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The bastard hadn’t even meant to get his hands dirty, paying others to do it for him.
Meanwhile I’d been bathing in the bloody aftermath of his creation for weeks now, each time having to pick free the sinew and muscle from under my nails. Even the expression he wore offended me. The tie he wore offended me, and the way the corners of his lips had begun to raise in a self-congratulatory smirk.
I pulled my gun back and, using the handle of it, brought it down against the side of his head like a mallet, with the cracking of what sounded like bone to go along with it. He, for his part, just pushed his legs up, the bottoms of his feet pushing into my chest as he pulled at the knife planted between my ribs. I could feel scraping along what felt like bone, severing the skin and muscle surrounding it even further with the harsh way it was being removed.
The pain was nothing.
It was an idle thought in the background of my fury. I wanted to rip him apart, to tear him down to his basest self and erase even that. This one man had come to represent so much more in such a short amount of time.He was the death of my father, the disunity of my men, my wife’s tears, the threat to my wife’s life. . .
Even as he unsheathed the knife fully from my flesh, I went to hit him again but felt the point of the steel blade driving back into a different section of my ribs. It was a searing pain, but it too was ignored.
The hilt of my gun met his skull again and again, indentions of mottled flesh and flayed muscle dotting along his skull with each new hit. He had only the one body, but in my anger, he became every man who had ever stood between me and my life. He became the embodiment of the corruption that had spread like a disease among the previously loyal. He became every scar on my body and every threat against Manya’s life.
I began losing track of where my fist ended, and the gun began as they both became a blur of frenzied motion.
Crunch, snap, squish.
The blood dotted my lip, leaving an unpleasant copper tang, and that hand that had been forcing the knife further into my body finally slipped. It was just enough for me to find purchase on his other wrist, dragging him out of the car and onto the ground at my feet. I could see the ruined remnants of his skull, splattered with the evidence of my hatred, but it was the sneer on his face as he lay there that finally did me in. He expected me not to pull the trigger, he expected to find a way out of it . . .
The gun dropped from my hands, forcing his smirk to grow wider, but my leg lifted at the same time. When I drove my foot into his face it was with such force that what should have been an inaudible pop almost echoed around the parking garage. I had curb stomped a man before, but never with such force.
There were no remaining features by which to identify him with, the mangled mass of his corpse laid out like an offering for burial rites.
The knife was still stuck into my ribs as I staggered back, pulling it out and falling into the driver’s seat. It was a nice vehicle for sure, with the leather still warm from where the Italian had been sitting. I ran my hand over my face, looking at the bodies that now lay still on the concrete, and then over to the blinking caller ID on the car stereo. The number was recognized, but there was no name attached, and the phone number did not pop up.
I looked at that body again, seeing the corresponding blue light coming from the cell phone within the Italian’s pocket.
I flipped the switch on the side of the steering wheel, leaning against it as I regained my sense of equilibrium. “Da?”
A moment of silence greeted me.
“I take it, by the Russian, that I am speaking to Dmitry Koalistia, or one of his associates?” The voice was obviously older, closer to what I would consider my grandfather’s age, with a wealth of political nuance hidden in each syllable of the posh Italian accent.
“Da,” I sighed, rubbing my forehead with the back of my hand.. “I take it by the way you greeted me that you are the boss?”
A chuckle sounded through the speakers of the car, another short pause preceding the answer I was given. “Si. I’ll go a step further in supposing that by your answering you have done away with the owner of this phone?”
My eyes fell on the visceral, bloodied form that we were speaking of, looking at the part of his skull that most closely resembled hamburger meat, and I snorted. “Da, if by ‘done away with’ you mean fucking murdered and left unfit for viewing. I did.” My voice was bland, though the undercurrent of anger there was evident. “Should I be driving before your men get here or are you calling to offer a deal?”
“Neither,” he replied with a sigh. “We were unaware as to Michelle’s actions concerning you and your family until recently. It was to be asurprisefor us, of sorts, by my understanding. I was actually calling to caution him against facing you head on, or at all, and insist that he instead offer a branch of pardon, so to speak. I knew your father. He and I have made business work between us for many years. If I am going to continue my work with your . . . family, then I would like to ensure that I do so being able to trust who you have appointed to be in charge.”
My head swam, the blood loss catching up with me as I started twisting my arm down to try and bind the areas with a towel from the backseat. “Those are a lot of words,” I groused, grimacing as I tied off the end of the towel I was wrapping around my torso. “A lot of fancy excuses and a convoluted fucking way to ask if I’m going to be taking over my father’s mantle . . .”
“Well,” he said, sounding amused, “you certainly speak like him.”
“Da… Russian. Not much variety, we grunt and shoot shit.” My head fell forward slightly, and I rubbed the point of my chin to try and force myself to stay centered. “You set up meeting, da? I will arrange things accordingly. You will need to go through fourth in command, as our power structure is . . . fluctuating currently, as I’m sure you know. And we will hammer out details, da?”
“Yes. . . . We will hammer out details.” The old man ended the connection without any further offering.
Though, I supposed, the olive branch he was offering was big enough in and of itself.
I exited the car without a backwards glance and headed to the elevator of the parking garage. The fucking Italian hadn’t even checked the levels above for the plants that had been put there, or for the explosives that were riddling the first story of the parking complex . . . that would be detonated upon my leaving.
Fucking amateurs.
My very bones seemed to ache as I took my phone finally out of my pocket again, sighing at the blinking light for missed notifications. Shura had called. A lot. With more urgency I opened the voicemail, quickly fitting the phone to my ear.
“Dmitry? Their men are here. Looks like five cars, damnit, those aren’t fucking Italians, it’s Sorokin’s men . . .”
“Fuck! Dmitry, they brought in the—GODAMN COCKSUCKER, MOTHERFUCK IF YOU THINK—”
“They took out the garage, fucking bitch-ass, pansy-assed motherfuckers won’t even get out of the—”
“Dmitry the West Wing is on fire. Manya—I can’t get to her—”
“Dmitry, Manya didn’t—”
Each voicemail was more broken up than the last, interspersed with the sound of gunfire and explosions going off in the background. Before I’d even heard the last of the messages, I broke into a run.
