“If you have that tape,” she said, voice low and shaking but steady enough to cut, “prove it. Show me. Or stop lying to my face.”
I tilted my head and then slowly shook it. “Not yet.”
Her laugh was quick, bitter, and jagged, like glass breaking in her throat. “Of course not. You want me to sit here and wonder. You want it to rot inside me until I can’t think of anything else.”
I didn’t deny it.
She looked away, staring at the cracked and stained ground. “I thought the worst thing he did was hurt people who crossed him,” she breathed. “That’s what I convinced myself of, anyway. I told myself the disappearances were business. Debts. Rivalries. I never let myself think he… filmed it. Sold it. Made entertainment out of people dying.” Her voice cracked on the last word, but she swallowed it down. No tears. No pleading.
She just sat there chained, my coat slipping off one shoulder, and every breath she took sounding like it cost her something.
And in that silence, something shifted behind her eyes. It wasn’t surrender, not yet, but the slow, terrible cracking of a wall she’d built to keep the darkest truths from coming out.
Zoya wasn’t asking to see the tape because she wanted to believe it. She was daring me to prove she was wrong. Because if I couldn’t—if I was bluffing—then maybe her father wasn’t the monster I said he was.
And maybe she wasn’t the daughter of one.
Chapter 4
Dmitry
The slaughterhouse had no windows in the freezer room, only the faint draft slipping through cracked mortar and the occasional metallic creak of chains when she shifted. The refrigeration units had been gutted years ago. It was too loud, too traceable, and too much of a power draw that might show up on some distant grid monitor.
I relied on the natural cold of the unheated concrete vault, the bone-deep freeze that never quite left these places even in summer. Upstairs in the old foreman’s office, I kept a small, muffled propane heater. It was a single-burner, low-flame, and vented through a jury-rigged pipe that dispersed the exhaust across the roofline so no thermal signature lingered long enough to draw eyes from the sky.
I used it only when the temperature dropped below minus fifteen and my own hands stiffened on the knife. Down here, no heat. No electricity. No light except the single, battery-powered LED lantern I carried in by hand.
This place sat so far outside St. Petersburg, on land that hadn’t been touched by surveyors or hunters in decades, that I hadn’t seen another living soul within kilometers in years. Not afarmer. Not a lost hiker. Not even a stray dog. Just wind, snow, and the slow rot of brick and steel.
I left her there for six hours. Long enough for the chill to sink into her bones and for the vodka to wear off. The silence would only be broken by her ragged breathing and the distant howl of wind through broken loading bays. It would become louder than any scream.
Before I left her, I gave her some bread, a wedge of hard cheese, and a sealed bottle of water. Nothing hot, nothing that required utensils, and nothing she could turn into a weapon. I didn’t do it out of mercy. I did it because a dead girl had no leverage, and a starving girl was useless for the long game.
Andrey would suffer more if she stayed alive long enough to scream.
I sat behind a scarred metal desk. I replayed the video I’d sent Andrey three times. Watched her eyes widen when the camera first caught her face. I saw the pink flush of rage crawl up her throat. And finally saw the way her lips trembled when she realized the truth of her situation.
I didn’t smile. Smiling would have meant pleasure. This wasn’t about pleasure. This was about making a wrong right and ensuring the fucker who deserved pain got it tenfold.
At hour seven, I went back down.
The steel door creaked open on rusted hinges. There was no hiss, no mechanical sigh. Just the slow scrape of metal on metal and a rush of winter air that carried the sharp bite of snow and pine from outside. The room was as cold as the night beyond the walls.
Unheated concrete and steel… the kind of chill that settled deep and stayed. The only mist that filled the room came from the faint cloud of my breath mixing with hers in the dim lantern light.
She was sitting with her back against the drainpipe, knees drawn up under my coat. The gown was torn at the hem from her earlier struggle. The silk hung in ragged strips, now dirtied brown and making her seem like damaged goods. The surrounding floor was stained with faint scratches from where she’d struggled against the cuffs, old concrete drinking up every drop of sweat and fear like it had done for decades before her.
I stepped inside, the extra lantern I’d brought raised just enough to catch the edge of her face. Pale and furious but there was a fire behind her eyes.
All there was for her was the cold, dark reality of her bloody world. She held my gaze as I entered, a little defiance that shouldn’t have made my cock twitch.
I stepped forward just enough so that my shadow covered her. “Zoya.” She lifted her head slowly. Her voice came out cracked, raw from cold and the hours of silence that had followed her captivity.
“You sent it,” she said. Not a question. An accusation. A fact. “You sent that video to him.”
“You know I did.”
She exhaled through her nose. It was a short, bitter huff that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He’ll come for me. Maybe. If he thinks I’m still his property. If he thinks getting me back will save face with whatever vultures are circling his throne right now.”
