Two years I spent there, making my way across mostly by foot, going through countless pairs of shoes with my relentless walking.
Then, of course, I found myself in Russia.
Coming off of the financial crash that happened a year before, sending the country into a depression that made the one in the States during the thirties look like a pleasure cruise, the country was in a time of change, of upheaval.
As it always did, collapse, even as temporary as the one in Russia, made crime go wild.
Organized crime, especially.
I had barely been in the country for a year when I was approached by a brigadier, the Russian equivalent of an Italian mafia captain.
"You. I hear your name," he told me, speaking English though everything about me screamed Romanian.
"Me? No one hears my name," I countered, taking the vodka the bartender passed toward me, preparing myself for a long walk to the next town, on the run again. Two weeks before, I had come across some fuckhead in an alley, pants down, trying to rip the pants down a girl who couldn't have been more than thirteen years old.
Her face was wet with blood.
Knocked out molar.
Busted lip.
Broken eye socket.
The girl ran, crying, hopefully getting home safely.
As I knocked out a molar, busted a lip, smashed an eye socket.
I didn't even seem to think before I did it.
I never did.
I just moved down the alley, noting the injuries. The decision had been made when I came upon the scene.
And even though this fuckface hadn't killed the girl, I knew there was no way I could leave him breathing. I couldn't let him tie back to me.
So his head, much like my father's, got smashed against the brick wall of the building, and he got left there to bleed out like an animal on the side of the road.
It was my fourth kill since I crossed into Russia.
Seventh total.
My father, two men I had come across abusing women in the Ukraine, and then a group of laborers in Russia that had two women trapped in an abandoned building, running trains on them.
In places where justice would fail women, I stepped in.
There wasn't even a choice.
"Ah but they do. They know it. They say it. In whispers, mostly."
I needed to get up and walk away.
I needed to get as far as fast as I could.
But something about this man had me frozen on the spot.
"People should keep their mouths shut."
"What? You gonna cut out their tongues if they don't?"
"Don't know what rumors you're hearing, frate, but they aren't about me."
"Some vigilante shit."
I stayed silent for a moment, debating whether it was better to lie, or to admit to the truth.
"Your friends must be confused. No one would consider me a vigilante."
"A righter of wrongs," he suggested instead, tapping the bar as I finished my drink.
I shook my head at him, moving to push off the stool. "I have places to be."
"Side of the road, praying not to lose a foot to frostbite. Man like you, you could do better."
I won't lie. At this point, I knew exactly what kind of man I was talking to. You couldn't be in the country for more than an hour without overhearing rumors about how corrupt things were, how much the Bratva still had a stronghold in many parts of Russia.
And because I knew about them, I knew what they could do for me.
To be perfectly honest, I was getting a little sick of not always having enough food in my stomach, of being cold, of not having a place to lay my head.
And being that I never finished school, I had no trade, and I couldn't think of a way to secure my future.
If this man, Andrei, was going to give me that opportunity, I wasn't in the position to turn that down.
Wouldn't it just turn out to be poetic that these particular mafia members were in charge of a medium-level arms-dealing ring?
The deal I got was to drive the shit from point A to point B. In return, they would smooth over any possible repercussions from my 'extracurricular activities' that they seemed like they had no issue with.
So I drove.
Russia to Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan to Georgia.
Georgia to Turkey.
Turkey to Syria.
After Syria, that was where someone else took over, likely carting the shit off to every country from Iraq to Pakistan to the Ivory Coast and the Congo. If there was some kind of war or civil unrest going on in Europe, Asia, or Africa, chances were that the Bratva was supplying the arms.
And, well, let's just say, when it came to crimes against women, you found a lot to work with across many of the places I visited.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had made the trip dozens of times, had left dozens of bodies in my wake.
It wasn't until I was back in Russia after my most recent trip down to Syria that I finally felt some heat surrounding it.
But, well, that can be expected when you in one of your cold, hard rages broke the hand, jaw, nose, three ribs, and four teeth of a man who had done so to his wife and daughter, before killing him.
Then later realizing the man you had taken out was the motherfucking Sovietnik - the Russian equivalent to the Italian Consigliere, or 'counselor.'
I spent so much time out of the country that I didn't know my power dynamics as they shifted.
Not that it would have necessarily stopped me anyway.
I was never exactly rational about who I did or didn't take down.
"It's not good, comrade, not good," Andrei told me over a bottle of vodka in my kitchen, a place that I spent so little time in that I never even got around to getting a couch for the living room.
"Yeah, got that, Andrei," I agreed, exhaling hard.
"They like your ruthlessness usually." That wasn't a lie. If there was anything the Bratva liked, it was vicious, cold-blooded killers. "But this, this they can't forgive. It won't look good, letting you live. I shouldn't even be telling you this, warning you. I shouldn't even know myself."
He was taking a huge risk in giving me a heads-up.
I guess he figured that he had at least two days before the Pakhan and his best Boyevik could make their way in from Moscow to hand down my sentence - meaning my bloody death - and he had a chance to do so without bringing suspicion down on himself.
"I appreciate the warning," I told him, pouring us both another glass.
"Where will you go?"
That was a good fucking question.
I had picked up more than a little bit of many different languages. I could settle down in any of the countries I had done business in. But then again, I had ties to killings there as well. And as much as my name was still said in whispers, it was said. And now, a description matched the stories.
I might not have a death sentence on my head like I did in Russia, but things weren't exactly looking good for me across Europe as a whole.
That left, what? Australia with its too-strict gun laws.
South America with too many gangs that wouldn't take kindly to an outsider.
Or, well, North America.
The land of opportunity.
Sure, the Bratva had a stranglehold in some areas of the States as well, but they were nowhere near as powerful as in Russia where they had half the police force and the politicians in their pockets.
Plus, hell, I could skate by on English, brush up on my Spanish, find some nice small town, and fucking retire on the fortune I had made working for the Bratva all these years.
"America is big," Andrei said, somehow reading my thoughts. "A man can easily get lost there, start over, become someone whose name isn't said in whispers anymore."
So that was what happened.
I packed my shit.
I traded in my rubles for dollars.
And I got myself stored in a cargo ship on the way to the States.
Boston was where I ended up for a while, determined to get on the straight and narrow, make a life for myself not soaked in crime and blood.
But then there was a news story on in a bar one night after a shift I pulled as security at a building that, for reasons I didn't care to ask about, didn't seem to give a shit about my illegality.
Good ole dad-next-door got a hung jury on a murder case because his expensive as fuck lawyer got the spousal abuse evidence thrown out of court, not allowing anyone to see the extent of his evil that went on for years before he finally went too far, and killed the poor woman who likely welcomed the fucking release.
Medical records weren't exactly hard to come by if you knew whose palms to grease.
And I sat down in my not-too-shitty pay-by-the-month apartment and opened the folder.
Chipped tooth.
Dislocated shoulder.
Broken collarbone.
Whiplash.
Tympanic membrane (eardrum) rupture.
Two busted ribs.
Black eye.
Subconjunctival hemorrhage.
And that didn't include the bite marks, bruises, scratches, and sexual injuries. It also didn't factor in the three times she had attempted to take her own life by means of pills, a belt, and slit wrists.
It was one of the worst detailed reports of domestic violence I had ever seen.
And he had gotten away with it.
Nothing had ever come of it.
Which left him free to murder her finally.
And seem to get away with that too.
And, well, not on my fucking watch.
I wanted to do better, to have a normal life after so many years of violence and illegal gun running.
But I guess life had other plans for me.
"Well, Walter, what is to be done?" I asked, walking around the table in an abandoned butcher shop on the outskirts of town. He wasn't strapped down because I wasn't a bitch like he was, but he'd taken a knock to the head hard enough to make him too woozy to stand. "I have this laundry list here of things you made that poor woman go through. A woman you vowed to honor and protect. I guess vows never really figure on the fucking groom being the one she might need protecting from, huh? Well, she's free of your ass now. And now your ass is mine. It's going to be a long, painful night, I'm afraid."
Chipped tooth.
Dislocated shoulder.
Broken collarbone.
Whiplash.
Tympanic membrane (eardrum) rupture.
Two busted ribs.
Black eye.
Subconjunctival hemorrhage.
Slit wrists.
Death by overdose.
I knew as I left Boston that a normal life was likely not something I could ever have. No matter how much determination was in me to go straight, to let the justice system handle everything, when I saw or heard of a man getting away with hurting a woman, there was simply no rationalizing with myself.
Because the justice system failed these women the vast majority of the time.
There was only a thirteen percent conviction rate for domestic abusers.
Rape victims were slut-shamed or disbelieved.
These men were allowed to walk free based on a system that continued to allow the exploitation and abuse of women through inaction or juries that maybe wondered Well, what was she wearing? As though rape had anything to do with sex in the first place.
Power.
That was what men were after when they raised a fist, when they held a woman down.
And me, well, I liked to show these men what it felt like to be utterly fucking powerless just like they had done to these women who had to live the rest of their lives with the memories of what had been done to them.
They needed justice.
And I became again what I guess I had been since I was fifteen years old.
Judge. Jury. Executioner.
My name was once again said in whispers among those who knew of such things. From California to Texas, Florida to New York City.
Eventually, I paid a mint to get some documents forged, allowing me to be legal in situations where I wanted to.
That was the reason I was in New York in the first place.
Where I just so happened to come across a pimp beating the shit out of one of his workers.
And because I rarely thought this shit through, I was only halfway done with my job when the goddamn mafia showed up and hauled me in.
Fucking useless sack, the leader of the Abruzzo clan.
But he could keep me prisoner in his fucking house while he tried to turn me into an opportunity to make a killing, sending his men off to see if there was a price on my head anywhere.
It wouldn't have been long for them to realize that the Bratva still wanted me, those fucks having a long goddamn memory.
Then one night, as fate would have it, the Abruzzo compound was stormed.
I could hear it from below, the gunshots, the cursing, the screaming, the begging for mercy.
Whoever this foe of theirs was, though, there was no mercy to be had.
By the time Reign and his men dragged me out through the house, there were literal pools of blood, eyes open wide in death, the smell of pennies strong enough to make even my stomach - so used to it - roll.
Wouldn't it just be kismet once again that these bikers were in charge of the biggest gun-running organization on the East coast? And in need of new blood after a devastating loss? And maybe a little interested in what contacts I still had overseas?
From the day I signed up, my life had taken a different turn.
I hadn't been a saint.
I damn sure hadn't retired.
But the blood I spilled since I joined up had been that of people who had fucked with the women of my brothers.
Bethany.
Kennedy.
And now, well, Lenny - and formerly, Letha's - abusive cop problem.
It helped me stay sane in a world full of men abusing their power, even if I did agree when Reign asked me to tone it down a bit so nothing could ever blowback on the club.
Hence why when shit went down, I didn't just skip town; I called my brothers. Like they would do if they needed me.
Also, there was no fucking way I was skipping town now that I knew Lenny was here, now that I got her to trust me.
And because of her giving me that trust, it was time for me to give her mine fully.
So that meant my past.
Come what may.
I knew it wasn't an easy truth to swallow.
Sure, she knew I was a biker. She likely assumed - rightly - that some violence came with that.
She had even seen me ruthlessly kill a man without blinking.
Then set to cleaning up a crime scene.
But she couldn't have had a clue how deep and depraved my life had been at times.
It was a lot to ask someone to accept, let alone embrace.
And, to be perfectly honest, I was fucking scared shitless that she wouldn't be able to.
SIXTEEN
Lenny
Shock and disgust.
I was pretty sure that was what I was supposed to be feeling in light of these revelations.
What did it say about me that I wasn't feeling that way?
This man had beaten men viciously before killing them.
Repeatedly.
For decades.
Starting with his father.
At fifteen.
Hell, you knew shit was insane when the part about working for the goddamn Russian mafia was not a big deal.
But these men had done these awful things to women.
They were, essentially, getting as good as they gave.
They fucking deserved it.
I wasn't some silly, naive chick with her head in the clouds, whose biggest concern was when Starbucks was bringing back the pumpkin spice latte.
I saw a lot more ugly to the world.
I couldn't just go through my day oblivious - or pretend
ing to be - to the awful shit that goes on in our world.
Maybe that had to do with the life I had led, the people I had associated with, the area I lived in.
The world was fucking ugly.
It was full of people who needed to be brought down, but too often were not.
And maybe my sister's situation had made me more ruthless than ever before.
Some people deserved to die.
Case closed.
So this man sitting beside me, he did that. He killed people.
But he held me when I had cried; he arranged funeral plans; he cooked for me; he fucking cleaned me; he followed through with a plan for justice I hadn't been able to complete myself, then dealt with the aftermath for me.
This man was a good man.
I had gone most of my life never knowing any.
Did his actions mar that, or maybe only amplify that?
I guess that was for the individual to decide, depending on what lens you saw the world through.
Me?
I said it only made him better.
How many others would turn the other cheek, feel sick to their stomachs at night knowing they were doing nothing about a situation? The majority of people, that's who.
Not Edison.
Edison saw a wrong, and he righted it.
Sure, it was bloody and painful.
But sometimes the punishment needed to match the crime.
He understood that.
He lived his life by that.
"So what you're saying here," I started into the silence after his words that I knew must have been painful to him, waiting to learn if I was sickened by his truth or not, "is you can teach me to curse people out in Russian. I mean everything sounds more savage in Russian. I want the guys at work to piss themselves when I break into another language."
"That's your response to all of this information?" he asked, tone guarded, something I really didn't like coming from him.
"Did you expect fainting? Edison, I went to that guy's house last night to kill him. I have no place to judge. Besides, even if I were the type to judge, I think what you have done is warranted. I think it brings some justice where it is sorely needed. Besides, seriously, did you think I was the kind of woman to faint? Come on."
"So that's it? You're just cool with it."
"So long as you don't get caught," I agreed, giving him a smirk. "You get sentenced to twenty-five to life, don't be expecting weekly visits from me. I got shit to do."
Edison (The Henchmen MC Book 10) Page 22
