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And even though this fuckface hadn't killed the girl, I knew there was no way I could leave him breathing. I couldn't let him tie back to me.
So his head, much like my father's, got smashed against the brick wall of the building, and he got left there to bleed out like an animal on the side of the road.
It was my fourth kill since I crossed into Russia.
Seventh total.
My father, two men I had come across abusing women in the Ukraine, and then a group of laborers in Russia that had two women trapped in an abandoned building, running trains on them.
In places where justice would fail women, I stepped in.
There wasn't even a choice.
"Ah but they do. They know it. They say it. In whispers, mostly."
I needed to get up and walk away.
I needed to get as far as fast as I could.
But something about this man had me frozen on the spot.
"People should keep their mouths shut."
"What? You gonna cut out their tongues if they don't?"
"Don't know what rumors you're hearing, frate, but they aren't about me."
"Some vigilante shit."
I stayed silent for a moment, debating whether it was better to lie, or to admit to the truth.
"Your friends must be confused. No one would consider me a vigilante."
"A righter of wrongs," he suggested instead, tapping the bar as I finished my drink.
I shook my head at him, moving to push off the stool. "I have places to be."
"Side of the road, praying not to lose a foot to frostbite. Man like you, you could do better."
I won't lie. At this point, I knew exactly what kind of man I was talking to. You couldn't be in the country for more than an hour without overhearing rumors about how corrupt things were, how much the Bratva still had a stronghold in many parts of Russia.
And because I knew about them, I knew what they could do for me.
To be perfectly honest, I was getting a little sick of not always having enough food in my stomach, of being cold, of not having a place to lay my head.
And being that I never finished school, I had no trade, and I couldn't think of a way to secure my future.
If this man, Andrei, was going to give me that opportunity, I wasn't in the position to turn that down.
Wouldn't it just turn out to be poetic that these particular mafia members were in charge of a medium-level arms-dealing ring?
The deal I got was to drive the shit from point A to point B. In return, they would smooth over any possible repercussions from my 'extracurricular activities' that they seemed like they had no issue with.
So I drove.
Russia to Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan to Georgia.
Georgia to Turkey.
Turkey to Syria.
After Syria, that was where someone else took over, likely carting the shit off to every country from Iraq to Pakistan to the Ivory Coast and the Congo. If there was some kind of war or civil unrest going on in Europe, Asia, or Africa, chances were that the Bratva was supplying the arms.
And, well, let's just say, when it came to crimes against women, you found a lot to work with across many of the places I visited.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had made the trip dozens of times, had left dozens of bodies in my wake.
It wasn't until I was back in Russia after my most recent trip down to Syria that I finally felt some heat surrounding it.
But, well, that can be expected when you in one of your cold, hard rages broke the hand, jaw, nose, three ribs, and four teeth of a man who had done so to his wife and daughter, before killing him.
Then later realizing the man you had taken out was the motherfucking Sovietnik - the Russian equivalent to the Italian Consigliere, or 'counselor.'
I spent so much time out of the country that I didn't know my power dynamics as they shifted.
Not that it would have necessarily stopped me anyway.
I was never exactly rational about who I did or didn't take down.
"It's not good, comrade, not good," Andrei told me over a bottle of vodka in my kitchen, a place that I spent so little time in that I never even got around to getting a couch for the living room.
"Yeah, got that, Andrei," I agreed, exhaling hard.
"They like your ruthlessness usually." That wasn't a lie. If there was anything the Bratva liked, it was vicious, cold-blooded killers. "But this, this they can't forgive. It won't look good, letting you live. I shouldn't even be telling you this, warning you. I shouldn't even know myself."
He was taking a huge risk in giving me a heads-up.
I guess he figured that he had at least two days before the Pakhan and his best Boyevik could make their way in from Moscow to hand down my sentence - meaning my bloody death - and he had a chance to do so without bringing suspicion down on himself.
