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Reaching the opening that leads into the torture chamber, I pause. The scene before me turns my stomach. The five men hanging from the ceiling chains have had their shirts ripped unceremoniously from their bodies to expose their vulnerable flesh. To the man, they look terrified. And several are sporting fresh cuts and bruises.
The one who gave me and Lenka such a hard time has his eyes focused on the younger man hanging in the middle. I see the kid clearly for the first time since we lured them into our trap. I was so focused on the man I was subduing, I didn’t have time to think about anyone else. But the younger brother can’t be more than sixteen, I would say, and he’s as white as a sheet, trembling like a leaf now that he has no shirt.
But when Sergio eyes him coolly, the kid raises his chin in defiance.
“Maybe you should have taken better care of your brother and kept him out of this entirely if you didn’t want him to face the consequences,” Sergio reasons, his tone cold and emotionless, perfectly comfortable with killing the brother despite his prisoner’s pleas—or the kid’s young age. He approaches the kid, studying him closely, then pats him harshly on the cheek, turning the skin red beneath his palm.
“Don’t you fucking touch him!” the man hisses, and he spits on the floor at Sergio’s feet. “Or are kids all you can manage to intimidate these days? You’re going to die, old man. Your time is up, and I can’t wait to see you in hell.”
All concerns about whether I might be walking into a trap are long gone because the sight of the scene before me brings me back to cold, hard reality. This is how my brother died. Sascha would have had the same fiery temper as this man, the same insults launched like missiles, because when you trap a wild animal, they don’t know any better than to lash out with every weapon they’ve got.
Those same cruel-looking tools laid out on a bench beside Sergio were likely used on the person I was closest to in the world, the man who would have done or said anything to try and save my life in this very situation.
And now my brother is gone because Sergio is an animal—no, I won’t give him the dignity of that title. He’s a monster.
Viktor chortles as he strides forward to stand in front of the man trying to save his kid brother’s life. “What makes you think you have any right to speak to Sergio Sakharov like that?” he asks snidely. Then he buries his fist in the guy’s stomach, drawing an agonized groan in response. “Yeah, not so cocky now, are you?” he sneers.
Mocking chuckles ripple through Rasputin’s men.
Rage boils up inside me at the thought of my brother suffering a fate like this. And it hits me full force—the fury that made me want to kill Sergio so badly in the first place. My whole reason for being a part of this operation. He took my brother from me. He cut Sascha down simply because Sergio didn’t like the Nezhit Bratva.
He wanted what they had, and he was willing to kill whoever got in his way.
My brother and I never did anything to hurt the Sakharov family. We had no beef with them aside from resisting when they tried to claim our territory. We were targets because Sergio is greedy, and no amount of power or wealth is ever going to be enough to satisfy him.
Now, Sascha’s dead, wiped from the face of the earth with as little consideration as one might kill an ant after burning it under a microscope.
This is it.
I need to stop stalling and do what I came here to do.
Because Sergio is about to rip apart another family. He seems perfectly comfortable with torturing this guy’s younger brother right in front of him. I can see it in the malicious glint in his eye. Sergio enjoys this. He’s sick, twisted, sadistic.
And for that, he will die.
Right now, I have the perfect opportunity. Everyone else’s attention is on the five men chained at the center of the room. No one’s even noticed my arrival. No one’s on guard about Sergio’s safety because they trust all the men in this operation with his life.
That’s where they made their first mistake.
I could put a bullet in the back of Sergio’s head—and likely kill Rasputin and several of his men as well—before anyone made sense of what was going on.
“Did you really think you would get away with it?” Sergio growls as he stands in front of the kid, but his eyes are on the older brother. “And then what? You thought you could just slink back into the gutter you came from? I will rip you limb from limb. I will remove every one of your fingers. Then your toes. And then I’ll feed them to you.”
My hand is inside my jacket and on my gun before I’ve consciously made up my mind.
I step back into the shadows slightly, using the doorway as my cover while I take aim.
First Sergio, then Rasputin, with Viktor shortly behind—those are my priorities.
The other three, I will have to take down as they come. Because by then, I’m sure they will have figured out that I’m a threat. But even if I had to take all three, I could do it.
They’re all dead.
I inhale slowly and release it. The first bullet can’t miss.
It’s the only one I absolutely have to get right on the first try.
But as I lock onto Sergio with my sights, my finger hesitates on the trigger.
