by S F Draven
“I truly thought I covered my tracks, but you have to know that I was just curious. I didn’t come to Moscow with the intention of exposing you. I didn’t even know who you were until just a few days ago,” I said, trying to plead with him.
“That may be the case, but I can’t let you back out into the world knowing that you have an inkling as to what goes on behind the scenes. My only goal in life is to protect my empire, and I refuse to let a simple suspicion cause people to start asking questions.”
“People are already asking questions, Dominik,” I spat at him.
“No sweetheart, you simply trusted the wrong people,” he said, just as a man came in behind him, who I clearly recognized to be the man from the café.
“Nice to see you again, Katerina. It’s a shame that we have to see each other under these circumstances,” said Alexei, and I started to put the pieces together. They didn’t just want to grill me for everything I’d learned over the last few days, they were planning on torturing me to the point that I’d never so much as utter a word of it to anyone.
“Why even bother leaving me here? If you’re so worried about your precious image, then why don’t you just kill me?” I asked, testing him even though I knew that wasn’t the brightest idea right now.
“I’ve been down that road countless times before, Katerina. I’m thinking this time I’m going to try something a little different. I may be able to use your powers to my advantage, swing a few stories in my favor, and as much as I’d like to put you in the ground for the trouble you’ve caused, I’m not going to just yet. From the moment I met you, I knew there was something about you that piqued my interest. It wasn’t until you tried to disrupt my entire life that I began to realize that I was dealing with someone much like myself,” he said.
“There’s no way in hell that we share any qualities, Dominik,” I said, coughing up what appeared to be blood as I looked up at him to realize that the drugs he gave me did a number on me.
“You’ll soon see that we’re much more alike than you may realize, Katerina. I can only hope that you find a way to make it up to me for what you’ve done. That’s the only way you’ll ever have a semblance of a life again. I suggest you choose wisely,” he said, and I wanted so badly to scream, to claw his eyes out, to try my best to escape but I knew better. Anything I do now would just be wasted energy. I have to wait for the right moment, and when I get the opportunity I’m looking for, I have to take it and never look back.
Chapter Five: Dominik
Of all the suspicions I was hoping wouldn’t check out, I was really looking forward to putting this rumor to rest once and for all. Alexei’s creativity with this one has quite amazed me, and I’m very surprised that he managed to hook her so easily. I’m just glad that we got to her before she had the chance to tell anyone else about this. Now, I have to figure out what I’m going to do with her, because for some reason, I don’t feel like putting her in the ground.
I supposed it was just because I found her so interesting, or that she was one of the first women in a long time who made me feel something other than typical lust. I could hold a conversation with her that stemmed from a place of genuine curiosity, but I’d learned now that she only ever thought of me as her next big break.
I sat in my office early the next morning after having brought her in, sipping on my espresso and throwing some vodka into it from the flask in my desk drawer. I needed a kick this early in the morning while I thumbed through the mundane work she’d done over the course of her short career. I was surprised that she was in such a high tax bracket considering the fact that she wrote absolute nonsense, but I supposed it was just a product of what sold where she came from. I remembered my first trip to New York, how eager I was to connect with the community there because it was exceptionally good for business. I became a household name the moment I started making connections, and it was connections like Roman Carlyle that led me to my highest paying customers.
The first murder I ever committed in New York City had been a woman. She was tall, blonde, and absolutely stunning. A lot of her mannerisms mirrored Katerina, and I supposed that was why I was so partial to not killing her. That woman held my interest much like Katerina had, and if it wasn’t for her poor lack of judgment and getting involved with the wrong crowd, she may have still been around today. I truly didn’t understand why these women were singling me out, trying to tell an age-old story that didn’t need to be told again. The world knew enough of what people like me got up to on a daily basis, and there was absolutely no reason to rehash that sort of information.
I read through the mundane celebrity gossip that she put her name to, wondering if this was the kind of thing she’d set out to do the minute she decided she wanted to be a journalist. A part of me wondered whether this was the reason she wanted to branch out and visit Moscow, so she could happen upon the story that was going to change her life. I felt a little guilty for crushing a young girl’s dream, but there would be no world where I allowed my name to be trashed in the magazines across the globe, immortalizing me as a crook and killing my business with one headline.
I’d done so much to protect myself over the years, and apart from the few of my brothers that I still talked to, I didn’t care much for anyone else but myself. I knew how to handle my own affairs, make and maintain my own money, and I promised myself from the very beginning that I was going to take down anyone who would get in the way of that. As I sat at my desk scouring through the intimate details of Katerina’s life, I started to ask myself why I had such a fascination with her in the first place. There was something more to her than she was letting on, the kind of longing that I hadn’t seen in anyone in quite a while. She certainly wasn’t happy with her life, otherwise she wouldn’t have made the trip in the first place. I felt the urge to learn everything there was to know about her before I could truly take action.
I wanted to get inside of her head the same way she’d been trying to do to me, and I wasn’t going to let anyone undermine me like that. Katerina and I are going to be spending a hell of a lot of time together from now on. If there’s one punishment that I can think of that’s fitting enough for a crime like this, it’s to tell her everything she’s been wanting to know from the very beginning and making sure that she’ll never live to tell the tale.
I smiled to myself at the thought, remembering the countless times I’d jumped straight to the killing instead of trying to enjoy the ride. There was always something that set me apart from the rest of my family and it was that I cared about more than just the lifestyle I’d come to know and love, I thrived on revenge. I knew that as lovely as Katerina had been, she was planning on undermining me just as many women had tried to do in the past. I knew, however, that I was going to have to deal with her in small strides because I couldn’t let her come between me and my business. I shut the file on my desk containing all of her information, sticking it into my desk drawer and locking it before I tended to the business I had set for the day.
I was meeting with some of my men on a job that required copious amounts of supervision. We were docking thousands of containers of the finest contraband known to man, and I’d be damned if I’d let anyone look over it except for me. I got dressed that morning, feeling quite strange that the woman I’d most recently slept with was wasting away in my basement, but I couldn’t let that deter me from the task at hand. What is wrong with you? You shouldn’t even be thinking about her this much. Her only goal was to try to ruin you for her own personal gain.
I decided it was best to drive myself to the site this time around because I just needed some time to think. I didn’t want anyone around me as I contemplated how long I was going to let her rot in there before I started picking her brain again. As much as I’d like to say I’d venture off to the basement every so often to answer all of her questions, I knew that would never do any good if I kept her locked up. She would stop being able to listen entirely, drowning out the sounds of just about anything that didn�
��t require her being able to eat and survive. I wanted to play this differently, especially because we weren’t planning on torturing her the old-fashioned way like we had the others. I prided myself on the fact that I took the time to get to know the people I put in the ground, and Katerina would be no different. For a moment, just as I turned to pull into the docks, I mulled over the idea that there was something about Katerina that made me want to hold onto her for longer. It wasn’t simply about the fact that she was trying to ruin me, it was more than that.
From the moment I met her, she managed to capture my interest in a way I’d never had happened to me before. I couldn’t deny how incredibly beautiful she was, how perfect of a body she had the night that I fucked her, and how quickly my appreciation for a night well spent turned to rage the moment I found out that she was going to double-cross me. I didn’t want to be the subject of her story, but I was going to make her the subject of mine. I wondered if my strange fascination with her had to do with the fact that no one had ever challenged me in the past, no woman had ever taken the time to get to know me. It was always about the money or the fame, and when they finally learned about what I was capable of, they would always cower in fear.
As terrible as the conditions Katerina were in was, she didn’t seem to be afraid of me. She spoke to me like she would if we were chatting nonchalantly somewhere public, even as she was shackled, laying in her own filth. It amazed me how resilient she was even though she was in a strange country by herself, now wasting away in the confines of my basement. There was still a lot I had left to learn about Katerina, but I shifted some of that work onto Alexei because he would be the one watching over her any time I had to step out on business. As much as I’d have liked to believe she was secure where she was, I knew how easy it could be for someone to slip up. If she managed to escape, all hell would break loose and I certainly wasn’t equipped to deal with that right now.
I got out of my car on the pier waiting for the boat to dock so we could get our merchandise packed away in a truck and transported before anyone could see us. I kept a close eye on what was happening, making sure that everything went down without a hitch but just as my men were finishing up, they noticed that one carton was uncommonly heavy.
“Open it up,” I commanded as one of my men grabbed a hold of a crowbar and prized the lid open.
Inside was a terrible odour, and covering my now open bags of drugs was one of my men’s blood crusted on the white powder. He laid there dead, probably having decomposed for days, ruining thousands of dollars worth of my product.
“Fuck!” I screamed, slamming the lid shut, realizing that this was becoming more than just a harmless threat to my money. Whoever was doing this to me had balls, I had to give them that, but there was only so much loss I could take before I’d eventually snap. I refused to lose any more money, and now I had to call in the big guns if I wanted to find out who was trying to take me down.
The list of my enemies was too long for me to handle myself, and I knew that if I wanted to have any semblance of a life after this, I was going to have to delegate the work to some of my most trusted men. I gathered a few of them, lined them up, and explained that their positions with me were just about to be changed. I could feel the blood boil beneath my skin at the thought of someone getting ahold of my product before it had even been shipped, killing and stuffing one of my men in the crate to send a message. The message has been heard loud and clear. If it’s a war this person wants, he’s going to have to show his face soon or I’m just going to have to draw him out myself, I thought, eyeing each of my men to see if there were any chances it could’ve been one of them.
They all appeared to be too frightened of me to have done something like this. I had to expand my search.
I need to find out who my next big kill is inevitably going to be. I hate that someone has managed to take advantage of me like this. First, they disrupt my influx of cash, throwing off the entire line of my business and now they have the audacity to destroy my product. I'm going to find out who this fucker is and I’m going to make sure that he pays for what he’s done, I thought, getting back into my car, slamming the door as I banged my hands on the steering wheel out of pure anger. It had been a long time since something like this affected me so much, and I had so much else going on that it was starting to feel like it was too hard to see straight. For a while, I had such a handle on the way my business was being run that I didn’t have to question a thing. Now, I was starting to feel like maybe I’d begun to lose touch with my sense of power, especially because I had a feeling that the person behind all of this trauma was someone I used to trust in my past.
I was beginning to worry that the minute everyone else realized I was losing my sense of authority, I’d have more cases to deal with of my men acting out. I knew how they operated. They only ever flocked to those they believed could take them to far places. I knew that the minute they started to catch onto the fact that someone was undermining me, there would be countless dollars lost and more blood spilled. I was no stranger to that sort of retaliation, but it was something I would much rather live without. It would be a fight that would require me to ask for help from those I’d rather not have seen for a long time. As much as I valued family, I knew I wanted to succeed without their help, because I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of doing this on my own.
I was not the oldest brother in my family, and I’d seen what a good, commanding powerhead looked like when my father was in charge of it all. If he were here right now, I knew he’d be disappointed in the way I was handling things. He’d want me to police all of my men, making them beg for their lives as I tried to get as much information out of them as possible. That just wasn’t how I liked to do business, because I always believed that it caused more trouble in the long run. I supposed I was right, because it was a situation like that which caused the untimely death of my father, and none of us had ever looked back since.
I guess today wasn’t an entire failure because I still managed to get ahead of the story that was being written about me. I need to do something to distract myself for a little while, and there’s still so much I don’t know about the beautiful woman rotting in my basement. The only way I’m going to get a leg up on her is to make sure that no one else has heard of what she was trying to prove, and that the story will die with her if that is what needs to be done.
I instructed the rest of my men to clean up the situation before the dock would be flooded with other people, and I took off, trying to find a local bar to clear my head.
I never liked to drink so early on in the day, but with all that was going on, I was sure that a few glasses of something strong would do me some good. I made my way inside, noticing that the place was rather busy for being well into the afternoon. I suppose I’m not the only one under copious amounts of stress. I sat down at the bar as a beautiful bartender came up to me, batting her eyelashes at me as though she was looking to get some.
“What can I get you, darling?”
“Anything that’s going to make me forget my name,” I replied, watching as her lips turned up into an infectious grin.
“Coming right up,” she said, going off to make me something I was probably going to regret ingesting.
She came back with something that smelled absolutely rancid, but I had a feeling it was just what I was looking for. I shot her one more smile before downing the entire glass as she watched in absolute shock.
“What’s the matter, don’t get day-drinkers like me in here too often?”
“Not one with as much tolerance as you,” she said, wiping the surface of the bar with a terry cloth.
“It’s been a rough last couple of days,” I said.
“No kidding.”
I sat there for a few hours chatting with her, wanting so badly to take her home and fuck her silly, but I had far too much on my mind right now to so much as do that. I needed to figure out what I was going to do with Katerina, because if I was going to kill h
er I’d have to come up with a pretty good story to excuse her disappearance. I couldn’t have an American journalist’s blood on my hands because if it were ever to get back to me, that would be the end of my entire empire as I knew it. There were just some things I knew better than to get myself involved in, but she gave me no choice when she began to obsess over my life. There’s no story here. My life is just as fucked up as everyone else’s, and while I may spend half of mine making questionable decisions, that doesn’t give her any right to pry. It’s time I learn your truth, Katerina. It’s time I learn about who you really are.
Chapter Six: Katerina
My world is crumbling around me and I’m worried that there isn’t going to be an escape. I’m locked in here, scared out of my mind, kicking myself for getting involved with such dangerous men when I’m supposed to know better. I’ve heard horror stories about journalists like myself getting too close to a story they should’ve never been a part of in the first place, and it always resulted in them never being heard from again. I’m one of them now, shackled and put away in the basement like some sort of animal. It’s degrading, infuriating, and my entire mindset has begun to shift. I have sudden urges to want to lunge forward and claw at the locked door before me, even though I can’t see it. It truly is amazing how easily we can lose our humanity when we’re put into situations like this, and the only way that I’m going to keep going is if I convince myself that I’m somehow going to make it out alive.
