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The last snippet of information had been weighing on me, and I wondered if it was something that I should tell Viktor about. But I didn’t want to get Luis involved in the Bratva’s business, with his friends fighting it sounded like he had more than enough on his plate. I shuddered as I remembered the way his work buddy, Paco had stared at me before Luis had dragged him away.
Chapter 19
Viktor
Iwas quietly furious as I pulled up to the warehouse where we did our interrogations. The auction had been thoroughly disrupted by what the employees now thought was a thwarted break-in. Olivia had gotten a good scare and could have been killed. Two of our men had been injured capturing a pair of my would-be assassins.
On top of all that, my body was still humming with frustrated desire for Olivia. Who, thank God, hadn’t run at her first taste of my life in the shadows. But she was still so upset that even the heat between us couldn’t draw her away from the fear and shock.
I almost lost her today, in more ways than one.
Yet another grievance to lay at the feet of our rivals.
Four of my men were guarding the main space, which was a dummy warehouse only partly full of actual boxes of merchandise. Buried behind them were shipping containers that had been welded together and converted into a combination of hideaways, with some rest spaces for guards but mostly used for cages for enemies we brought here.
When Uncle Mischka had first shown me the place, I had walked out feeling sick, and praying I would never have to use it for its intended purpose. But that was a long time ago, and a different, much younger me. Now, I was relieved to have the facility at my disposal. Otherwise, I would have had to interrogate them somewhere closer to home. Somewhere more memorable, less disorienting, and more likely to allow them to walk away with new knowledge of us and our activities.
If I didn’t have this space, I would have had to kill them afterwards. And my distaste for wasted life did, unfortunately, extend to my enemies. Not that it ever stopped me. I would always do what had to be done for the safety of my family or my organization. But my preference remained in the other direction.
After what had happened today, I couldn’t help but imagine what Olivia would think about this, both what I was about to do, as well as the very existence of our interrogation rooms.
I was sure that on the outside, it would seem rather gruesome to her. But maybe one day, she would see that it was a kindness. Perhaps she could come to know me well enough in time, to see that I was offering life by continuing with my uncle’s established interrogation procedure. That by bringing the enemy here where they could gain no information on us, knocking them out and taking them elsewhere to free them—after we received the intel we needed, of course, and only then—I was offering something most others would not.
I’ve always suspected that Uncle Mischka chose me as his successor for a very specific reason. Not just for my organization, leadership, and the power I’d gained in my time with the family. He’d been teaching me, training me to succeed him from a young age, before he’d ever really seen all that in me. And I’ve always thought that it was because without ever saying it, we both knew we had a similar outlook on the importance of life, and our role in taking it.
I sighed and shook these distracted thoughts from my mind, just as Boris came out to meet me, relief on his face. “Didn’t know what to think when you dropped out of sight.”
I shrugged. “I told you I was using a safehouse and to contact me when you had anything. Now, what have you got for me?”
“Two Pueblo goons. Not sure how much use they’ll be, but we should be able to at least get some names out of them.” He turned, and we began walking to the back office, where a hidden staircase led down to the interrogation rooms.
As I followed Boris down, I heard Mischka’s voice in my head, going over the specifics of how to get information from a man properly.
You have to decide whether you are there to torture them, or there to get information. You must understand that when you are making an example of a man, when you are breaking him so that his condition will terrify your enemies, the methods are very different from what you do when you want a man to talk.
You see, a man will say anything to make torture stop. After a while, they will simply make up whatever they think will satisfy you, just to end the fear and pain. That is not proper interrogation. It will get you garbage nine times out of ten. If you wish to get at the truth, the key is not pain.
The key is intimidation.
“How long have they been chained up in the interrogation room?” I asked patiently.
“Twenty minutes. They were in the cages for three hours before that.” They should be pretty softened up.” We strolled casually down the narrow concrete hallway that led to the occupied room. It was deliberately unkempt and empty, with the several flickering lights remaining purposefully un-fixed and erratic in their spray of dim light.
“Did you lay out our tools and leave them to wait with them there?”
Grisly things, those tools. Unpleasant to handle, and twice as much so to use. But it was all part of Mischka’s established routine, and thanks to his tutelage I knew the importance of psychological warfare.
It encouraged the men to start talking nice and quickly, before so much pain was inflicted that they were likely to lie just to make it stop. And it meant that we didn’t particularly need to do any real damage. Surface stuff, likely to leave marks but easy enough to recover from and not very debilitating.
Some men called me soft for it, repeating the same things about Mischka. Those men now wore scars of their own that proved just how ‘soft’ I was. Scars, and an unwillingness to repeat those words twice.
“Yeah, every tool is out there on display for them.” Boris chuckled. We had gone a bit hog wild with our collection. Besides surgical and autopsy tools like bone saws, mundane devices like pliers and clamps, and some homebrewed items like an electro-torture device hooked up to a car battery, we had also added some rather disturbing things from the local sex shop. I had even donated that giant, gaudy knife I had confiscated from the would-be murderer to our pile.
The rooms down here were a touch on the dramatic side, and were a source of amusement among my men, who seemed to love it and make a game of discovering what we could get away with displaying, and what was too much.
I let them play with the decor as much as they liked. It was a running joke and brought the men closer, which I approved of. Although they all knew that when the time came that we had need of the rooms, they were to be cleaned out of the more ridiculous items.
Although, Sergei’s purchased double-ended dildo had almost made the cut once, simply from the sheer confusion and fear that might come from seeing it. The rainbow unicorn design had gotten it scrapped, though, in the end.
