I try to say something, anything, but my throat has locked itself shut, and all I can do is stand here with my hand pressedagainst my mouth while Boris lights a fresh cigarette and checks his watch.
Roman extracts the second nail, and Alexei passes out, his head dropping forward. Someone produces smelling salts that are strong enough to make my eyes water from across the room. Alexei jerks awake, gasping, sees his ruined hand, and starts screaming again.
“Romka,” he chokes out, “Romka, pozhaluista—”
He’s using Roman’s childhood name. This isn’t some stranger; this is someone who watched Roman grow up, who maybe held him when he was a kid, and now he’s got blood bubbling between his fingers while Roman looks at him with absolutely nothing in his eyes.
That’s when Roman sees me.
The pliers slip from his hand and clatter against the concrete.
For one single heartbeat, his face cracks open, and I see something underneath the mask that looks like pure terror.
Then the mask slides back into place so fast I almost think I imagined it, and he retrieves the pliers, passing them to Boris without a word. Then he’s walking toward me. The same steps that ate up distance yesterday when he backed me against the lab bench and kissed me.
Except yesterday, I wanted him closer.
Now every step feels like watching my marriage collapse in slow motion.
His shoes are handmade Italian leather. He walks through blood without even looking down.
He stops close, but says nothing.
“What did he do?” I rasp.
“Questioned my fitness to inherit at a gathering with Chechen representatives. Said I’ve gone soft. That I’m distracted by my university wife.” He doesn’t soften anything. “Eighteen men heard him. Vadim set the deadline.”
I know enough about Bratva culture to understand what that means. If disrespect is public, punishment has to be public too. Eighteen witnesses mean eighteen lessons.
“So you’re torturing him.”
“Yes.”
One word. He doesn’t try to make it easier to hear.
Behind him, Alexei is sobbing prayers in Russian, the same Russian my mother used to speak when she tucked me in at night, and now it’s spilling out of a man whose face is destroyed, while my husband stands in front of me looking like we’re discussing dinner plans.
“How many?” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “How many have you done this to?”
Roman holds my gaze without flinching. “Enough.”
The answer hits me harder than a number would have.
“I can’t—” But I don’t know how to finish that sentence.
Roman watches me for a second, then wipes blood from his wrist with that monogrammed handkerchief. “Building nine, East Bay. The centrifuge is there. Anton will drive you back.”
“Does it work? The torture. Does it actually stop people from questioning you?”
“No. They just get better at hiding it. But it satisfies Vadim’s requirement that I prove I can rule through fear.”
The man in the chair has degraded to these horrible animal whimpers, and Roman turns away from me, walks back to him, and takes a gun from Boris, custom-engraved with the Volkov crest.
He checks the chamber with hands that don’t shake at all.
Alexei sees the gun and starts screaming in two languages at once, words tumbling over each other in that specific way people do when they know they’re about to die. “Please—I’ll do anything—ya sdelayu chto ugodno—”
Roman raises the gun and aims at Alexei’s head.
