Page 69 of Nightfire

Nikitin didn’t answer. He simply waited. She could see Dmitri holding the cloth behind him. He didn’t have to talk.

“There’s—there’s a man. He comes for her almost every day she’s there. He’s like her shadow.” She coughed, a paroxysm that lasted several minutes.

Yes! Nikitin didn’t move a muscle. Merely asked, quietly, “Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” she wheezed. “But he’s a big man. Not tall, but big. Like a weight lifter.”

“What did he drive?”

A frown appeared between her eyebrows. She coughed again. “I don’t know. One of those big gringo cars.”

“An SUV?”

She nodded. “Tell me the model.”

She shook her head. Nikitin restrained himself from slapping her hard. It wouldn’t help. She didn’t know. The whores didn’t drive. Weren’t allowed to learn. A driver’s license in the hands of a whore could be very dangerous.

“And where does this Chloe live?”

She shook her head but her eyes flickered. She knew. The bitch knew. Nikitin leaned right over her, gazing directly into her eyes. Out of her line of sight, he signaled to Dmitri. He dropped a cloth over her face and started pouring. She didn’t have time to prepare herself and breathed in sharply. The only effect was to tighten the grip of the cloth over her face. She started choking immediately, kicking madly against the restraints, mewling sounds coming from under the cloth.

If he took a blood sample right now, the carbon dioxide level would be extremely high.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. He looked at Dmitri who lifted the cloth.

Her eyes were wild, unfocused. She’d been convinced that she was going to die. Nikitin had once seen a Special Forces soldier, an Amerikansky, resist hours of waterboarding, but he’d been trained. He hadn’t talked but he had been reduced to an animal and had been shot later, almost as an act of pity.

Her eyes were rolling around in her head, like an animal’s. Nikitin clasped her jaw tightly, painfully, and turned her head to him. “Listen to me.” He waited until her eyes focused on him. She was breathing in short, ragged breaths, her entire body shuddering.

Good.

“Where. Does. Chloe. Live.”

Nikitin deliberately looked up at Dmitri, who stood ready. She saw that and shuddered. The whore’s body would be telling her she wouldn’t survive another round. She would, but she wouldn’t understand that. There would be very little reasoning bouncing around in her head, just dark primal fears.

The whore opened her mouth but only clicking sounds came out of her throat, the sounds of sheer terror. Nikitin waited. No use punishing her when her body wouldn’t let her talk. He waited, watching her eyes carefully. He recognized the exact moment in which she came back into herself.

“Where?” he repeated.

There was no resistance in her. None. Her body had almost died and had come back, the most primal experience a living being can have. Next to that, there was nothing she could do.

“Coronado Shores,” the whore gasped. “That’s what I heard some of the other girls say. La Torre.” She wheezed, her body trying to pull in air.

Nikitin didn’t press. He had a vague idea of where—and above all what—Coronado Shores was. A place for the rich. La Torre. He had to tuck that name away and find out later. He merely nodded, as if confirming what he already knew.

“What else?” he asked, keeping his tone low and bored. As if what she was saying were of little significance. “What else do you know about her?”

Now she was looking confused. She gazed right into his eyes, something a chernye, a whore, should never do. And they didn’t. The women at the Club were trained not to look a man in the eyes until they were having sex.

This one was looking straight at him, training forgotten, terrified. “Nothing. I know nothing else.” Her voice was low, shock still in the tones. And truth in every syllable.

Nikitin knew truth and he knew lies. He’d broken enough men to know the difference. The woman had no more information to give. She didn’t know where his men were. If she had any information at all, she’d have given it. She was useless to him.

“Three more times,” he growled to Dmitri in Russian.

Three more would break her. The bitch deserved it. If she hadn’t started acting up, he would never have had to send his men on a mission that had inexplicably swallowed them whole, leaving him with one man in a foreign country, with the vory back home expecting everything to be ready for the arrival of the first shipment in four days’ time.

He stood and looked down at the woman who was so much trouble. If she hadn’t been worth money to his backers, he’d have had her killed, and not slowly.