Adrian joins me, even though he’s intently watching the scene, probably recreating it in his mind’s eye as I suspect he does whenever he visits a place.
We find Kirill between two cars filled with bullet holes, and I mean completely fucked up with bullets like in some Middle Eastern war. Two bodies lie limp around him as he punches an Albanian to a pulp. Even though the man is not small by any means, Kirill has made a bloody painting out of his face. His features are unrecognizable, eyes swollen, lip busted, and shirt soaked with blood and dirt.
Every time he punches him, the man’s blood sprays on Kirill’s shirt, face, and even glasses. That’s a first for someone who’s so meticulous and never gets his hands dirty.
“I said…” He breathes harshly. “Where the fuck is your nest of cowards? Where do you rats hide? Huh?”
The man groans with obvious pain but says nothing. If anything, he smirks, and that gets him a brutish punch to the skull.
“He won’t talk.” Damien leans against a car as his closest guard fusses with a wound in his bicep. “The others didn’t before we killed them.”
“Where’s Rai?” I don’t recognize my voice, the rage in it and…the fear. A fear so deep I can taste the bitterness of it.
Damien shakes his head once. “They took her.”
His words strike me like a thunderbolt in the middle of a raging sea.
They took her.
The Albanians took her.
Nicolo’s words from earlier and his retellings about what they did to his grandmother wrap a tight noose around my throat. It keeps suffocating me with every gruesome detail he mentioned.
I storm in front of Damien and grab him by the throat. “How the fuck did you let them take her? Where the fuck were you?”
His guard steps in to push me away, but stops with a dismissive motion of Damien’s hand. “Not that I have to fucking answer to you, but they wouldn’t have taken her if I were there. I was fighting one of them off, and when I turned around, they were carrying her and Aleksander into a van.”
“Aleksander was taken, too?” Adrian’s suspicious gaze slides to Kirill, then goes back to Damien. “Why would they take a guard?”
“Fuck if I know.” Damien dismisses the soldier who won’t leave his bleeding arm alone.
“In my place.” Kirill pants, still clutching the Albanian by the collar. “They took Sasha in my place.”
Sasha? Ah, right. Russians and their weird nicknames. How they even associate Sasha with Aleksander is a mystery.
“Still doesn’t make any sense that they’d take you or Aleksander.” Adrian stares at me even as he speaks to Kirill. “They’re usually interested in women.”
At his words, the retelling of Nicolo’s grandmother’s story hits me again, and this time, the images—the rape, the breaking, the murder, the tapes—all of them are too vivid and my hold instinctively loosens from Damien.
Bloody hell.
“He…” the guard in Kirill’s hold croaks, smiling to show bloodied teeth. “He…looked…like a woman…that guard…”
“Fuck! Fuck!” Kirill roars, then takes a few breaths, smoothing his voice even though he appears ready to murder a town. “Listen to me, cockroach, if you don’t tell me where you took him, I’m going to have you raped. I’ll assault you with so many objects until I fucking break you. Maybe then you’ll know how it feels, yeah?”
“In the meantime…your girly guard’s ass will be broken.”
Kirill swiftly yanks Adrian’s gun and points it at the Albanian’s head.
“No.” I sprint toward him and place a hand on his arm, then whisper so he’s the only one who hears. “He’s our only card to find them and he’s provoking you on purpose so you’ll kill him.”
Kirill is breathing through his nostrils even though his face remains stone cold. Instead of releasing the gun, he shoots the guard’s leg, and blood splashes onto the Russian’s glasses.
The Albanian screams like a chicken being slaughtered, but he soon goes back to smirking.
“Let me.” I slightly push Kirill back and he complies, wiping blood off his glasses with the hem of his shirt.
The Albanian is kneeling on the floor, so I crouch in front of him and adopt the tone that got me through everything, the slightly light one, the one that hides how much I want to shoot this scum’s brains out. “Hey there, I’m the good cop among all of them. Damien there would snap your neck in a second. Kirill here would torture you to death, and Adrian, well, you must have heard rumors about how he puts people in a white room, then drives them crazy without laying a hand on them. So aren’t you happy you got me?”
“She’s…your wife…isn’t she? The…blonde beauty. I bet they can tear her cunt in one day—”
I drive my fist straight into his face, and even though the need to finish him off is stronger than anything I’ve felt before, I smile and continue in a semi-restrained tone. “Focus. That was not my question. But, anyway, since I’m a good cop, I have good-cop methods.” I grab his cheek, wiping the blood with my thumb as if I’m worried about it. “What’s your name?”