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“We already know you are.” Alastair shrugged. “The tattoos are a giveaway. I am curious at how high the bounty on her head is now. What made you try to take her on?”
Igor’s head fell forward, but he answered, gasping for breath at each word. “It’s one million dollars.”
Alastair looked at me and raised a brow. “Not bad, darling.”
I couldn’t believe that I was smiling as I watched this chaos. These guys were insane. But was I crazy for enjoying this as well?
“Though she’s quite priceless.” Alastair said, reaching up to Igor’s collar and pretending to smooth it out, before laying his hands flat on his chest and swinging him on his chains, causing him to moan at the new pressure the manacles put on his wrists. “So, if you ask me, you were going in cheap.”
Brett side eyed Alastair before standing in front of the young one. Konstantin.
With his contrived casual demeanor back, Brett placed his hands in fists at his pocket, picking at his nails, and looked up at the boy with a slow, maniacal grin.
“Ty russkiy, mal’chik?“ He said in an almost conversational tone. I had no idea what he was saying.
“Da.” the boy said, looking at him almost as if he had found a friendly face in the crowd. Then he looked at his friend with the missing face, and the fear returned.
“Ty ponimayesh po-angliyski?”
“Da!“ Another yes.
“Horosho.“ He turned to me, and with sympathetic eyes asked. “Did he touch you?”
My hand went to my abdomen, where thread held my flesh together. I hadn’t seen it yet. I was terrified to see what I would find underneath the bandage. “He’s the one who shot me.”
Brett let out a long breath, then a low whistle. It was such an innocuous thing, but it was menacing. Like the whistle before the boom of a rocket attack.
“Kak tebia zyvot, mal’chik?“ Brett asked. I wondered what he was saying, but didn’t stop to ask.
“Konstantin.” The boy said, tears falling freely down his face.
The boy had also been beaten, but certainly not as bad as Igor. I wondered if he had given them less problems.
“Kosta,” Brett said. “How did you find her?”
He was talking about me and the boy shook his head. “We didn’t. We saw you out together.”
Brett’s eyes widened, just for a second, then closed up again. They had recognized Brett as Jericho Vasiliev?
“We’re here to spy on him,” the boy’s eyes cut to Alastair. “To see if she’d come to him. But then… we saw you, and we…” The boy started whimpering. “We just wanted the ransom…”
“I have all the information I need. Torturing you and your friends,” with a finger, he pointed at the two men swinging beside him, drawing the boy’s terrified eyes to the sight. “It’s obviously just amusement at this point.”
Again, I laughed. It was inappropriate and the boy started shaking in fear.
“So, Kosta.” Brett continued, reaching up to slap the boy’s cheek affectionately. “I have to send a message to Anton Vasiliev.”
I tensed at the name of the pakhan, the head of the Russian mafia. I remembered him telling me that it wasn’t my night, and setting all of this in motion.
“Do I send you to him in pieces?” Brett asked, then doing something similar to Alastair, straightened the boy’s collar. “Or just your head.”
The boy started to cry, “Please! No! Niet!”
Alastair smiled at the display. Then he looked at Igor and saw that he had passed out. So he grabbed the ice pick and moved it around like it was a joystick until the man woke up again.
“Let him go.” I found myself saying. Alastair, Hugo and Brett stopped and their heads twisted towards me. “He’s just a kid. Let him go.”
Alastair tilted his head. Hugo shrugged. Brett looked at the boy pensively, unconvinced.
