Total pages in book: 52
Estimated words: 47961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Outside, everything was a white blur. I lit a cigarette under frozen statues and watched the snow devour the cherry. Time had threaded silver through the black at my temples, but my eyes were still winter-gray and empty.
My body was heavier now, thicker through the chest and shoulders, muscle layered over muscle like armor plating. Scars crossed every inch of my skin that the ink didn’t cover.
Tattooed across my chest in brutal Cyrillic was НЕ ПРОЩАЮ—I do not forgive.
The past rose. I was seventeen the night I heard my mother screaming in the apartment we couldn’t afford. They dragged us to the basement where I saw two animals waiting. They zip-tied me to a metal chair, taped my eyelids open, and made me watch from behind the camera as they destroyed everything good and pure about my mother. She begged for mercy in the voice that used to sing me to sleep when the violence was right outside our window.
Ivanov never showed his face on film, but I saw his reflection in a mirror, adjusting the tripod, laughing, telling the actor to drag it out because “the client paid extra for tears and for the son to watch, the sick fuck.” And then he’d laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
When it was over, it felt like days, weeks, had passed, like I had been in a hell that was never-ending. They left the tape in the VCR and walked away like they hadn’t just destroyed my world.
I sat in the dark until sunrise, wrists raw, piss cold on my thighs. And all I could see right in front of me was the carnage of the horror they forced me to watch.
I buried what was left of my mother in an unmarked grave outside Sergiev Posad. Then I learned how to kill quietly and never looked back.
I’d nursed that hate for thirty-eight years, letting it fester like a wound that never heals, because Andrey Ivanov wasn’t just some street rat I could gut in an alley.
He was a ghost in the machine—buried deep in the Bratva’s web, shielded by layers of corrupt agents, private armies, and Rublyovka fortresses that made storming them suicide even for a death dealer like me.
I’d stalked his shadows from afar, piecing together his empire of flesh and film, but striking alone would’ve ended with my head on a pike and his sins buried deeper.
Viktor’s offer changed that. He gave me resources, intel, and a clean in through the gala. Not to mention five million to carve justice slowly and make him feel every second of what he stole from me.
Without it, revenge was a whisper. But with it… a scream that would echo through Moscow’s underbelly.
I finished my cigarette and kept walking. The city was drunk and asleep. Neon bled red onto the ice.
A homeless man held out his hand and offered me a smile that I didn’t return. I gave him a wad of cash, anyway. It was enough to keep the cold from claiming him tonight. Mercy for the weak; none for monsters.
I’d stopped at a flower stand earlier that day. I bought twelve white roses, long-stemmed and perfect. White like innocence. Like the lies Andrey fed his spoiled daughter, no doubt.
Back in my Taganka shithole, I locked the door, stripped off my coat, and opened the safe behind the loose brick. Passports. Bricks of cash. Guns. And one cracked VHS tape labeled in faded marker: “Lot #004–Svetlana M.”
I hadn’t touched it with bare hands in longer than I could remember. I didn’t need to watch it to know what was on it. I had the image burned vividly into my brain and had seen the horror firsthand.
I still saw my mother’s face. She’d begged more to save me from witnessing the horror than she had for saving her own life. Her first scream was still embedded in my bones, and I heard it in my soul every day since then.
I grabbed the VHS, wrapped it in plastic, and slid it into a padded envelope. I addressed it in neat block letters: A. Ivanov, Rublyovka.
No return.
Tomorrow, I’d deliver it in person. Along with something far worse.
I showered until the water ran cold, scrubbing until it felt like my tattoos bled. Thirty-eight winters had carved me into something the devil himself and his fire wouldn’t touch.
Once cleaned and dressed, I laid out tomorrow’s tools on the table like a surgeon: silenced Glock 19, ceramic knife, garrote wire, zip ties, chloroform rag soaked and sealed, and a tiny vial of Rohypnol just in case. I picked up my favorite scalpel… the one I used for my signatures.
I slept without dreams, the white roses on the table staring back at me, but all I could see was them painted in red.
Tomorrow, the king would lose everything.