Page 99 of Ballistic

“He was murdered because of you. But no matter, he was dead, anyway, for what he did to her. My wife.”

“My wife.” Tesarik spoke through clenched teeth and turned to face Dmitry. “She was mine first.”

“She never loved you, Jozef. Surely, even you could see that.”

“She was bewitched! Just like your skurveny Rus father, turning our mother into a whore. Not even worthy enough for my father’s name.” Chin high and lip twisted in contempt, he gave a dismissive wave. “You had to take our mother’s.”

I recognized the term Tesarik had used to describe one of his Russian acquaintances—one he hadn’t been particularly fond of, nor trusted, so I had to assume it was a derogatory slap against Dmitry’s father, who I already knew to be Russian.

Tesarik sucked in another drag of his cigarette and pointed back at Dmitry. “You know, I could’ve been a different man. A woman, a wife like that could’ve changed me.”

Neither of the two seemed ruffled by the other, like watching two sharks circle each other in the water. Dmitry had once told me he’d expected the end. He welcomed it. Perhaps Tesarik felt the same.

Maybe that was how men like them lived, always prepared to die.

“It wouldn’t have changed anything.” Hands behind his back, Dmitry stepped closer, and when he circled Tesarik, the shark visual came to mind again.

“Am I to assume you’re the thief who stole my money?”

“Your money? Paid by the lives of so many innocent? It hardly belonged to you.”

Tesarik remained silent, but I caught sight of his thumb rubbing across his fingers, indicating he’d grown increasingly on edge. I remembered the gesture the night his men had captured Aleksey and me, as we’d tried to get away. Aleksey had come to rescue me on his own, and paid in what I could only imagine was the most horrific death.

I couldn’t think about that. Not yet. I’d wait until later, when everything, including Dax, would come crashing down on me. An entire world of pain pressing its weight into my conscience. Killing me from the inside out.

But not yet.

“I had Nicoleta delete them.” The easy way Dmitry said it forced me to hold back a chuckle. Only someone as intimidating as Dmitry could get away with speaking so casually to a man like Tesarik—one psychopath to another. “It’s gone. Poof. No more.”

“You fool. You fucking fool!” Tesarik tugged a gun from beneath his suit coat, tightening my chest, as Dmitry stood with his back to the bastard. Before he could take the shot, he fell to his knees and cried out.

A stray shot whizzed past me, the burn streaking across my cheek, and the sound of broken glass chimed its exit. I swung around to see the hole in the window, with its branching cracks, and slapped a hand to my face, damned near pissing myself as I palpated the wound that extended up my cheek, angled in the same trajectory as the bullet. Holy hell, that was close! An inch closer, and I’d have had a hole through my face.

Tesarik’s gun clanged against the wooden floor, and he smacked a hand to his shoulder where Dmitry’s guard had nailed him. “Do piče!”

“Heartbreaking isn’t it? How your entire world can collapse in a matter of seconds? One minute, you’re a king, sitting on top of the world, and in one blink, you’ve lost everything that mattered.” With his gloved hands clasped behind him, Dmitry paced alongside his suffering brother.

Tesarik groaned and fell back onto the floor, beside the scatter of blood drops.

“Your failure was your greed. Your love for money. There’s no passion in that, Jozef. No purpose.” Dmitry shrugged, head tipped as he stared down at his brother. “Now look at you.”

“You won’t kill me. You’re weak. You’ve always been weak.” Tesarik spat at Dmitry’s feet, still holding his wound to staunch the oozing blood.

“You mistook compassion for weakness. But you’ve stripped me of that, now. So unlike you, who left me to live with the memory of that night, I am going to kill you.” He reached back his hand, and another guard emerged from the shadows, carrying a medium-sized plastic bottle that he handed off to Dmitry. “But first, I’m going to watch you suffer.”

The second guard, dressed in black like Dmitry, moved like a phantom, taking position behind Tesarik.

Tesarik fell forward, his good arm stretched out toward his fallen gun, and the guard slammed his boot down on his elbow with a sickening crack.

I flinched, as Tesarik’s scream reverberated off the walls of the hollow room.

Dmitry poured what I surmised as acid, given the curls of smoke that rose up on impact with Tesarik’s skin, and those screams turned blood-curdling. A sound like nothing I’d ever heard before. The sizzle of his skin coiled my stomach, and I had to look away as the gore of his wounds dripped onto the floor in a pool of blood and burned flesh that left a dark brown stain on the wood.

With his cheek pressed into his arm, Tesarik’s body seized on the floor while his hand liquefied before his eyes.

“It’s unbearable, the pain. And I wish I could say it subsides at some point, but it doesn’t.” Dmitry set the bottle down and crouched in front of his brother, removing his black gloves. “Even now, just watching you, I can feel the burning across my skin.”

“I … kill you.”