Sin of Silence (Sinner's Empire Book 1)

by Nikita Slater

  “Okay, I think you have a few broken ribs, but they don’t seem to have punctured your lungs. Which is good news, even if it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch.” He blinked one eye open and tried to focus on her face. The other was swollen shut. “It’s a good sign that you can hear me,” she assured him.

  She examined him slowly, one section of his body at a time, cataloguing injuries. What she came up with was a horrifying map of vicious intent. He had a broken arm, several contusions to the head, abrasions to his face and most of his body. A broken nose, four broken fingers, a few broken ribs. Nothing life threatening unless he had an internal injury. It must be his heart. Probably couldn’t take the sustained beating it looked like he was given.

  The blue tint to his face and lips, along with his shallow, pained breaths worried her. If he didn’t get immediate help, he was going to die. Given the extent of injuries, she was surprised he’d lived this long. There was no bleeding outside the body, which was helping him stay alive. The people who had done this to him knew exactly what they were doing, where to hit him without killing him. Too bad they hadn’t counted on a weak heart.

  A bucket hit the ground next to her, making her jump. Water sloshed out the side, splashing her. There was a big foot in a leather boot next to the bucket. She followed it up, past denim-clad legs, to a belt, and a leather coat. His hands were hanging down, one close enough to her face that she could see the detailed tattoos covering the back of it. There were words on each finger, but she didn’t know what they said, and a web with a spider on the back of his hand, a dagger and a rose with blood drops on his wrist. Through the ink she could see the veins popping out on his skin and winding up his wrist. She shivered and looked away. Those were the hands of a killer.

  She forced her gaze up to his face and pleaded with him, “This man will not survive if he doesn’t get to a surgery in the next hour.”

  He dropped what he was holding in his other hand: some cloths, a bottle of aspirin, a spoon and what looked like a bottle of peroxide. He snatched her by the back of the head, digging his fingers into her hair and shaking her. Shaun let out a pained yelp and reached up to clasp his wrist, trying to lessen the pressure on her scalp. It felt like he was about to rip her hair out at the roots. He let her go so suddenly that she fell back on her ass.

  He crouched next to her, signing, if he dies, you die.

  She looked at him in despair, searching for an ounce of mercy in his cold gaze. There was none. “Then I guess I die, because I can’t fix this man down here, with only these supplies. He needs a hospital, period.”

  He glared at her; his frustration evident. Wake him up, now.

  She narrowed her eyes at him and shuffled slightly closer to the man on the floor. “Did you do this to him?”

  He made a growling sound under his breath, and signed, make him able to talk.

  She gave him a penetrating stare and thought hard about her fragile position. The gun was just under his arm. It would only take one quick move and he could shoot her. She had a five percent chance of surviving a shot to the head. She took a deep breath, thought about the consequences of what she was doing, and decided five percent was better than breaking her oath to her profession.

  Shaun shook her head. “I won’t wake him up just so you can torture him some more.”

  He growled and grabbed hold of her head again, shaking her. Her teeth rattled and it felt like he was about to twist her head off. She shoved him, but it was like trying to move a boulder.

  “Stop it!” she yelled.

  Chapter Four

  “I won’t fix him!” she shouted as clearly as she could through the thundering in her head, caused by his tight grip on her head and the crazy pattering of her heart.

  He threw her away from him in frustration. Shaun fell sideways, but quickly crawled back to the man on the floor. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her to do something, to start working on him. To find a way to get him to the hospital where he could get the medical attention he needed. Instead, she was forced to watch him die a slow and painful death because she refused to help him if her captor was just going to question him and kill him.

  She eyed the tattoos on her pacing kidnapper’s hands and neck and wondered how deep in the mafia he was. The part of Ukraine that she worked in had become lawless due to the removal of most forms of authority except military, who were concentrated on fighting the rebellion. For the most part, the hospital and its occupants were left alone.

  Unless someone needed a doctor, a person who couldn’t use normal channels. Reality hit her like a punch to the gut, bringing with it a good dose of nausea. They needed her to fix the guy, so the guy could talk, then both she and the guy would become disposable.

  The lack of law enforcement in the area would ensure that no one was available to actively look for Shaun. Or, to look for her body, if it came to that.

  He pulled the gun from his holster and, kneeling next to her, pressed the muzzle against the side of her head. She stared up at him, her dark gaze clashing with his blue eyes. She couldn’t find anything in that empty gaze, nothing to help her out of this situation. She summoned as much bravery as she could manage.

  “I will not help you.”

  He cocked the pistol, the clicking sound loud in her ear.

  She continued to stare at him, desperately trying to keep a straight face, to keep the fear out of her expression. If she was going to die right here, right now, in this dirty little basement, then she was going to do it with whatever dignity she had. She would do it with professional pride, knowing that she was doing the right thing.

  “No,” she said simply.

  He pulled the gun back, and her eyes drifted automatically closed as she felt death rush toward her. An explosion burst through her head, followed by bright flashes behind her eyelids, and for a split second she thought she was dead. As pain razed through her skull, she realized he hadn’t actually shot her, but hit her instead.

  Anger rushed through her and she balled up her fists. She opened her eyes and glared up at him. “Next time you hit me, you may as well kill me, because I will kick your fucking ass.”

  She saw a flash of surprise in the clear depths of his eyes, and there was a slight lift of his lips into a smirk. He was amused by her words. Probably wasn’t used to someone like her fighting back. He probably preferred his victims docile until he killed them. Well, he wasn’t going to get that with Shaun.

  She was a fighter.

  He sat on his haunches and contemplated his captive. Then he leaned over, brushing her arm with his, making her jerk back, and pressed the gun to the head of his other victim. The man he’d most likely beaten until his heart had given out. Though the gun was pressed to the skull of the man lying on the floor, her captor still stared at her, speaking with his face and eyes.

  Despair rushed through her. What should she do? She couldn’t actually let the man be murdered right in front of her, could she? Not if there was something she could do. She’d made an oath to do no harm. Yet, would she be doing more harm by helping? Patching him up just enough that he could be awake for his own death?

  She glanced over the man and reassessed his injuries. The main issue was a suspected coronary. She couldn’t know for certain what was going on inside him, but her best estimate was that this man had no more than a few hours left without intervention. A lot could happen in two hours. Maybe by some miracle, the hospital had managed to alert the military to her abduction, and maybe they were casting a net in hopes of finding her. It sucked that she wasn’t within the city limits anymore but had been driven out to the countryside. Maybe someone saw the van and reported it. Maybe, just maybe the military was on its way.

  She couldn’t let the patient die if there was even the glimmer of a chance that she could save him. She sighed deeply and nodded. “Okay, I’ll do what I can. But I don’t know if it’ll be enough for you to talk to him. He’s pretty far gone.”

  She hoped if the man on the floor was listen
ing at all, that he was capable of understanding the conversation taking place over his prone body. Shaun thought it would be best for him to stay unconscious, even if that meant he had to pretend. The longer he was unresponsive, the longer he and Shaun would stay alive.

  Her kidnapper tucked his gun back into the holster and stood. He took a few steps away and leaned against a stone wall, his arms crossed in front of him in a negligent pose. Shaun suspected he could be across the room and on top of her within seconds if she made any wrong moves. He made his position very clear, in both his posture and the hard stare that never wavered from Shaun; he wasn’t budging until he got what he wanted.

  She worked silently for several minutes, crushing up a handful of aspirins and mixing the white powder with some water before slowly trickling the liquid into her patient’s mouth. She used her finger to rub the extra mixture from the spoon onto his gums, where the skin was thin and the blood vessels were close to the surface, allowing the medication to reach his bloodstream faster. He didn’t swallow, which meant he was unconscious again. She checked his pulse. It was worryingly faint.

  There wasn’t much more she could do about his heart.

  She turned to the rest of him, tugging on clothes, and inventorying and treating injuries, until the basement faded away and it was just her and her patient. His body, his injuries spoke to her, even while he could not. She had enough experience from her time spent working in the Montréal General Hospital that she could tell what had made the marks and how much pressure had been applied. If she had to guess, she would say that he took several punches to the face, chest and abdomen, kicks to all of his limbs, probably when he’d fallen to the ground. His hands and fingers had been stomped on, as were his feet. The intent had been to cause extreme pain without doing life threatening damage.

  Shaun had no way of dealing with a cardiac arrest beyond thinning his blood with aspirin, and without a hospital, it would ultimately be what killed him. After she finished cleaning and dressing the injuries that she could actually treat, she sat back on her heels and surveyed the man. It was no use ‒ he was going to die, and he was going to do it soon. His breathing was shallow and his skin was grey and clammy.

  “That’s all I can do,” she said, feeling helpless and afraid.

  She lifted her eyes to meet the unsympathetic ones of the man across the room. He hadn’t moved while she worked, just watched. He now shifted his eyes down to her patient, his victim. He took a long look, then signed to her, wake him up.

  She didn’t know how to make him understand that she couldn’t just wake the patient. She sighed and rubbed at the headache hovering over her left eyebrow. A stress headache that came along once in a while when she found herself in an impossible situation.

  “What’s your name?” She decided on a new tactic; try to form some kind of bond with her captor so he might trust her.

  He pushed away from the wall, straightened and rolled his shoulders back as though releasing tension. Finally, he signed the letters - J - O - Z - E - F.

  She nodded, and said softly, “Jozef.”

  He looked at her, his eyes dropping down to her mouth, a strange expression flitting across his hawk-like features.

  “Jozef.” She deliberately repeated his name. “You have to understand, this isn’t a matter of just ‘wake him up’ or ‘don’t wake him up’. You, or whoever did this to him, beat him until his heart gave out. On top of his other injuries, he probably has a concussion at best and a skull fracture at worst. He may never wake up.”

  Jozef growled and began pacing the basement, his big booted feet kicking up dust from the floor. He was such a terrifying and imposing figure. If she had to guess, she would put him in his mid-thirties, same as her. He was probably a professional criminal with a good dose of street thug. He was the type of person that mamas and small children would cross the street to avoid.

  Throughout her career, Shaun refused to avoid anyone, to be intimidated by people like Jozef. In her profession, she’d learned that anyone was capable of anything. Sweet little old ladies could be serial killers and the biggest, noisiest, scariest looking men could be teddy bears who cried over a few stitches. She’d seen it all and knew better than to judge. Unfortunately, Jozef was proving himself to be the former, rather than the latter. He’d already killed one person and she was terribly afraid there were two more on his list.

  After another minute of pacing, he turned on his heel and strode out of the basement. The moment he was gone, Shaun hovered over top of her patient and shook his shoulder.

  “Hey, wake up. Can you hear me?”

  There was no response, so she tried harder, tried to wake him up without jarring his injuries too much. She checked his breathing and his pulse again and realized it was a lost cause. This man was going to die very soon, and he was going to do it without helping her escape.

  Before she could come up with something else, she heard the clatter of feet on the rickety wooden steps. She glanced up in fear as Jozef returned with another person, one of the men from the van. Jozef walked toward her, his steps so rapid, she lurched back. He didn’t reach for her though, instead picking up the bucket of now dirty water and throwing it in the face of the man on the ground.

  Shaun gasped and grabbed hold of his wrist, trying to pull him back. As soon as her fingers touched Jozef’s arm, he gave her a look of such loathing that she instantly dropped her hand and scuttled backwards on the dirt floor. He switched his focus from her to the injured man, who was sputtering water and groaning in pain.

  Jozef grabbed hold of his collar with both hands and lifted him off the ground, his legs swinging uselessly underneath him. Shaun wanted to scream out, to tell him to leave the man alone, that he was in too much pain to be of any use. It didn’t seem to matter though, she was the only one cared about his state beyond getting him to tell them whatever they needed.

  The man who had come downstairs with Jozef, the one who spoke with her in the van, stepped up to them and snarled, “Tell us where Krystoff is.”

  The injured man blinked several times as if trying to remove a fog, then groaned loudly, bringing his unbroken arm up to shield himself. It was no use though, as Jozef dropped one arm, using his other hand to hold the guy up off the floor. Shaun was amazed at the strength it would take to do that. She could usually tell how much a person weighed by looking at them, a hazard of her profession, and she suspected Jozef was holding a two-hundred-pound man as if he weighed no more than a sack of groceries.

  Jozef pulled his fist back and sent it flying into the other guy’s gut. Hitting him in the belly, then continuing to punch him, getting him in the face, arms and stomach. The hits would be unbearable over top of his other wounds and the squeezing pain in his chest, but they weren’t lethal. Jozef seemed to know what he was doing; like a surgeon, he was precise.

  Shaun bit her lip so hard that it bled into her mouth. She wanted to scream. She wanted to leap to her feet and defend her patient, but she knew it was a lost cause. They were going to kill this guy and then her. Maybe if she kept her silence, they would forget about her. At least for now. She’d seen too much death in her career, which had prepared her for the inevitability of dying, but now, every precious second seemed to count. She wanted as many as she could get, even if those seconds came along with the horror of watching someone else beaten to death.

  She was about to cry out that the man was dying, that he couldn’t talk to them, when his groans turned to words. The words were garbled gibberish, pushed through a mouth full of blood and broken teeth. Shaun didn’t understand what he was saying, then she realized that he wasn’t speaking English, but Ukrainian. She’d managed to pick up enough to interact with her patients on a basic level, but she hadn’t been in the country long enough to speak fluently, or understand it well, especially when the words were being spoken with rapid desperation.

  Finally, the words ended, and Jozef nodded. He dropped the man, who fell backward with a crash, his head hitting the floor so ha
rd it bounced. Shaun winced and started to crawl toward him. Maybe if they were done the interrogation they would leave and she could tend to the man, at least make his passing a little more comfortable.

  Before she could reach him, Jozef pulled his gun again, trained it on the man and put a bullet through his head. It was a clean shot. The head remained intact, the only sign of a fatal injury a couple of drops of blood seeping from the wound. Shaun let out a scream of horror and scrambled away, crawling back until she was pressed against a wall.

  Her heart thundered, and she looked up at Jozef, expecting the gun to swing around toward her. She was going to die in that dirty basement, next to the stranger she’d failed to protect. She didn’t know what to expect. She thought maybe her mind would flood with images of her family, or maybe a bright light. Instead, there was nothing but blank terror. Every instinct within her was screaming at her to run away, to try her hardest to escape the fate that was rushing at her, but her limbs were locked, and she could do nothing but watch the gun swing toward her.

  She stared up at Jozef defiantly, tried to tell him silently that he didn’t scare her, that she was prepared for death. None of it was true, but he didn’t need to know that. She watched as his finger tightened on the trigger, just the way it had seconds earlier. His fingers were so starkly beautiful, with the intricate ink painting them. She wondered if he played an instrument; his hands would look beautiful flying over chords as he made music.

  Then she thought of her parents and prepared to die.

  Chapter Five

  Shaun was expecting to feel a raw ripping pain tear through her, followed closely by death. She wasn’t expecting to have someone grip her arm and wrench her up to her feet. The move was so fast, so sudden, that she felt instantly dizzy. When her vision cleared, she was confronted with the intense stunning blue eyes of her captor. His forehead was wrinkled in a frown.