I only dug my thumbs in harder, feeling them slide between the flesh of his squeezed shut eyelids. “Do you want to know how she died?” I ground out, my own voice dripping with the same tightly controlled violence I exhibited on his body. “Just. Like. This.” With a final push I shoved my thumbs the rest of the way through his sockets, feeling the pop of his eyeballs exploding under the force.
I didn’t stop there.
With a savage twist of my face I pushed further, waiting until the body stilled beneath me, until I could be sure that the last of his life had bled out.
Those heels slowly stopped kicking against the earth, that body’s muscles twitching beneath my own until they didn’t . . . until everything was still save for the ragged rise and fall of my chest. Until I was the only living thing left in that glade.
I pulled back from him slowly, lifting to my feet and half stumbling back as I regained control of my breathing.
The earth beneath his heels was gouged, with mud where grass had been, and chunks of earth disturbed around it. His hands were half buried into the ground where they had tried clawing their way down from the pain, and the blood dripping down his sightless eyes almost made him appear to be crying.
I sniffed, rubbing my nose with the back of my hand and pulling the knife from my arm with a groan. He had been arrogant. Same as his wife, same as his comrades. He had been a fucking idiot, betraying the family like he had, trying to further his own station beyond the point he could feasibly hold. He imagined himself a future Pakhan when he barely deserved to be called a shestyorka.
I grabbed his body, hefting it over my shoulder and heading to his still-running car without so much as a pause, taking inventory as I went. Other than the tear in my arm from the knife, I only had a handful of contusions. . . a few areas where his bullets had grazed without much contact. I would need to get those looked at though, just in case.
I threw him in the backseat, looked dispassionately over the scene I was leaving behind, and slid behind the wheel of the foreign car he had used to tail me. The phone in the cupholder was all I needed; I pulled out, dialed the familiar number, and put the phone to my ear as I drove.
After several rings, a guttural voice greeted me, “Da?”
A ragged coughing followed his response.
“Papa,” I answered, my voice low. “There’s a mess off of highway 145. Sunbelt Nature—something or another. You might want to send a crew.” I sniffed, rubbing my chin against my chest to try and clear the drying blood seeping down from my lip. “And I’m taking my friend Jacov here to Maplewood, he’s having a breathing problem.”
A beat of silence followed my words, my father’s chest rattling audibly over the phone. “Da… a breathing problem?”
“As in he’s not,” I bit out, taking my next right turn a little too sharply. “And I almost wasn’t as well. I’m keeping my status as torpedo for now . . . we can discuss it more later. I just wanted to let you know, da?”
“Da, Dmitry,” my father sighed back, sounding suddenly so much older than I’d ever heard him before. “Da. I’ll have Shura meet you there, you need medical care?”
“Nyet.”
“Small favors, son. Ditch the phone. Ditch the car. We will speak later.”
There was no other goodbye attached to his end. Jacov’s phone went dead against my ear and I threw it into the passenger seat.
Small favors indeed.