost thoughtful. “Because I’m standing here. And you—” I gesture to his ruined form with a flick of my hand “—you’re not even fit to be a jester, let alone the king of the Bratva.”
I reach down and pick up one of the teeth from the floor, warm and slick between my fingers. I let it dangle in the space between us, holding it where he can see the blood crusted into the enamel. He stares at it like it’s a weapon, or a confession.
“Did it hurt?” I ask, one brow arching, my voice deceptively gentle. “When Sho ripped this out? Or did he punch them out because youneverlearned to shut the fuck up?”
