“Maine.”
“Maine? Why Maine?”
“I was looking over her shoulder one day while she was just sitting on the couch scrolling through her phone after a really hard day. She was dog-tired, in a sore mood, and didn’t see me watching her at first. Noticed she was looking at some pictures of lighthouses, and she had this smile on her face, like they were sending her somewhere happy. Fuck, that smile just did something to me. Few of the lighthouses she was looking at were pretty notable, so I noted them, looked them up and found out they were in Maine. Booked us a cabin out there by the ocean, and I’m going to take her to up and down the coast to these little towns to see all these lighthouses.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Hope she’ll like it. Of course, it’ll be a solo trip for her, considering I’ll be dead. Hope the damn lighthouses will make her happy while she’s mourning my death.”
“I’m sure she’ll love them.”
“I’ll miss her. Won’t miss the idea of going through a bunch of small towns, though. Small-town people are friendly and chatty and want to put their noses in your business and care aboutthings like what your name is, where you’re from, and if you’re having a nice day.”
“Those fucking bastards.”
“Fuck them. Silence is a lost art.”
The door to our concrete, fish-and-ammonia-and-urine-stinking hellhole opens, and the older man who led the group of Russians who took us prisoner enters. He’s smiling. I’ll bet the stench in here reminds him of home. Tank and I go quiet.
“Mr. Volkov is so happy to finally have you here, DeMarco.”
The man’s voice drips over me like engine sludge, and his smile droops and hangs from the edges of his sunken, sallow face.
“I didn’t realize the debt I owed Volkov was worth all this,” I say.
“After a while, it wasn’t about the money. At some point, the expense — the lives, the effort, the time — meant that he, no, we, were required to bring you in.”
“Is this a fucking honor thing?” Tank says.
“And opportunity,” says the sludge-voiced man with the face of a microwaved zombie. “Your cavorting with those fucking Triads provided us with more than enough reason to put into motion something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. This debt of yours, Reaper, and the way you’ve handled it… it’s been a fucking gift.”
“Merry fucking Christmas, Boris.”
He blinks. “How did you know my name?”
“It’s a gift that I have.”
Boris blinks his beady eyes, smiles, then takes a knife from the pocket of his jacket. The steel shines almost silver in the dim light of our piss-soaked tomb. He advances, kneels in front of me. His breath makes the room smell like a florist’s shop.
“Ruslan said that I get fifteen minutes with you before he wants to talk to you. Do you know what I can do with these fifteen minutes?”
“Give me a really lackluster handjob?” I say.
Tank snorts. “Or deliver a monologue that’d make me want to talk to one of those ‘Save the Children’ people on the street-corner rather than listen to another fucking second of your bitching?”
Boris's face darkens, the knife twitching in his grip. "You think this is funny?"
"I think you're taking way too long to get to the point," I say. "Either start cutting or start talking, but quit wasting my time with the dramatic buildup. We both know how this ends."
He presses the blade against my cheek, just hard enough to dimple the skin without breaking it. The steel is cold, sharper than it has any right to be. "You killed three of my men."
"Only three? Fuck, you must be senile because it was way more than three."
The knife bites deeper, drawing a thin line of blood that runs warm down my jaw. Boris leans closer, his microwaved-diaper breath making my stomach churn. "Those men had families. Children."
"So did the people you've been terrorizing for years."
"This isn't about justice, DeMarco. This is about respect. About showing the entire fucking city what happens when you cross the Bratva."
