ANYA — Solntsevo Dockyards, 10:47
The warehouse number doesn’t match the delivery slip, but Anton keeps insisting it’s building seven, loading bay C, and that I need to sign off on something immediately, so I push through the metal door.
The smell hits me first, and it’s wrong. My hand tightens on the door frame before I even understand why my body is reacting.
It’s freezing in here, and my breath fogs in front of my face while condensation drips somewhere in the darkness.
Voices echo from deeper in the building. Russian, low. And one of those voices belongs to my husband.
Except I’ve never heard Roman sound flat and cold and empty, like someone reached inside him and scraped out everything human.
Turn around, my brain screams at me.Turn around and walk away, and pretend you never came here.
But my legs keep carrying me forward anyway, around the corner of a shipping container, and then I see it.
Roman is standing over a man who’s zip-tied to a chair.
It takes me a few seconds to catch up with what I’m actually looking at, and when it does, my stomach drops so hard I have to grab the container wall to stay upright.
That’s Roman. That’s my husband in a blood-spattered white shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his cufflinks placed neatly on a metal crate beside him. There’s a man in that chair with half his face beaten in so badly I can see the bone through the tissue damage.
Zygomatic fracture, probably comminuted, given the displacement. Orbital floor likely compromised. The swelling pattern suggests repeated blunt force trauma over at least twenty minutes based on the color gradation of the bruising.
Then the man makes this wet, desperate sound that isn’t a word, just pure animal suffering.
Holy shit.
Holy fucking shit.
Industrial zip ties on his wrists. A metal crate sitting open with pliers and wire cutters, and electrical tape, all laid out in a neat row.
Boris is smoking near the loading bay like this is just a normal Tuesday. Ilya is scrolling through his phone. Neither of them is looking at the center of the room, and there’s a third guy by the door holding car keys.
“Eighteen,” Roman says, and his voice is so flat that my skin actually crawls. “Eighteen men heard you question whether I’mfit to inherit. Eighteen witnesses to your suggestion that I’ve gone soft for my university wife.”
The man in the chair—and oh God, I recognize him now, that’s Alexei, I’ve seen him at dinner parties, I’ve watched him toast Roman’s health—tries to answer, but Roman is already picking something from the crate.
Pliers.
“We’re going to count them together.” Roman crouches in front of the chair and rolls his shoulders once, loose and easy, settling into a stance that looks way too natural.
His watch is sitting on the crate beside his cufflinks. He took it off before he started.
Alexei is babbling now, Russian and Ukrainian and something that might be Chechen all tangled together, promises and prayers tumbling out of him. “Gospodi pomilui—please—proshu, ne nado—I’ll do anything—”
Roman grabs his left hand, spreads the fingers, and positions the pliers around the nail bed of his index finger with the same focus I’ve seen him use when he’s tuning his violin.
The veins in his forearms stand out against his skin.
He pulls.
The sound is exactly what the physics predicted—that wet, tearing noise of keratin separating from the nail bed, tissue ripping away from living flesh—and Alexei’s scream hits a frequency that makes my teeth vibrate.
I’m going to be sick.
Roman drops the nail on the concrete and wipes the pliers on a linen handkerchief with his initials embroidered on it, folding the cloth neatly, then moves to the next finger.
“Seventeen.”
