Flawed

by Francette Phal

  Everything had been dark. The only source of light coming from the partially drawn curtains that had allowed slivers of moonlight inside, casting elongated shadows of our bodies on the wall.

  “Will it hurt?” she’d asked, with a voice shy of a whisper. She had been twelve, I was eleven, and our slumbering victim fourteen.

  “The more it hurts…the better I feel…” She was the first and only person I’ve ever told that to.

  “You’ve done this before.” Not a question. “I’ve followed you…I’ve seen you…”

  “Yes.” I didn’t know what I’d been replying to. She’d walked around the bed to my side and stood at my shoulder, saying nothing for a long time.

  “Do you want to go?” I’d asked her. I didn’t. I wanted to stay. I wanted to eviscerate. “It’s okay if you don’t want to.” It wasn’t. I could hear the lullaby. Feel the thrum. My body a spring trap, stretched so tight that I could have snapped at any moment.

  “I won’t miss him if he’s gone,” she’d confided in a dead tone, eyes fastened on the body of her only brother. “Show me,” she’d said, her eager eyes trained on me, her pretty, delicate features unmoved by the gravity of the situation. “Show me how you do it, Knox.” I didn’t know what it was. But suddenly I didn’t want to do it in front of her. I didn’t want to share this part of myself with her. It was private and it was mine, and I didn’t want to dirty the sacredness of it for someone else. The thrum and the lullaby clamored in my head. But it hadn’t felt right. It needed to be right. To be perfect. Alone. Not with an audience. Not with Katia, because it’d felt wrong with her there.

  She didn’t protest when I left. But later when I’d lain in bed, restless, anxious because my mind wasn’t calm and sleep refused to come, she’d slipped inside a room that was just as big and just as ostentatious as hers and her brother’s. A room given to me by Yuri when he first brought me to his home seven years ago. The mattress was king-sized, big enough to fit many more. And yet, when Katia came to lie next to me, it’d felt too small for both of us. She’d been doing this since the night I came to live with them. I didn’t know if it was to comfort her or me. But I never said anything. Never minded. I’d only been in my pajama bottoms and she’d been in her sleeping gown. But she’d felt like ice against me.

  “It was too soon.” Her breath, the only thing warm about her, had wafted softly against my chest. “But one day,” she’d murmured, cryptically, “would you kill for me, Knox?”

  In the near darkness of my bedroom the silence had been a violent one. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. “I don’t know,” I’d replied. Not for her. For myself. When I killed, it was to stop the thrum, stop the lullaby, and satiate the burning craving inside myself.

  “I would. I would kill for you,” she’d whispered, raising her head from my chest to look at me. I couldn’t see her but I could feel the intensity of her eyes. Her words meant very little to me. “You…my father brought you here for me, Knox,” she’d said softly, the subtlest shift of her body against mine, the petal soft impression of her lips at the corner of my mouth and then the crawl of her cool hand down my stomach and lower still. She cupped me through my pants, rubbed and fondled to gain a response. “You belong to me.” Her forceful declaration had caught me off guard. “And I belong to you.”

  I didn’t know how to feel. I never knew how I should feel. So I remained silent, utterly inert as she’d done things. My semi-erection and my nonexistent participation hadn’t bothered her at all.

  Life with the Khitrovas hadn’t been appalling. Though greatly ignored, Yuri didn’t deprive me of the life he provided for his own children. I grew up better than most orphans. I didn’t know the circumstances of how I ended up in the custody of the Russian crime lord, but my life up until five years old had been a complete and utter blank and Yuri had never been pressed to fill it in. The cause of my parents’ death remained obscure, all I had been told on the matter was that it had been a hit ordered by another crime family that had been swiftly avenged. Yuri had taken me in because there had been no one else. It was all I was told. All I needed to know.

  ***

  I was sure it had been the closed-circuit security cameras placed throughout the mansion that had finally clued Yuri in on my “urges.” He took me away after that because I’d posed a threat. But more than that, I think he finally figured out what to do with me. He had a plan, a place where he could put my skills to use for his own benefit. I was given to men no twelve-year-old child should’ve been around. Bad men. Evil men. But they’d understood me. They understood how my mind worked. They understood the inclination to see the inner workings of the human body. They understood torture. They specialized in it. The way they opened people up, dissected them, it’d been a pure art form. They taught me to prey on humans, criminals, Yuri’s enemies. Stalk them from the shadows, hunt them, capture them, and string them up like livestock while reveling in my own personal sin.

  I saw the underbelly of the great machine that was Yuri’s criminal empire and how it operated. It was a very large, extremely intricate, and immensely prosperous machine. Yuri had a lucrative stake in everything, from politics to stock manipulation, narcotics, money laundering, and weaponry—the sort of weapons that wiped out small countries. But it was the organ harvesting that interested me. It was my section. My expertise. It had taken me only a week to locate the assigned target and slaughter him. I was thirteen. They’d ordered me to make it look like a hit. I gave them a blood and guts masterpiece on the bedroom walls. Yuri had been disgusted, but that hadn’t stopped him from pushing me further. So I watched and learned, and practiced until I became better than my handlers. Became the only one. An assassin with serial killer tendencies. I became the best. It wasn’t a matter of conceit. It was fact. An uncontested truth. I was the best because I enjoyed what I did.

  I’ve been doing this for two decades now and I still can’t say why I am this way. What factors contributed to this appetite for murder. Maybe it was a genetic defect. Maybe something I inherited from my parents. Whatever it is, I know I’m built differently, everything in me has been arranged backwards. My thought patterns are abnormal. Emotions blunted. I never understood why people feel the need to make connections. How the simplicity of attraction can be the driving force of intimate relationships. I’m lost to the fundamental emotions that drive people to do what they did. To act and react to situations with such a raw gamut of emotions. It isn’t something I can say I envy. There is too much complexity in that. Too much for my simple brain to comprehend. I have family. Yuri, Katia, and even Dmitry. They’re my family. But I have no attachments to them. No real sentiments aside from the loyalty I owe to Yuri for taking me in, for providing for me, for giving me an outlet to my depravity.

  The sound of my phone brings me back to the present. Otis Redding plays in the background. “Try a little tenderness” is a favorite of mine, especially when I’m working on an arrangement. The flower shop on the ground floor of my building is my official place of employment. It’s something I do in between the pleasure of the slaughter. The irony of cultivating these delicate things when death is all I know isn’t at all lost to me. But being a florist is an extension of what I do. There is violence here too, it’s just concealed by beauty. There is a lull in the ringing so I continue working. Debra Miller, daughter of newly elected mayor, Patrick Miller, had gone missing some months ago. There was still an ongoing investigation into her disappearance. They wouldn’t find her. Inside the carefully arranged bouquet of white lilies, lush greens, and crimson red roses, is the heart of a mutilated Debra Miller. It’s Yuri’s message to the new mayor who had based his campaign around stopping the criminal activities in the city, pointing specifically to the Khitrova group. The Millers will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary tomorrow; Yuri wants them to have the arrangement for the special occasion.

  The arrangement isn’t quite done yet. There are a few more flowers I want to add. But the ringing starts again.
The persistence of the call makes me frown. There are only three people with access to this number. Yuri would not call. He is far too paranoid to discuss business over the phone. There are men (carrier pigeons) relegated within the association to relay his messages. Katia, like her father, rarely ever called. She simply dropped by unannounced. A problem in its own right. So that leaves Dmitry. The little shit. Letting the phone ring or shutting if off completely is a tempting notion, but ignoring his call means risking the chance that he will come here and invade my space. That’s something I will not allow.

  “Yes,” I say simply, putting the phone to my ear.

  “I have a job for you.”

  “I do not work for you.”

  “I…fuck…” There’s a pause in which I hear him take in a breath. It’s a shaky sound, thick with agitation and an underlying sliver of panic. Far removed from Dmitry’s typical imperious tenor. “I did something…I need…fuck…I need you to come here and help me, Knox.” The panic is uncontainable, nearly full-blown now.

  “Where are you?”

  “The brownstone in Easton.” If traffic permitted, it will take me thirty minutes to get there.

  “Do nothing else until I call you.” I cut the line before he can say anymore. I place the Miller’s fiftieth anniversary bouquet in the fridge in the same minute it takes me to grab my jacket from the back room. There is a .38 holstered in the pocket of the jacket’s shearling lining. I lock the front door and turn the “closed” sign so that it faces the outside before exiting out the back entrance. The black Dodge Charger parked along the back alley of the building is a prized possession I bought about five years ago. It’s fully loaded, manual six-speed transmission with dark tinted windows. I hop inside the driver’s seat, the sizeable interior big and wide enough to fit my 6’4 frame comfortably. It rumbles when I start the engine but tapers into a smooth, droning tune when I roll out into the streets. My tools are in the hidden compartment in the trunk. I don’t know what I’m in for, but I’m prepared for the worst.

  I park in the underground parking lot. I grab my suitcase from the trunk before taking the stairs to the twelfth floor of Dmitry’s condo. It’s more time-consuming, but it’s less detection than risking taking the elevator. There are no security cameras in the stairwell. The ones positioned in the elevators are constantly monitored through a live feed, while the ones placed at the exit of every floor are recordings, checked infrequently. But all the same, I make it a point to look down when I exit. The beige, patterned Berber carpet absorbs my booted footfalls as I make a steady progress down the quiet and open corridor.

  “Open the door.” I’m standing in front of the large, oak door with the silver-plated 12 G stamped on the right side when I make the call. It doesn’t take long for Dmitry to swing open the large door, and he looks like the piece of shit I’ve always believed him to be. He’s wearing boxers and nothing else, so I instantly notice the scratch marks running like red ribbons down his chest. I count thirty deep markings there, fifteen on the neck, and ten on his left cheek. They’re marks of a struggle, made undoubtedly by feminine nails.

  “Jesus…fuck, man…”

  “Close the door.”

  He rakes a shaky hand through his ashy-blond hair, but otherwise, carries out the order without protest. Dmitry takes after his father in his stocky build. He isn’t handsome in the traditional sense but with the sort of crowd he hangs with, no one really cares about his looks so long as he had a surname like Khitrova and the wealth and influence that came with it. And as far as smarts went, Dmitry unfortunately swam in the shallower end of the gene pool. He’d always been a pompous and arrogant bully with an underserved sense of entitlement that has grown worse over the years. He’s a complete and utter waste of space in my opinion. The one family member I can very well do without. It’s just too bad that Yuri needed an heir to continue his legacy.

  “What the fuck took so long?”

  The condo is dark, the only source of light filtering in through the blinds, pulled over the large floor to ceiling windows of the immense living room, is from the city lights outside. There is the scent of sex in the air that’s only overtaken by the assortment of drugs I see on the coffee table.

  “Is she dead?” She has to be or she needs to be. There is only ever one reason why he would call me.

  “Fuck, man…fuck, I don’t fucking know.” He’s more than likely still high or maybe coming off the high and the panic is the slow bleed of reality setting in. “We…were just fucking around…she fucking liked it…” he replied nervously, his jittery hands making restless movements.

  “Where is she?”

  I follow him to the bedroom. A quick assessment reveals that yes, she’s very much dead. Dmitry’s fingerprints are littered across her skin. Autoerotic asphyxiation done by an amateur. His handprints encircled around her powder-white neck.

  “Shit, man…you have to fucking clean this shit up, Knox. I can’t…I can’t fucking go to prison.” It would be a fitting punishment. But one I know will never happen. If Yuri can evade the law so thoroughly, then keeping his son out of prison will be next to nothing.

  “Was she anyone important?” I ask, because it will determine how I will dispose the body.

  “Fuck if I know. She was just a stripper at Spades downtown. She was up for an after-hours party, so I brought her here.”

  He brought her here. To his condo. Which meant people saw her leave with him. This isn’t my area of expertise. I’m just the man who makes people disappear. Someone else, thankfully, will be assigned to deal with Dmitry’s stupidity.

  “Just…” He clears his throat and looks at me. The light from the bedside table illuminates the room enough that I can see how dilated his watery, blue eyes are. “Just do whatever the fuck you do and get rid of her.”

  I can leave. I can let Dmitry sink in this pool of shit and sit back and watch him drown. But lucky for him, he just presented me with something I’m going to enjoy doing.

  Chapter Six

  Katia

  To the general populace, I am a rare breed among my social set. I’m an heiress and a socialite, yes, but rather than grappling for headlines in gossip magazines or participate in outrageous antics to draw the paparazzi to me, I choose to put my time and effort somewhere else. Like my charities, for example. There are three in total, but each one means the world to me, and I’ve devoted the last ten years into funneling as much money and support as I can into them. There is also my activism in stopping human trafficking. I took an interest about six years ago when a personal friend of mine clued me in on this atrocious act of how thousands of girls were kidnapped right off the streets and were sold into the sex slave industry that was worth billions of dollars. I knew immediately that I needed to be involved and so I’ve made it my mission since then to put a stop to it. It has been an ongoing campaign that has won me several awards in the six years since I’ve been bringing more and more attention to it.

  But I don’t do it for the recognition. I do it because it’s the Christian thing to do. That’s who I am. That’s what I’ve based my public image on. My faith and my humanitarianism have made it possible for the public to love me, to trust me, to see nothing else but what I choose to show them. To them, I am this blond, blue-eyed woman with an angelic smile and a heart of gold. Mother Teresa reincarnated. With that image emblazoned in their minds, no one bothers to look any closer. To dig any deeper. Not that they will find anything, but the fact that they don’t have a clue, goes to show just how well I have them fooled. Not only does it say a lot about my acting skills, but I’ve been very good at covering my tracks.

  An act of precaution that has been well appreciated by my clients. To be covert and discreet are two attributes essential in this business, especially when it comes to transporting the merchandise, and I take great pride in my team’s diligence. I take the champagne flute from the man who offers it to me without a second glance back. My heels click rhythmically against the concrete floor as I grad
ually make my way around one of the three giant wooden crates in the middle of the well-lit warehouse.

  “I hope this shipment is better than the last, Alexi,” I say quietly, taking a sip from my glass. “You promised me prime merchandise.” My eyes shift to the man standing on the other side of the crate and regard him coolly. He is one of my best suppliers. Although his last merchandise left little to be desired. Luckily my clients hadn’t noticed. But I had, and he needed to know it was unacceptable. We didn’t do shoddy goods. He knows this.

  My relationship with Alexi goes back many years. He works for my father, but his loyalty has always belonged to me. I found out when I was in my teens, that Alexi had a thing for young girls. So I let him fuck me in my father’s favorite town car, and consecutively after that until I grew bored with it. By then, I had him by the balls. My silence for a favor. I never put an expiration date on that favor. And now, he works for me. He was one of the many people I implemented in my father’s life that fed me information about his business. Alexi is the friend who first clued me in on how lucrative human trafficking can be. A business venture I intercepted from my father. He wouldn’t have done it justice, at least not without my connections, and that is something I’m unwilling to share.