Trey
“Come on, Eight, answer your fucking phone.” It’s late, the sun commenced setting hours ago, and I haven’t had an update from Eight since this morning. The last time I heard from him, K was as lifeless as a plank of wood, unblinking and unspeaking. She’d been that way since Eight carried her into the compound she was raped, beaten, and sodomized in.
I get why he chose that location, I understand it’s the one spot Nikolai’s enemies would never consider looking if Nikolai’s disappearance was about more than a turf war, but my fucking God am I fretting our actions today will set K’s recovery back by months.
You can’t teach someone to swim by throwing them into a pool and hoping they’ll stay afloat. The same can be said for the nightmares of your past. More times than not, forcing someone to relive the experience fuck’s them up even more. I’m living proof of this.
Nikolai’s disappearance was because a man wanted a monarchy that wasn’t his. He took the rules we lived by, bended them to suit himself, then stormed in with the aggression Cole used when he thought he was wronged by our father.
It got men killed, women and a kid victimized, and has put my head into such a dark and temperamental place, I’m worried not even K will be able to yank me off the ledge.
I was born for this life. I was raised by a killer to be a killer. I can end a life without the slightest flip to my stomach, and sit down for a meal only seconds later, but I wasn’t taught how to handle any of the things I’ve been bombarded with today.
Love fucks everything up. It screws you over like you spent a thousand dollars on a whore only to discover she has a dick between her legs, and will have you wondering why you ever signed up for this shit in the first place. But, even in the darkest of moments, it will also convince you that you can’t live without it. It’ll have you craving it like it’s a drug, and have you begging for another hit before you’ve even snorted the first line.
It’ll even convince you that no matter how loud the dark calls for you, you don’t have to walk into it. My past fucked with my head today. It screwed me over, and had me convinced I’m not cut out for this life, but instead of letting it get the better of me, I fed off it. I dared it to push me harder and to try and break me.
All it did was make me stronger.
What I said all those months ago was true. I didn’t want to break K, I wanted K to break me.
Today broke me, yet here I am, still breathing and alive. That wouldn’t have been the case if I hadn’t seen the slightest flicker of life in the eyes of a grubby, malnourished sex-slave. K was forced to walk through the gates of hell unaccompanied, but instead of letting it consume her, she whizzed through the place like she owned it. That’s why her crown will never slant even in the windiest conditions. She’s a true duchess who knows even a pawn can become a queen if you play the game right.
After pulling my Shelby behind Eight’s car, I throw open my driver’s side door and hot-foot it up the stairs K raced up when I separated her from the pack.
My brutal speed slows when I spot Eight’s phone sitting at the foot of the internal stairwell. I know it’s his phone. His screen is proof of his namesake. You can’t see his eight fingers since they’re occupying two of the eight whores surrounding him, but they’re not the only part of his body my brothers referenced when considering his nickname.
When I bob down to gather up Eight’s phone, the faint murmur of a set of voices hits my ears. I think one of them belongs to Eight, but I can’t be sure. Although they sound like they’re coming from below me, something steers me toward the stairwell. It could be intuition, or the fact my pulse thuds in my ears the more I approach the stairwell.
After removing my gun from the back of my jeans, I climb the soot-covered stairs two steps at a time. Unlike today’s mission to find Nikolai, I go into this operation with complete silence. K taught me that silence can be your greatest strength when you live in a world with people who refuse to hear your words even when you speak the same language as them.
My gun enters the room Vladimir was killed in before me. Although the accented voices trickling into my ears still sound like they’re coming from beneath me, this is the only room reflecting any light.
“What the fuck?” I murmur to myself when I discover the light is beaming out of a trapdoor in the corner of the room.
Most of the theories I ran with today were based on Vladimir escaping the inferno K and I lit twenty minutes after Nikolai took him down with a knife to his chest. Justine’s representation of the noise Vladimir made when she removed Nikolai’s knife wasn’t close to the gargle that left Kliment’s mouth when he stupidly touched Justine without permission earlier. Add that to the fact the information Maxsim had on Nikolai was only known by a handful of people, and I was convinced we were dealing with a ghost.
It wouldn’t be the first time a ghost has resurrected from hell. Now this adds credit to my theory. The trapdoor is mere feet from the spot Vladimir laid dead when Nero threw gasoline over the walls. He could have rolled to safety. He could still be alive.
I gallop down the stairwell at the speed of lightning. My heart is pounding in my ears, but for the first time in years, I’m not seeing it as a good thump. Vladimir kept K in the room across from his. He only ever did that with his favorite whores. If he’s alive, and K is missing, that can only mean one thing…
No!I refuse to say it.
She’s free from that life. I promised no one would ever touch her without her permission. I’m going to keep my fucking promise.
With my blood pressure sky high, and my finger curled around the trigger of my gun, I enter a bunker-type room at the end of a pitch black corridor. My stomach heaves in disgust about the skank smell streaming into my nose, but my wish to find K keeps my head screwed on straight.
The smell of a rotting corpse is not my brother.
He’s buried thousands of miles away from here.
He can’t come back from death for the second time.
I jackknife to the right when a thick Russian accent says, “Don’t be shy, little one. I’m not going to hurt you… yet. If you behave, I can play nice too.”
My chest rises and falls in rapid concession when I take in the wrinkled face of Vladimir Popov. It’s grainier than I remembered, duller. That probably has more to do with the fact I’m peering at him through a bank of security monitors than seeing him in the flesh.
When he shifts to the right, my blood turns black. K is cowering in the corner of Vladimir’s private suite. Her cheek is red like it was recently slapped and her eyes are brimming with wetness, although not a single drop flows down her cheeks.
