Isabella. Her babies. Tatiana. My brothers. Even Cassio, Nico, and their gang.
Some people considered us bad men. Nothing was ever completely black and white in this world. I grew up seeing cruelty and evil as an everyday occurrence. Fighting and killing to survive. And not all those I killed growing up deserved to die.
Their deaths still haunted me.Pashka. Ilya. Kostya.Memories flooded through me. Their faces, their smiles, their deaths. The smiles were few and far between growing up in that world, but we had shared them. They had been my brothers… they were my family.
The burning spread across my torso, sweat dripping through the cuts. But it didn’t compare to the burning in my chest.
Kostya’s eyes widened, his blood spraying from his neck across my chest. I watched as he struggled, his hands clamping desperately over the gash. I stood in the ring next to Ilya as we watched our friend die. He stared into our eyes, knowing we had no choice.
Kill or be killed. It was our life.
I watched as his mouth moved. “It’s okay.” A whisper passed across his lips as the blood began to trickle from the corners of his lips.
The guilt ran red through me, just like the rivers of Egypt. It swallowed me whole. It didn't matter that it wasn’t me that sliced his throat. I had made him weak. He fought me before he fought Ilya; I weakened him. Though I refused to finish him.
Watching my friend die a slow death was Ivan’s punishment to me. For disobeying him. I had refused to finish Kostya, so he made Ilya and Kostya fight.
But Ilya could never hit the right artery to make death quick. Less painful. Instead he missed Kostya’s carotid artery so we watched him struggle. Fighting to live but knowing he’d die.
I should end his suffering. Slice the artery correctly so his suffering would end. My body shifted barely an inch, and Ivan’s voice boomed over the ring.
“Touch him, Alexei, and you’ll earn yourself another forty lashes.” The skin on my back itched, still raw from the last beating I earned. “You missed your chance, bastard.”
My eyes found our captor. His evil smile spread across his face, thinking he’d taught me a lesson. Thinking that I’d follow his orders blindly. That I’d become one of his favorites as Igor had done. My eyes flashed to the boy no older than me sitting on the floor next to Ivan’s chair like some obedient dog, a smile just as evil as his master’s spread across his face. Because that’s what he was to us… a master, someone that dictated our lives… our deaths.
My fists clenched. My ears buzzed. Hate boiled as Ivan’s guards stood to the side, drinking their vodka and eating beef stroganoff, while none of us in the ring had had food since yesterday.
Kostya clung to life, his gurgling sounds the only thing I could focus on. His soul struggled to live. He was only a year older than me at twelve. Too young to die.
My eyes found Kostya’s. The plea was there - the plea to end his suffering. To end his pain. The whole scene… heart wrenching. Though I wasn’t sure that I had much of a heart left.
Two steps. One knife.
His hands fell from his neck as if accepting his fate. I slashed the blade across his carotid. The fatal blow. His blood soaked my hands and my forearm as I held his head.
We were children. Forced to take each other’s lives in order to save our own. I watched as life drained from his eyes, until the frost of death covered them. I lifted my hand, sliding them over his lids, closing them.
He was dead.
He was free.
So many times I’d wondered if it wouldn’t be better to let them kill me. So that I too could be free. But when the time came, I found myself desperate to survive.
Yet with each of the deaths I caused, something inside me died right along with them.
“Give him forty lashes,” Ivan ordered, his voice hard. But he might as well have been on another planet. All my focus was on Kostya. “Twenty on the front and twenty on the back.”
Twelve months. 365 days. 8,760 hours.
I turned eleven today.
Happy fucking birthday to me, celebrating with another death… another beating.
We’d all die here anyhow.
My memories sliced into my barely healed wounds. The scars on my skin were nothing to the scars inside me. Those tasted of copper, guilt, and hate. The kind that couldn't be healed.
Hollowness was so much better.