Page 146 of Fractured Ties

He had news for them.

Kolya didn’t fight.

What would be the point?

He was forced down. His knees cracked against the cement and a grunt left his lips at the way the sharpness echoed through his bones. The shirt he’d tossed on was cut away, exposing the tattoos that colored his chest and shoulders. Hands tightened on his body to keep him still, but never once did he move to give them a reason to grab him tight enough to hurt.

Someone’s hand was in the back of his hair; another on top. Pinning his arms down and grabbing his throat. All the while, he watched Vadim. He watched as knives were heated by a blowtorch and readied to do the exact thing to him that he’d done to Maya’s father just a few months ago.

“Everyone has a choice to make,” Vadim said, coming closer with knives that glowed a morbid red, “and you made yours. You made choices against me, Kolya. That was how you chose to repay me for the life I gave you, and the future waiting for you to take. So, this is how I repay you—by stripping you of those things I gave you.”

He could have done without the speech. He didn’t really need it.

“Every tattoo but the cross will stay,” Vadim said. “I’ll even leave your Latin as a reminder, Kolya. Remember, you will die. You felt it so necessary to have that above your cross. You think I didn’t know why you had it done? It’ll be good for you to keep, even alongside your stars, now. Because that’s all you are—vor, but a worthless one at that. One simply waiting for death that will inevitably come, yes?”

Vadim kneeled down and stared Kolya in the face at eye-level. “She was not worth this, Kolya.”

The last words he chose to speak to his father in that chamber slipped from his lips easily, and honestly. “Yes, she absolutely was.”

It probably wasn’t the right thing to say. If anything, it likely pissed his father off more. But Kolya refused to bend to Vadim more than he already was. He was on his fucking knees, a burning hot knife dangerously close to his chest, and that was enough.

He would not give more.

The first burn of the knife coming down against Kolya’s thieves’ cross was enough to make him open his mouth to shout. Somehow, he forced that urge to scream back. He tensed, sure, his arms and body straining with the need to fight back against those who held him down. But he didn’t say a goddamn thing.

To make noise was to be weak.

To beg was certain death.

He would do none of it.

But the pain. The pain was blinding—searing. A shock to his system that nearly sent him straight to his feet even with all the hands keeping him down on his knees. With the second knife, Kolya swore he felt the way a strip of his skin melted under the hot blade of the knife, and then how it was ripped away from his body when the weapon was lifted and tossed to the side.

Vadim didn’t let up, and he didn’t give Kolya a break. Not even when one of the men let Kolya go to stumble off to the side and vomit in a corner. His father only spoke when he was ready to demand another knife be handed over so he could begin the process once more.

Over and over and over again.

Until sweat dripped down his skin and he’d clenched his teeth so hard to keep from crying out that he was sure he’d cracked his molars. Until his fingernails broke through the skin of his palms, and he could taste blood in his mouth.

Until he wanted to sob, but the pain had crossed a threshold of no return. Where he was more numb than he was in agony, and he just wished it was over.

And still, he kept quiet.

Still, he didn’t fight.

Kolya wasn’t sure when it ended—he’d blinked out at some point. The agony touched a level where his body decided to shut down, and all he saw was black. His chest was no doubt a raw mess of burns, and the last thing he needed to do was rest on a dirty, wet cement floor. That was exactly what he did when the hands finally left his body.

The last thing he heard as his body rested against cold cement was the whimpering of a puppy, and the whisper of a man he hated.

“Leave him,” Vadim said.

The door banged shut again.

If there was a hell, this was surely it.

• • •

Pain.