Very much breathing.
My vision blurs for a second from the relentless blows.
Yuri Zorin.
The name sits heavily in my mind.
I shot him. The bullet struck his head after I relieved him of the one thing he valued above all else, his manhood.
He should not be here.
And yet he is.
Each kick of his boot against my body confirms that this is not a hallucination.
How did I misjudge so catastrophically?
Why is he standing here instead of reduced to ash?
Did one of my men fail to dispose of him properly, or did I?
Did someone betray me?
What, exactly, went wrong?
What disturbs me most is not his survival.
It is what his survival means.
He is one of them. The sort of man I remove without a second thought. And if he has survived all this time, then he has continued exactly as before, harming, exploiting, destroying.
Men like him don’t change.
Rot like that doesn’t disappear, it runs in the blood.
My stomach tightens.
I know for a fact he no longer has his manhood. I made certain of that. He will never violate another girl in that way again.
But trafficking doesn’t require a fucking dick.
It requires connections.
He was never alone. If anything, he was merely a puppet for men far more powerful than himself. He belonged to a circle, business associates, as they like to present themselves.
Influential men… protected men shielded by money and power.
Reaching them is never simple. The higher their standing, the thicker the armour around them.
Even so, I reached Yuri.
I eliminated one from that circle. Or so I believed. My intention was never to stop there. I meant to dismantle them all, especiallyhim. It simply required time.
I don’t speakhisname.
Not even within my own mind.
Another blow lands into my ribs, knocking the air from my lungs. My vision destabilises. For a moment I wonder whether deprivation has begun to distort my mind, hunger and thirst pulling him from memory.
