Page 61 of Lord of the Underworld

Ivan halts the muffled screaming by delivering a vicious punch to the stomach for both of them. "You will show respect to Mr. Turgenev and his wife, am I clear? If you don't, we will start cutting off body parts." He rips off the tape, and they both burst into an enraged mix of Italian and English.

"I'll fucking kill you! I'll kill you!" The Don is screaming. "My family will come down on you- all Cosa Nostra will join us!"

I notice that my husband doesn't look unduly concerned by his threat. "Maybe," he acknowledges. "Or they'll continue doing they're doing now. Laughing at you. A gutless, dickless fuck who wasn't man enough to treat his family well."

Marco bursts out, "Your woman meddled where she shouldn't. She had no right -" Vadim's fist hits his jaw with a crunch that sends blood flying across the room.

Ivan leans closer to me. "Oh, I think he broke Marco's jaw with that one.”

"Yes," I agree. "It looks like it's sagging there on the left. Maybe that's because he's missing teeth?" Sure enough, Marco spits and two molars go flying.

"It is a given," Vadim says, "that you will both die."

He waits patiently as a torrent of begging, pleading, and attempts to buy their freedom burst out again. "You struck my wife," he says. "You threatened to kill her. You will die. It is up to you to determine just how long that takes."

My husband smiles now, and it's a type I've never seen before. Horrifying, even to me, his grin stretching wide, feral. He looks like a shark closing in on a seal, showing every tooth. "I can make it last. I can keep you alive for a very long time," he says, leaning closer to them, speaking slowly, almost intimately. "Your mind will break before your body does, but there's no comfort there. The agony is always there."

Marco breaks first. "What do you want?" he howls. "We can work with you. We can –"

"Shut the fuck up!" Don Rossi screams.

Vadim doesn't say anything, staring at them until Marco's pleas die off, and his shoulders sag. These pigs have always been so arrogantly confident that they could talk or buy their way out of anything. I don't think it has occurred to them until now that they're going to die here.

I smile.

The Don sees it, screaming again, veins bulging in his forehead, straining against his chains. "Your life is over, puttana! What's planned for you is beyond anything your psychopath husband can deliver."

Vadim's fist drives into his ribs. He's wearing brass knuckles, with sharp, gleaming points. When the Don screams, it's high, and shrill. Almost inhuman. I'd come across a rabbit in a snare once while riding my horse on one of the forest trails. I clumsily released it, crying for its suffering as its terrified brown eyes watched me. I don't feel any empathy for Rossi.

"You mentioned the others," Vadim continues dispassionately. "Who?"

"We're not the only family she's fucked with," Marco says, with an odd sort of dignity. He's glaring at me, chin held high. "We were contacted by the Irish. There are others. Ten families."

Now, a slight grin spreads across the Don's face as if he's holding in some brilliant strategic move that will make us all fall to our knees, weeping. "We hired the hunters."

Spinning his brass knuckles on one finger, Vadim asks, "Who."

The Don watches his moving finger and his confidence suddenly withers. Slipping the brass knuckles back on all his fingers, Vadim raises his fist. "The- the Black Kynigós Group!" Rossi yelps.

"Shit. The Greeks," Ivan murmurs with a frown. I'm guessing this isn't good news.

Vadim drives the brass knuckles into Rossi's shoulder, and even from here, I can hear the bone crack as he howls. My husband turns his attention to Marco, who's shaking in his chair. He's realizing his information is not going to help save him.

"The hunters say they don't have any names yet," he gurgles from his ruined mouth. "But they’re close. They say that it's women from crime families who know how our world works. The hunters found a couple of the operatives." He stops, groaning for a moment as the cut on his forehead splits open again, sending little streams of blood down his face. "They weren't much help. They couldn't get the names of the people in charge, but it gave them a direction.”

I'm breathing shallowly, trying to think of the people we’ve worked with, who disappeared from our network. Who might have died for us.

The high whine of a drill starting up and a chorus of screaming and begging joins it. It barely registers for me. A team of hunters, a dangerous one from Ivan's reaction. It takes me a while to blink and come back to the here and now. Marco's missing an eye, his brother, an ear.

"We would have been the ones to solve this," the Don says bitterly. His words are mushy. "Lana contacted me. I would be the one to catch and crush these puttanas!"

Lana and the others? Their deaths were too easy, I think bitterly. They deserved more than just a quick bullet. I will always judge women more harshly. Maybe it's because I've seen the brutal byproducts of what men can do too many times, but to know that another woman could look upon the suffering of a mother or a child, and find a way to make a quick buck out of it? It's unspeakable to me.

"What else do the hunters know?" Vadim asks. One of his men is turning something over a brazier, the metal is glowing a sullen red. Marco can't take his remaining eye off of it.

"The women in charge, they say they had it narrowed down based on proximity," Marco says.

Frowning, I try to understand how they could do that. We've flown all over the country, and three times into Europe to extract women and their families.