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“What are you talking about? Do you realize how insane that sounds?” I ask, growing less patient by the minute.
“Yes! I realize it sounds insane, but it’s completely plausible. If she’s my sister, I need to know, okay? I’m not asking you for anything except to just let me talk with her,” he pleads.
“I mean... I don’t own her, at least not yet. I can’t keep her from you or make her talk to you, but I don’t trust your ass, and she seems too naïve for me to let her be around you,” I reply. “Also, I have the feeling that you’re fucking with me. That all seems way too close to the plot of a soap opera.”
I can sense that Luka is losing his patience with me, but he’s trying very, very hard to conceal it. “Please, she’s my sister. I know she is. Just let me talk to her next time she’s here. That’s all I’m asking for,” he insists.
“You already know my answer, now fuck off and take your posse with you. You’re going to turn my club into a trap house,” I reply firmly.
Without another word, I leave Luka and his remaining colleagues alone at their booth, significantly less confident than they were when they walked in. Part of me is dying to know if there’s any truth to Luka’s mindless ramblings, but I don’t want to entertain his fantasies.
Besides, I have more pressing matters at hand – Elliot.
Due to the shady nature of my lifestyle, I’m acutely aware of how many people can be scraped together for a witness statement in the event of a missing person. If even one person sees me enter the basement where I’m keeping Elliot, they could be pinned against me if Elliot’s body is found once I’m through with him.
I decide to wait a while before going down into the basement, using the excuse that I’m missing supplies that hadn’t been stocked in the upstairs cooler. Everybody behind the bar knows what’s going on, but anybodyaroundthe bar, namely Elliot’s idiot friends, might be suspicious, especially if any of them were watching long enough to see Rurik drag Elliot down the stairs.
I need to be cautious.
Returning to the ground floor, I instruct Rurik to come down with me in order to keep the manpower in my favor. Elliot is weak, but he’s had time to prepare for my arrival. He could’ve crafted a weapon down there, and I’d prefer not to get my skull caved in by some asinine twerp.
“Were you planning on letting this guy go?” Rurik asks as we descend the basement stairs.
The moment Elliot hears us, he begins shouting and cursing at us.
I ignore him.
“I was until he decided to challenge me. Now, we’re going to make an example out of him. I can’t let these street punks think for one fucking second that they can push me around in my own club,” I reply.
As we reach the bottom of the stairs, I spot Elliot still chained up to a pipe on the wall, his fists balled tight and his face beet-red from shouting. “You two are going to prison for a hundred fucking years, you fucking sociopath!” he screams at me, his voice cracking at the end of the wordsociopath.
“Yeah, can you repeat that? I missed that last part,” I reply, watching the blood boil in his face.
“My dad’s a lawyer, so don’t try to act cute with me. I’ll make sure you fucking fry, you piece of shit,” Elliot continues as Rurik casually approaches the workbench to his left.
I watch with amusement as Elliot shouts at me, struggling with chains that he could never even hope to break. Rurik shifts through supplies next to him, looking for a suitable weapon. A gunshot would be too easy, not personal enough.
I want to hear his bones shatter.
Just as Elliot’s bitching is coming to a head, Rurik grabs him and secures his arms separately along the pipe, forcing him into an open T-pose. He’s completely incapable of moving his arms now, whereas before, he could at least swing them and attempt to hit me with the limited range of motion he had.
Now, he’s completely defenseless.
And he knows it.
“Come the fuck on, man, you’re going to do all this overDelilah? She’s just some girl, dude. You literally met her what, yesterday? You’re a sick bastard,” he continues, the tone of his voice growing desperate and nervous as Rurik tightens his chains.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m a vile, evil cretin of a human being who deserves to be put away for the rest of my life. But the funny thing is that I won’t be, and you’re not going to do shit about it,” I reply, watching the reality of his situation sinking in as he slowly realizes that he’s dug himself too deep this time.
Looking at Elliot from this standpoint, he really does seem like a pretty pathetic specimen. He’s exactly a carbon copy of every suburban loser who ever wanted to rebel against his parents but couldn’t find a single reason to do so. His clothes are too nice for him to be truly poor, even though he wears them in a way that begs you to believe that he’s an authentic, salt-of-the-earth human.
To the kinds of idiots that he hangs out with, he might be, but people like me know better. Growing up in the Russian projects helped me figure out pretty damn quick who was real and who wasn’t, and it didn’t take long for me to learn that most people aren’t much more than the sum of their parts. They’re all deceitful cowards with no integrity who would sooner throw you in the lake in the middle of winter than admit that they knew you at all. It was all based on pretense, and since then, pretense sticks out to me even in people who have been practicing it their entire lives.
I rub my chin, genuinely confused why he didn’t just leave my club alone after I broke his nose. It didn’t have to come to this. “You’re not still in love with Delilah, are you? I mean, you cheated on her, so it’s questionable whether you were ever in love with her in the first place.”
Elliot is bewildered, his eyes popping from his head in disbelief. “It doesn’t fucking matter, dude! Are you nuts? Even if I cheated on her with thirteen different women, killing me for it would be fucked up.”
Truthfully, I don’t know anything about Delilah. Maybe she’s a really awful girl, and this idiot is going to tell me that he was driven to cheat by her evil, sociopathic compulsions.
