“Okay,” I whisper, and relief crosses his features.
“Turn away. I’ll tell you when it’s done.”
My legs feel unsteady as I pivot to face the far wall, squeezing my eyes closed to go somewhere else.
The next twenty minutes are brutal. There’s the sound of choking, gagging, desperate animal noises of someone fighting for air.
Slitting Spider’s throat was one thing, but this is different. My lungs ache even though I can breathe fine.
There is something merciful in not having to watch, in letting Kirill shield me from the images that would stay with me forever.
It feels never-ending. Abram was wrong. Kirill isn’t soft. He knows exactly how to break people, how to find the pressure points that make strong men crumble. He’s methodical, precise, relentless.
The smell of copper hits me, thick and metallic, coating the back of my throat. I breathe through my mouth, trying not to gag. My hands are shaking, nails digging into my palms.
More sounds. The scrape of the chair. The sharp clink of metal instruments. Wet, choked sobbing. Begging. “Please, please, I’ll tell you what you want to know, just stop, please stop.”
Kirill’s voice, rough, pushed past the edge of his control. “He’s ready.”
I turn around and open my eyes.
Abram’s face is destroyed. One eye swollen shut, the other barely visible through the mess of ruined tissue and broken skin. His nose is twisted, and dark crimson leaks from his mouth, dripping onto his chest with each labored breath. The fingers on his right hand are bent at wrong angles, two of them missing.
Kirill stands over him like death incarnate. Blood covers his hands, his forearms, his shirt. Spatters across his jaw, his neck. His pale eyes are empty, cold, focused entirely on the broken man in the chair. I don’t recognize him right now. He’s primaland violent and terrifying, and even though it’s sickening, he did this for me.
I tear my gaze away from Kirill and focus on the broken man in the chair.
“Tell me what happened to Marina Voronina,” I say, my voice raw. “Tell me what happened to my mother.”
Despite his damage, Abram releases a bitter laugh. “So you’re the daughter of that bitch. Thought you looked familiar.”
Kirill grabs Abram’s broken hand and squeezes, grinding the shattered bones together. Abram’s scream is high and feral, echoing off the concrete walls until Kirill releases him and he slumps forward, gasping.
“Try again,” Kirill growls. “And this time, show some fucking respect.”
“The Network sent men to get her,” Abram rasps. “She had a marriage obligation to fulfill.”
My pulse roars between my ears. “What obligation?”
“Marina Voronina was engaged.” Abram coughs, spitting blood. “But she drowned before she could walk down the aisle. At least, that’s what everyone believed until one of our guys spotted her years later in Moscow, very much alive, with a new name, a new husband, and a little girl.”
The floor tilts under my feet.
“I don’t understand,” I say, dread settling into my bones.
“It’s not complicated, girl. Marina was supposed to marry the pakhan to unite the families through blood. But she didn’t want the marriage so she faked her death.”
The pakhan. Ruslan was supposed to marry my mother?
“When word spread that she was still alive, Ruslan lost his fucking mind,” Abram continues. “She’d made a fool of him, rejected him, and here she was living like he didn’t exist. He blamed her parents too for being weak enough to let her slipaway. For losing control of their own daughter and destroying the alliance in the process.”
My heart climbs into my throat. “What did he do?”
“Killed them all. Those Voronin idiots didn’t deserve to live. Then he sent men from the Network to take Marina in the middle of the night. Brought her here to fulfill her obligation. As his wife.”
Kirill freezes. The kind of stillness that comes before a cataclysmic event.
“That’s impossible. My father was already married.”
