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It’s been a long time since I’ve been this covered in blood.
The screams have stopped. The stockier one, whose name I know now is Andrei, is sitting in front of me, slack-jawed and tied to a chair. The other, Stepan, is on the other side of the shed, kneeling with one of my men standing over him, ready to react at the slightest sign of resistance.
The shed smells like blood and piss. Both men soiled themselves at some point, Stepan first. For all that, he’s apparently the one who is responsible for most of Caterina’s condition; he’s a sniveling coward when it comes to his own pain. Which is why I chose to question him second.
I’m enjoying forcing him to watch while I question Andrei. I’m enjoying giving him the extra time to think about exactly what I’m going to do to him when it’s his turn, and not just because I want information from him.
Because I want him to hurt, the way he hurt my wife.
Andrei, unsurprisingly, didn’t know much. He’d tried to act tough, told me to fuck off at first, but once I’d liberated a few of his teeth, he’d started to sing a different tune. A fingernail or two later, and he was screaming that they’d been hired by a third party, just a job to watch an asset for someone important in Moscow and get a little information out of her. He didn’t know who the boss was or who was behind it, and he’d stuck to that story well enough through a solid beating and a couple more teeth being pried out of his mouth that I was convinced.
That didn’t stop me from breaking every finger on his right hand when I discovered he’d held Caterina down for Stepan to beat her after she tried to fight back.
This isn’t an ideal situation by any stretch of the word. I’ve tortured men before, of course, these days I tend to leave it to someone else I trust when such methods are necessary, like Mikhail or Alexei, when Alexei was still someone I could trust. And when I have been the one to apply the heavy hand, it’s been with a cool head and a detachment that enables me to get the information I need and then let it go.
But there’s no keeping a cool head in this situation. I can’t look at either of these two men without seeing Caterina and everything they did to her. It’s all I can do just to stick to extracting information from them and not simply tearing them limb from limb for my own revenge.
“Don’t kill me, please—” Andrei starts to blubber, the words coming out strangely through his missing teeth, blood and saliva dripping down his chin. “Please, I’ll tell you anything else I know, I know it’s not much—”
“I’ve heard all I need from you. You’re lucky I don’t take your tongue for the pleasure of it.” I jerk my head towards one of my men. “Cuff him again. It’s the other one’s turn.”
Stepan lets out a high, keening noise, like a trapped animal, and the man holding him cuffs him in the side of the head hard. “Shut up,” he snarls in Russian as Stepan rocks sideways on his knees. “You talk when theUssuritells you to talk, and no sooner.”
It’s gratifying to hear loyalty from one of my men at this point. I think that I can trust everyone here with me, but there’s no way to know for certain. Alexei’s poison has run deeper than I’d expected, and I know that it’s wise to keep one eye open until every last bit of it can be rooted out.
Stepan’s cowardice makes my job easy, but it doesn’t help him in the slightest. I have no intention of showing him mercy, especially after how thoroughly Andrei blurted out that Stepan was responsible for most of Caterina’s injuries while I was working his thumbnail free. Stepan had done his best to argue his case, but no one was listening to him at that point.
The only thing that saved Andrei more pain was his assurance that they hadn’t violated Caterina at any point and his blubbering over and over again that Stepan was the one who had taken the most pleasure in hurting her, that he’d kept going long after Andrei had suggested that there was no point to it anymore. I hadn’t believed him at first, thinking that he might simply have been trying to save his own skin. When a man repeats the same story over and over under such duress, it’s usually the truth.
Stepan, it turns out, doesn’t know any more than Andrei does about their shadowy employer. Neither of them was there when Caterina was kidnapped to hear them tell the story. She was dropped off and drugged at the cabin, and watched until Stepan and Andrei arrived for their guard duty. Then the kidnappers left, without ever speaking to either man or showing their faces. The payment was left in a cupboard inside the cabin, and strict instructions on a burner phone voicemail about what they were to do with Caterina.
Andrei had laid those instructions out for me, quite clearly for a man who’d had pliers locked around one of his molars a few moments before.
Hurt her only as much as necessary to get information.
Question her about her husband, a man named Viktor Andreyev, and get information about his business.
Keep her alive, to be transported to the next location when instructions were given.
Not to rape her, do permanent damage, or harm her face.
I’d been moderately impressed at how well Andrei had managed to recall all of that, enough that I’d given him a few moments respite from the torture before starting back in again. It’s also frustratingly clear that neither man will be able to provide me with anything that will tell me if this is Igor or someone else who is behind all of this, let alone if Alexei is connected to it.
Which makes it even harder to contain the furious rage that makes me want to rip Stepan apart and scatter the bits of him across the Russian wilderness.
I ask him, again and again, why he continued to torture Caterina when it was clear that there was no more information he could get out of her.
At first, he insists that it was his instructions. But I already know that’s a lie.
There are few things in this world that I hate more than a liar.
By the time he starts to beg, I can feel myself on the verge of losing my cool. I’m already in a fog of rage, my shirtsleeves rolled up above my elbows, my forearms spattered with blood. I feel as if I’m slipping into some kind of daze, an out-of-body experience where I no longer really care about what comes out of Stepan’s mouth.
I know the truth. He enjoyed hurting Caterina. He enjoyed inflicting pain, finding all the ways he could take her apart at the seams without technically breaking the rules, and maybe he even got off on it. Who fucking knows. But whatIknow is that nothing on earth will stop me from inflicting that same pain on him for my own brutal revenge. Not the truth, not his pleas, not anything he can say or tell me. He could lay out every secret in Moscow for me on a silver platter, and I would still carve lines in his body to match the ones on Caterina’s flesh.
At some point, I think he realizes that—that his fate is sealed, no matter what he says. That I don’t give a shit what comes out of his mouth. And that’s when his cowardice shifts to something approaching bravery—or really, just defiance.
“I fucking liked hearing her scream, what about that?” he spits through a bloody mouth, sneering at me. “I wanted to fuck her until she screamed some more, but Andrei wouldn’t let me. He wanted to stick to therules. Well, the rules don’t fucking matter now, do they? We’re here, and you’re going to fucking kill us once you’re satisfied. So I might as well have gotten to put a load of my own in that pretty Italian bride of yours.” He spits, blood spattering across the floor. “I bet she would have felt so fucking tight and sweet around my—"
