Ground floor. The doors open again onto the lobby’s marble expanse.
“Bastian?” Harold pauses in the doorway. “You coming?”
“No.” My thumb finds the basement button. “I’ve got something else to take care of.”
“Ah. Of course.” He adjusts that goddamn bow tie again. “Don’t work too hard.”
The doors close on his teasing smirk. He thinks I’m heading down to inspect kitchen equipment or review inventory. It’s thehapless grin of someone who has no fucking idea what I’ve become.
The elevator continues its descent into the dark.
When it reaches the lowest circle of hell, I step out of the elevator and into the concrete corridor that runs beneath Olympus’s gleaming kitchens. It’s not pretty down here. It’s ugly, intentionally so. Raw-edged concrete and metal pipes. The flickering fluorescent lights are daggers to the eyeball, but they’re better than the darkness. It could be anything hiding in the darkness.
My footsteps echo as I walk toward the storage room at the far end. The door is steel and windowless. I unlock it with a key that lives on a separate ring from all my others.
Inside, Aleksei’s latest problem is zip-tied to a folding chair.
He’s already been worked over—ribs mottled purple and black, lip split so deep I can see the pink of inner tissue, head lolling forward like his neck has already given up the fight. One of Aleksei’s men did the preliminary work. Softened the meat for me.
I’m here to carve it up and serve it on a silver platter.
The man’s eyes track me as I cross the room. He whimpers before I’ve even said a word. He knows why I’m here. What I am. What I represent.
The last thing he’ll ever see.
“Please.” His voice comes out wet, garbled. He’s missing teeth. I can see the raw, bleeding sockets when he talks. “I got kids. I got?—”
“Shut up.”
I don’t reach for the gun right away. Instead, I shrug off my jacket and fold it over the back of an empty chair. Roll my sleeves to the elbow.
Aleksei prefers I do these things quickly and neatly, but I’m past giving a shit about his preferences. This isn’t about sending messages anymore.
It’s just about getting through the day.
“The gun would be mercy,” I tell him. My voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere far away. “I don’t know the meaning of the word.”
I pick up a scalpel from the selection of implements resting on a nearby table. I heft it, switch it from one hand to the other, then turn on him.
His eyes bulge. “No, no, no?—”
Grabbing his jaw, I split his cheek in two. Right side, then left. His jaw hangs loose and wrong from his face now. Blood pours in red curtains down his throat. The scream that comes out is damn near unholy.
I grab a fistful of his hair and wrench his head back, forcing him to look at me. His face is a ruin. Unrecognizable. One eye already swelling shut, the other wide and white-rimmed with terror.
Blood on the tile.
So much blood on the tile.
His bladder releases. The acrid smell of urine joins the metal-and-mold cocktail already saturating the air. He’s crying now. Tears cut tracks through the dried blood on his face.
“My kids,” he whispers. “Please. They need?—”
“You stole from the Bratva. Did you think there wouldn’t be consequences?”
I release his hair and drive my fist into his chest. Something gives beneath the impact—ribs, probably, the ones Aleksei’s men have already cracked. He screams, or tries to. It’s a repulsive, gagging sound.
“My kids,” he says again. “Please…”
