Thirty Days of Hate

by Ginger Talbot

Vasily barrels through the door, and they all tense up. He’s muttering to himself as if he’s having a secret conversation that only he can hear.

  His men look uneasy. Is there any way that I could use that? Not with him right there, but maybe at some point. I’m desperate. I’ll try anything.

  My adopter, my tormentor, walks up to me, and I stiffen and brace myself for whatever horror he’s going to throw at me.

  I look into his eyes and see a howling wasteland. Sanity left there long ago.

  “I want to kill you, but she won’t let me,” he whines. “Your mother doesn’t want me to kill you. She said so. She talks to me, you know? Does she talk to you?”

  It hits me like a hammer blow. So that’s who he thinks is talking to him. The guilt has driven him mad.

  “No, never.” Because you took her from me, you psychotic son of a bitch. Because she’s dead.

  He gloats at that. “I knew it. She talks to me and not you. She always loved me more.”

  “I know it. I know she did.” It’s not true at all, but I’ll say anything to placate this lunatic. “But this is between me and you. Please let these women go,” I plead. “My mother was kind and gentle – she wouldn’t have wanted you to hurt anyone. Please don’t desecrate her memory like this.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me. “Since your mother doesn’t want me to kill you, I’ll give you a chance. One more chance. Prove you’re worthy of me. You can work with me. By my side. Are you strong enough to be a Toporov? Do you deserve the name?”

  Do I deserve the name of a rapist and murderer? I strangle on a laugh of disbelief and horror. But he’s deadly serious.

  He points at the women, and his lips stretch back into a hideous rictus grin. “You and me. We’re working together.”

  I’m stunned into silence.

  He can’t possibly mean this. It’s insane. But then, so is he.

  He looks back at me with a sly smile. “Do you want to hear about my operation?”

  No. Hell no.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “Please tell me about it.”

  He starts walking towards the women on the tables, and reluctantly, I follow him. He waves his hand at them. “I have collected all these women over the course of the last few weeks. Not just the ones in here; we’ve got more in the back. Twenty-seven in all. Selected for their youth and beauty. We get them from nightclubs, and from a fake employment agency I have set up.”

  I wince as I look at them, seeing the misery and despair on their faces. They’re thinking about how foolish they were, desperately wishing they could go back in time and do things differently. Wishing they were anywhere but here. Praying to wake up from this nightmare, and knowing they never will.

  Vasily shakes his head in disgust as he looks at them. “Only four of them were virgins, I’m afraid. Women are such whores today.”

  He falls silent, looking at me expectantly. “That’s unfortunate,” I murmur, instead of spewing venom in his face, shouting insults and threats.

  But words are useless against him. I need a weapon. Something to cut him open, to make him pay for the agony he’s dealt out over the years, to make life a little fairer.

  Maybe if I play along, I can get my hands on one.

  Vasily rambles on, like a businessman giving a tour of a factory. “I’ve got buyers coming in two days. I’ve worked with them over the years, and they know I only sell the highest quality merchandise. They’ll pay to sample the wares, except for the virgins of course. Then they’ll pay me a fat fee for the slaves of their choice, and fly on home with them. Millions and millions of dollars. And I do this every month. I’m the go-to man in the whole region.” Sweat beads on his forehead as he brags to me.

  I can’t believe how much he’s changed since I last saw him. He was haughty before, yes, but this is more like mania. Killing my mother has clearly eaten away at him, and I take at least some small comfort from that.

  “I can see that you’ve got a highly profitable business here. Can you please let Darya go?” I ask him quietly, keeping my tone humble and my eyes cast down, the way I did when I was a teenager and he was my father. “Darya could work with you too. She’s worked in an office before.” Total lie, but I’ll say anything at this point. “I could…I could balance your books for you. I’m great at that. She could help me.”

  He throws back his head and laughs, a horrible rasping sound.

  “Are you really that fucking stupid? No. If you want to work with me, you have to prove yourself. My men are bored. I brought these bitches in here to keep them amused. So you’re going to pick which one they fuck first.”

  “What?” I suck in a gasp of horror. “I…I can’t do that! That’s not helping you run your business! I mean…if you hurt the women, they won’t be worth as much…”

  “I knew you weren’t worthy. I knew it.” Now his voice is a high-pitched whine. He points at Darya. “So we’ll take your little friend. I hate to waste a virgin, because they’re worth so much more, but you leave me no choice.”

  What kind of sick logic is that?

  Darya jerks at her restraints. His men start walking towards her, unzipping their pants, and her eyes widen in horror. She bites her lip and stares at the ceiling, her body as tense as a drawn bowstring.

  “No! Ludmilla! Take Ludmilla!” I cry.

  A nasty smile twists his lips. “Good, good. You’re coming around. Why Ludmilla?”

  I sway where I stand, fighting not to weep. I make my mouth form words. “She…she betrayed me.”

  “Yesss….” It comes out as a hiss of satisfaction. “Thinking like a Toporov. Yes. Very good.”

  And his men line up as Ludmilla cries out and thrashes, struggling against her chains. The first man in line unzips his pants and climbs onto the table, on top of her. Then he spits on her face.

  “Ugly old cunt,” he sneers at her. “Don’t think you make my dick hard, bitch. I’m just following orders.”

  I hug myself and turn away. I can’t believe I just did that. I can’t believe I just pointed someone out and ordered their rape. Ludmilla is shrieking as the man slams into her and the other guards, five of them, jeer and caw insults. Her body jerks on the table.

  I’m sick. I’m so angry I want to burn them all alive. I’m shaking with horror. Darya is still strapped down, legs splayed open, and some of the men are glancing her way. She’s the prettiest girl in the room. How much longer can I keep her from being molested?

  After the first man finishes with Ludmilla, he slides off, and a second man replaces him. Ludmilla lets out a hoarse cry of pain as he rams into her.

  I can’t stand it anymore. “Please stop this!” I cry. “My mother doesn’t want it! She – she just told me so!”

  Instantly, he’s mad with rage. “Liar! Liar! You said she doesn’t talk to you! Liar, liar, liar!”

  He lashes out with his fist, and I hear my nose crunch and break, and there’s a split second when I don’t feel anything. Then the explosion of pain drives me to my knees, and I’m gagging on my own blood. The room wheels around me, and I vomit on the floor.

  “No, no, no!” Through a haze of agony, I can hear Vasily’s tormented shrieks. “I had to! She talked back to me! She lied! That’s against the rules! You know the rules! I taught you the rules! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  Then he snuffles pathetically.

  “Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. I’ll give her another chance. You hear me? Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.”

  Two of his guards haul me from the room and take me down the hallway into a room that’s been set up like a doctor’s office.

  I collapse on a chair, head whirling.

  A white-coated man in his forties comes in a few minutes later, and I sit stock-still as he carefully cleans up the blood and splints my nose.

  My head throbs in pain. I feel nauseous and dizzy.

  The doctor helps me sit up.

  “When you went to medical school, did you think you’d end up going into business with men who tortur
e women?” I ask him, my dry, cracked lips curling in scorn. “Your mother must be so proud.”

  “I thought I’d be earning more money. And now I am,” he growls, and gives me a glass of water and two pills. “Antibiotics, painkillers.”

  My hands are shaking so hard that he has to help me take the pills, and hold the glass. I gulp it all down, and then I’m allowed to use a bathroom.

  A guard brings me in a roast beef sandwich, and I’m in so much pain I’m nauseous, but I force myself to eat.

  And then I’m hustled back to my cage. Darya is already there, curled up, blanket wrapped around her.

  “They put their fingers in me,” she chokes out. “But then your father made them stop because he says he’ll get more money for me if I’m still a virgin. He hit one of them on the head with his gun.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, my voice sounding strange and nasal because of my broken nose. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” It comes out as a long, sad sigh. “I think I’m going to try to sleep now.” And she turns her back to me.

  This cage is my life, and my life is now hell.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Day sixteen…

  SERGEI

  It’s dawn, and my office is a shambles. I’ve torn it apart, thrown everything that’s not nailed down at the walls. Books ripped to shreds, papers scattered across the floor, pillows torn open. With every step, broken glass crunches under my feet.

  I still haven’t slept. At least I don’t think I have. I’m moving in a daze of horror and rage.

  It’s starting to sink in. I might never see her again.

  I’ve put out the word. Fifty million dollars for my Willow’s safe return. Death to whoever took her, or knows where she is and does not tell me immediately. The kind of death that I specialize in – slow, excruciating.

  Nobody has contacted me and asked for ransom. Nobody has called me up to taunt me. This makes no sense. Cataha is the type to gloat.

  Why haven’t I heard from him?

  I have my entire network on this. I’m offering a fortune. We’re getting some information trickling in about men who work for Cataha, called to work with him on a special project, but they were just ordered to get in a truck. No idea where they were headed.

  The special project is Willow.

  I know it.

  This is what I tried to save her from. This is why I was willing to break her heart, stomp on it, slash it to pieces, back in California.

  Why I was willing to break my own heart by lying to her.

  Yes, I have a heart. I know this now. It beats only for Willow.

  Hurting her was better than the alternative – whatever’s happening to her right this minute, somewhere dark and terrifying. Where she’s all alone and I can’t protect her.

  And it’s her fault too. Damn her and her morals. Her conscience. What is the purpose of a conscience? What good has a conscience ever done for anyone? A conscience does nothing but mock and torment and insult.

  Her conscience will be the death of her.

  No. She can’t die. If she dies, I’ll burn the world down. Nobody will be safe. Good or evil, innocent or tainted, I will make everyone suffer for my loss.

  Then Slavik bursts through the door, his face stubbled with beard growth and his eyes bloodshot. He was out all night, personally breaking down the doors of anyone who might possibly have a lead on Cataha’s whereabouts.

  “What the fuck?” I snarl at him.

  “Andrei’s got news. He has a lead.”

  As Slavik explains, I feel a wild surge of hope. Andrei’s waiting for me at a construction site that I own.

  I round up my men and we tear through the streets to get there. His lead is a woman named Sabina. Ludmilla’s sister. And she’s one of those vile bitches who betrays her own sex by luring women into the sex trade with false promises.

  We’re there within the hour. Andrei will be getting a fat bonus from me.

  The site has been closed down for the day, all the workers sent home. Andrei’s there with a dozen men. He meets me outside the room where they’ve got her chained up, and explains the situation to me. And he’s got a task for Slavik.

  I storm into the room where my men are holding Sabina, who is strapped down to a chair. She was taken eight years ago, when she was sixteen. She looks much older than her years now, with that hardened prettiness so common to women in the game. Her lips are puffy with silicone, her hair is bleached a frosty platinum and blow-dried straight, and she’s dressed in Gucci from head to toe.

  The look of rage and contempt twisting her face shows that she’s too stupid to understand her situation. Andrei has helpfully laid out a row of tools on a table right where she can see it – pliers, a blowtorch, skinning knives – but I can tell she doesn’t believe that I’d use them. She’s about to find out that I live up to my reputation.

  She spits at me when I approach, a glob of saliva landing on my jacket. “I don’t know a fucking thing about your stupid whore girlfriend, and my boyfriend’s going to cut your dick off and feed it to you, asshole!” she sneers. “If you were smart, you’d—”

  I never get to find out what I would do if I were smart. As she’s screeching at me, I pull a knife from my waistband and slash it down the left side of her face, carving a straight red line from cheekbone to chin.

  Her eyes fly open with shock, and she makes a strangling noise, then starts screaming.

  “My face! My face! My faaaaace!” She’s a cartoon caricature of shock and horror. She can’t believe it. I’ve seen that look so many times before, on people sitting in chairs just like this one, as the horrible reality of what I’m about to do to them finally starts to penetrate their dumb brains.

  “Wasn’t anything special to begin with. I’m going to cut those silicone lips off and feed them to you.”

  I ball up my fist and punch her on the side of the head. I have to will myself to pull my punch so I don’t snap her neck. Her head rocks to the side and her eyes go unfocused for a second.

  Now she’s crying hysterically, straining against her bonds, taking in huge gulps of air and making huh, huh, huh sounds. Gritty rivers of mascara stream down her cheeks and mingle with the blood that’s dripping onto her white sweater.

  “Where is she?” I bellow, pressing my knife up against her unmarked cheek. It’s taking everything I have not to gut her right there. I crave the sound of her agonized screams. My hand is twitching, my arm vibrating from the effort of not killing her.

  I’m never this impatient, but the stakes have never been this high. Every second that she keeps this information from me is another second that Willow is suffering. Maybe dying.

  Slavik bangs open the door, carrying a brown cardboard box, and instantly the room fills with the stink of blood. Much stronger than the little trickle that’s running down Sabina’s cheek.

  Sabina still doesn’t get it. “Do you idiots even know who my boyfriend is?” Her voice is an outraged, terrified screech. Half-whining, half threatening. It’s really important to her that we know who her boyfriend is, because all her importance and self-esteem are wrapped up in her identity as Mogens’ Girlfriend.

  Yes, I know who he is. Mogens is a medium-level pimp with sadistic tendencies, inefficient security, and delusions of grandeur, and most of his men will be dead by the end of the day, at the hands of my people.

  “This boyfriend?” Slavik says helpfully, and he reaches into the box. He carried out the task that Andrei gave him with admirable speed and efficiency.

  Because when Andrei was grabbing Sabina, some of my other men were grabbing Mogens, and they brought him to the same construction site.

  Sabina stares at the box, and she’s finally starting to wise up. This time, it only takes her a split second to figure out what’s coming.

  “Nooo…”

  Slavik reaches in, grabs a handful of Mogen’s hair, and pulls his head out of the box. He’s raggedly sawed it off just under the chin. M
ogen’s mouth gapes open, and one of his eyes is closed, the other open and staring at nothing. The smell of blood is overpowering, the reek so strong that I can taste it when I breathe.

  Sabina screams at the top of her lungs, ridiculous melodramatic horror movie screams, and then her eyes roll back in her head and she passes out. Her head lolls to the side.

  A bucket of ice-cold water wakes her right back up. Andrei had it sitting nearby. He’s thought of everything.

  She jerks upright, and now terror has torn her face apart. She’s not pretty at all anymore. She blubbers and squeaks. “Don’t kill me, no, no, pleaaaase…”

  I grab the tin snippers off the table and pinch her nose with them, squeezing hard. Now she’s talking, words spilling over each other, desperate to tell me everything I want to know.

  She was taken to the place where they were holding Ludmilla, Cataha’s current base of operations. She got the impression that was where they’d be taking Willow.

  They made her put a hood over her head, and she could tell they were doubling back on their tracks as they drove, but it took a total of about three hours to get there, which at least narrows things down. At one point, she smelled smoke from a peat fire, which narrows it down even more. The peat bogs in Russia sometimes catch fire and burn uncontrollably for months or years, and there’s a notorious one in our district.

  They drove for half an hour after she smelled the smoke. The inside of the building looked like an old warehouse, and some rooms had factory equipment, but there was dust and cobwebs in the area she was in, so she knew that the factory hadn’t been operating for a while. She smelled a weird chemical smell.

  Andrei is listening to everything she says and frantically tapping on a laptop on a small table.

  Then she says something that fills me with more rage than I thought my body could contain.

  She claims that Cataha is Vasily Toporov.

  My tormentor, Willow’s father. That piece of shit who was supposed to have died years ago. The man who was there to greet me and my brother at the orphanage the day we were dragged in there screaming.

  The man who stood there while our clothes were cut from our bodies. Who watched as we were forcibly bent over tables and probed, our ass cheeks spread as men jammed their fingers up there to see exactly how tight we were.