Chapter 19

Chapter 19ViktorIwas 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.Right now, two men had been tied up and left in chairs facing a long table of a mishmash of items, most of which we used but some of which were honestly mostly a hazard.I found my lips curling into a cold smile as we almost reached the back containers. “Switch on that soundtrack we made. We’ll let them relax to some music while they wait.”He gave me a wry look and nodded, moving to the small utility room set right outside our interrogation chamber. I waited. A few seconds later, the muffled screams and pleas of a man being tortured started playing through the walls.It was a recording from a previous session of ours from a particularly cowardly fellow we’d interviewed, who’d reacted quite strongly even though we’d barely touched him, so it sounded realistic and suitably dramatic. The reverberations were perfectly suited to the space. There was no way to tell it was a recording through the walls.I checked my watch, schooling myself to remain patient. A minute passed. Then two. The wailing and begging intensified, only to be cut off suddenly with a loud scream and the sound of a rotary saw starting up.Once the saw started, I barked out a loud order to stop so that I could have a chat with the man—mostly because the saw was never used at the time, so there wasn’t much left to the recording—and Boris cut the sound and switched to one of quiet whimpers as I turned and headed down the hall, knowing that the Pueblo waiting for me would hear my receding footsteps.After a few minutes I returned, wondering absently what Olivia would think of menow, knowing I was an actor, too, as well as a mobster.I felt my lips quirk up wryly. The things I did to speed up the process…As I finally entered the occupied room, smirk still in place as I needlessly wiped my hands with a handkerchief, the two men turned nervous, if defiant, eyes my way. They sat under floodlights in the center of that otherwise dim space, forced to face the shadowy gleams of the tools I could use on them.They were both Puerto Rican, of course, compactly muscled, tattooed, dressed in army surplus gear. Hard men.We’ll see how hard they remained by the time I was done.“What the fuck was that all about?” one of them asked, his dark hair slicked back, and the black-and-red tattoo of a spider crawling up his neck pulsated in time with his heart. Despite his brave facade he was nervous. His eyes darted in a telling way, once to the side and then down, before his scowl intensified and he glared back up at me.I raised a brow and pocketed my handkerchief as I studied him. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. Practically still a boy. “What was what?”“Who was screaming?”“No-one,” I said completely honestly, as I came to a stop beside the table. “You are the only two in here, beside myself and Boris.”“Fucking liar,” he growled angrily. “Fucking monster.”My smile broadened when his friend beside him, beefier, older, and with a darker skin tone, spat at my feet wordlessly.“Come now, that’s not very polite,” I said, turning back to Spider-Neck, knowing within just a few seconds that he was the one who would give me what I needed. “I think your friend needs to learn some manners.”He didn’t seem to know how to reply, and then the door opened behind me to show Boris’s dimly outlined head poking through.“Boss, should I hose down the occupant of chamber one, or…?”I snorted. “Don’t waste my water, there’s no-one in there worth bothering with.” Again, completely true. Chamber one was entirely empty, of course.“Understood,” Boris mumbled, playing his part perfectly, before ducking back out. I turned towards the table to inspect the instruments, pretending not to notice the bewildered look the boy was sending his stoic partner.“Now,” I muttered casually, fingering a set of pliers, “shall we begin?”“Fuck you,” Spider-Neck managed, although it was clear that he was beginning to lose his nerve.“You’re not my type.” I didn’t even bother looking at him as I moved along the table, but then I paused. Someone had left a handheld milk frother among the torture implements. For a second, it made my smile real, and I shifted a large, serrated machete forward to hide it better.But then it was time to get down to business. I took up a scalpel and slid the blade from its plastic safety guard, before walking toward the young talker. I took a half step closer to him than was strictly necessary and leaned forward just a bit. His eyes widened slightly, he had gone suddenly quiet.I tapped him under the chin with the flat of the scalpel blade, making him flinch. “Now. Here’s the deal. For every ten minutes that pass without you answering my questions, I will remove one of your tattoos. I’m very good with a blade, lucky for you, so I should be able to do it without you losing too much blood. Don’t worry, I won’t let you die quickly.”His face paled, and he pressed his lips together as if to stop them from trembling. The other guy was glaring at me, but I could see worry mixing in with his rage. “Santiago,” he hissed, “don’t—”I turned fast and caught the older one by the chin. He tried to fight, but before he could, the blade was glittering an inch from his eye. “I started with your friend because I can see that he’s reasonable. But you? You want Santiago here to take the fall for you, don’t you? Bleed before you have to.”“Shut the fuck up, man,” Santiago spat, and I eyed his frantically beating spider tattoo for a moment. “He’s not like that. He’s a good guy, unlike you, you sick bastard.”“Is that so?” I let go of the chin between my fingers and straightened, studying the older man briefly before turning back to Santiago’s sweaty, pale face. “Hmm. New plan.”I turned and strode back towards the table, carefully placing the scalpel down before lifting the pliers up with a little twirl.“For every ten minutes that passes without you answering my questions, I will remove one of your friend’s fingernails with this useful little tool.” I turned back and smiled once more. “That gives you time to comply, before I begin twisting off knuckles.”Santiago’s breathing visibly quickened.“Boris,” I barked suddenly, satisfied to see Santiago flinch. Good, this should be quick and easy. “I need your timekeeping.”A few seconds later, Boris reappeared with an old digital stopwatch.“Should I start, Boss?” he asked as he came to a pause just behind me.“Please,” I answered, and the older man visibly strained against the restraints tying him to the armrests of his chair when Boris clicked the start button.“Wait,” Santiago cried. “You haven’t even asked anything yet!”“Oh, how silly of me.” Then I walked towards the older one and gently tapped his nose. “Question one, should I start with your left hand, or your right?”“You crazy fuck, what kind of question is that?” The boy was visibly panicking now, enough so that it was beginning to crack through his partner’s silence.“Santiago, relax,”he growled in Spanish, presumably thinking that I couldn’t understand. “Don’t let the sick bastard get to you.”“What the hell do you mean, relax? How the fuck can I relax?” Santiago muttered, again in Spanish.“Nine minutes left,” Boris interrupted them, and I lowered the pliers to his pinky.“I think he said the left hand, correct, Boris?”“Sure, Boss.”“Wait, wait, wait,” Santiago cried. “Don’t hurt him. Just hold on a minute.”“What for,” I said darkly, dropping my polite act as I pinched the pliers firmly against the man’s nail. “You tried to have me killed, today. What reason do I have to spare you anything?”“Fuck, fuck, fuck—Jose, what do we do? He’s going to bleed you out, he’s crazy!” Santiago spat.I kept my expression neutral, let them think I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.‘Know your enemy’, Uncle Mischka always said.“If we talk,” Jose growled, continuing the Spanish, “and El Luchador doesn’t fucking kill us, Miguel sure will. You know he was in charge of today, and he won’t want us making him look bad. So shut it!”“But Miguel’s wrong about shit all the time! It’s probably his fault today went down like it did! He’s the one that told us this guy was a skinny little white bitch! He never warned us that we’d be dealing with fucking Ivan the Terrible!” Santiago replied.I almost burst out laughing, straining against it so hard that my ribs hurt. Which would have been a bad idea, as I absolutely didn’t want them to catch on that I understood every single word. This exchange could be an information goldmine. So I ripped off Jose’s nail with a hard, quick yank, which very effectively dissipated my laughter.“Jesus fucking Christ!” Santiago cried desperately, although Jose took it with nothing more than one sharp shout, and a clench of his jaw. “It hasn’t—It hasn’t been ten minutes! You didn’t even ask anything! Jesus fucking Christ!”“Boris, restart the clock, will you?” I said as I turned and walked casually back to the table to drop the bloodied nail.“Yes, Boss.”“Chacho, look, if we want to survive this, we’ve got to be smart,” I heard Jose say behind me in a quiet, strained voice. “Don’t give him any names. Don’t talk about the boss or Miguel. Just play dumb, okay?”“I don’t think it’s gonna work on him. And if he finds out we’re holding back…I mean, what’s he gonna do next? This white guy is crazy, man.”“If I may interrupt,” I said with exaggerated patience as I turned back. “I’d like to know why in the hell your leaders are so eager for a war with us.”Santiago continued to visibly panic, and Jose kept his lips stubbornly pressed together, so I sighed, strode back across the room, and grabbed onto his next nail.“Th—the boss just wants you out of the way!” Santiago cried.“By which you mean El Luchador.”“That’s what Mig—”“Santiago!”The boy stopped abruptly, and I made a show of beginning to pull on Jose’s second nail.“Stop! Stop, you sick freak! It’s only been a minute!”“Two, actually,” Boris chimed in, and I sighed again and released the nail, moving over to crouch beside the barely-adult who was panicking so much his spider tattoo appeared to be crawling.“You were going to say Miguel, right?” I said. Santiago took in several panicked breaths and just stared at me. “I already know of him.” Admittedly, I had only just learned of the man thanks to their conversation, but they didn’t need to know that. “So you’re not giving me anything useful.” I lifted the pliers and rested them ominously against the back of his hand. “Continue what you were saying. You’ve got eight minutes left.”“M-Miguel…that’s what he said. That the boss wants you out of the way. So we hit the auction and tried to get it done.”“Santiago, I swear to fucking Christ I will kill you myself.” Jose hissed in rapid-fire Spanish.“I’m not saying anything that isn’t already obvious!” Santiago looked like he was on the verge of hyperventilating.“I see,” I said, partially overriding their chatter so they wouldn’t catch on that I understood. “And whose idea was it to involve a large number of innocent bystanders by attacking me at my uncle’s estate sale?”“I don’t know!”“So you’re not sure that orders came from the top? Is there a mutiny brewing in your ranks?”“I didn’t say that,” Santiago snapped, although his voice was raising in pitch.“So it isEl Luchador who’s trying for a war?”“I-I didn’t say that, either!”“Boris?” I looked questioningly over my shoulder, and my second glanced up from the stopwatch.“Six minutes.”“Jesucristo, Jesucristo, Jesucristo”Santiago was properly panicking now, his face bone-white and sweating, his fingers trembling so much the pliers I still had against them were visibly shaking. Looking at him properly now, I reassessed my estimation of his age. He could be even younger than I’d thought.I lifted the pliers…“Hey, eyes over here, shithead,” Jose snarled. “Leave the kid alone.”“This isn’t your war,” I said patiently down to the two of them as I stood. “This is your boss’s war. I’m a reasonable man. I wanted to negotiate. But he decided to send a killer after my friend, and then a lot of you after me. Now your people are dying and getting captured—that’s five already, to his one murder—and he still thinks he’s going to win in an all-out street war? It looks to me that you’re on the losing side.”“El Luchador never wanted a goddamn war,” Santiago said weakly, slumping in his chair as I moved away. “Miguel and some of the others, sure. But El Luchador probably figured we could just carve things up without shedding blood. He’s a good man. He’s not… He’s not crazy like you. He’s good.”“Then how is it that you find yourselves captured and left for dead after an attempt on my life?”When no-one immediately responded, Boris helpfully chimed in with a cheerful, “Three minutes!”“Listen, man,” Jose said wearily, eyeing the young Santiago as if his panic was hurting him more than his lost nail, “you’re crazy if you think El Luchador is just out there pouring his heart out to every one of us. You don’t do that, right? So why would you think he does? He’s not fucking stupid, he knows there could be information leaks and shit. I don’t know what you think we know, but you’re barking up the wrong tree. Nobody tells us jack shit. Nada.”Interesting that he would bring up information leaks, as if it was normal to be assuming backstabbing and traitors. Thing is, it’s normally leaders who have those paranoid thoughts. Grunts won’t usually hold that stress on their shoulders, not unless they personally know of a traitor in their midst—or in their enemies ranks, feeding them intel.I moved back to Jose and put my pliers to his next finger without emotion. He just sighed, hung his head, and clamped his lips shut.“Your boss is just as bloodthirsty as you claim me to be, and cares nothing for the lives of his men. Nothing for your lives, sending you out on a suicide mission when he knows by now the kind of force the Bratva would bring to an event like this.”“He’s not—”“One minute left!”“—like you.”“Then why are you here?” I pulled on Jose’s nail, enough to force a grunt out of him, and Santiago’s fingers began to convulse against his armrests.“Fifty seconds, boss.”“Why, Santiago? If he’s such a good man, if he cares for his people, then why are you in this position?”“Don’t answer him, chacho,” Jose gritted out from behind clenched teeth, reverting back to Spanish. “He’s playing games.”“Why are you here instead of safe in your bed?” I continued. “Is El Luchador completely unintelligent? Can he not strategize? Is your leader a moron not worth following, or a selfish bastard equally unworthy of his position without a care for the lives of his men?”“Thirty seconds.”“Tell me, Santiago, because it has to be one of those two options.”“You’re crazy, man, loco.” Santiago whispered, and I tugged slowly on Jose’s next nail, semi-dislodging it, knowing from experience that it was more painful than a quick tug. And when the older man grunted again and twitched violently in his seat, Santiago’s eyes rolled like a frightened horse as he frantically looked around the room, searching for an escape.“Ten seconds.”“H-he’s not stupid,” Santiago muttered. “He’s good. He saved me, he’s good…”“Then what source is feeding your boss bad information on us?” I demanded.A tear dropped out of his eye and rolled down his cheek, even as he continued to frantically scan the room as if desperate to look at anything but me and his partner. “I don’t know. I swear to God, man, I don’t know who. They don’t tell us shit like that.”So. There was a who, after all.The little beeping alarm of the stopwatch rang out across the room, and I ripped out Jose’s second fingernail. It was distracting, they’d think I did it out of anger for not getting information out of them, and they’d both be unlikely to notice or remember Santiago’s slip of the tongue.Who.Someone was feeding them information about us. Which could only mean one thing.The Bratva had a traitor in our midst, and I didn’t want them to know that I suspected it.A cold finger of horror and suspicion ran its way down my back. I looked up at Boris again, but he was paying no attention as he fiddled to reset the stopwatch. I pushed aside my annoyance at his inattention, forcing myself to focus.Perhaps it was better if he didn’t know what I suspected, anyway.I eyed him one more time, before turning back to my captives.“Useless,” I sighed, dropping the pliers straight to the floor as I stood and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Boris, don’t bother with the next round. These morons have nothing for me.”Santiago sagged in relief, but Jose only stiffened, eyeing me as if he expected to immediately receive a shot to the head. Which was a very fair assumption. However…“I’m sending you back to your boss with this message,” I said absently, as I pulled my handkerchief back out and wiped specks of Jose’s blood from my fingers. “First, tell him what a very reasonable man I am, for sending bothhis men back to him, alive and well.” Jose’s eyes widened at that, and I sent him a cold smile. “But this is the absolute last reprieve he will get, the last show of reason, rationality, and good faith that he will ever get from the Bratva. I want to talk to him. In person. Face to face. If he cannot offer me this one show of respect, then there is nothing that will help you or your men again, for as long as El Luchador continues to breath. Do you understand?”Santiago nodded almost convulsively, his eyes squeezed shut in relief that I wasn’t continuing, but Jose continued to stare at me as if he wasn’t quite convinced. No matter, his opinion meant little to me.Pocketing my handkerchief, I turned and walked slowly towards the door, speaking to Boris in Russian and looking at no-one. “Blindfold them, drive them downtown and dump them. Cut the rope off their hands but leave the bags on and get out of there.”Boris hesitated, and then turned to follow me out. Once we were at the far end of the hall, he spoke. “You’re really letting them live after they shot at you and your girl?”Olivia’s fear-filled blue eyes flashed through my mind unbidden, and I stopped. I straightened my cuffs, smoothed a hand through my hair, and continued to look straight ahead.“Do not question me.”“But, boss—”I walked out without a word, with only one question floating through my thoughts on repeat.Who?