Kostya A Dark Bratva Hate Story

by Talbot, Ginger

Yeger scowls. “Don’t scar her,” he says to Aleksandr.

  “Yes, sir.” Aleksandr draws his arm back, and slashes at Anya’s back. She bucks against the chains and shrieks.

  “Kostya! Why are you punishing me?” she wails. “I’ve done everything you asked! Sir!”

  “I don’t need a reason, Anya. Maybe I just like hearing you scream.” Please understand. Please understand. Please know why I’m doing this.

  She already knows I’m a monster. I don’t want her to think I’m a liar. It shouldn’t matter at this point, but it does.

  I stand there, clenching my jaw, sweat beading on my forehead, as Aleksandr proceeds to whip the living hell out of her. She screams and kicks her legs, she thrashes, she cries. Every second feels like an eternity. Her back turns into a raw, red field of hatch marks.

  Rage boils inside me, and I struggle to maintain control. For my family, I must hide my emotions. “Enough!” I finally snap at him. “You’re at serious risk of scarring the merchandise now!”

  “Yes, you’ve done a good job on her back. Move to her front side,” Yeger calls out.

  “Yes, sir.” Aleksandr’s eyes glow with eagerness. He walks around to her front side and begins whipping her again. Sweat rolls down the sides of his face. He pants with exertion as the whip slashes at her tits, her stomach, the front of her thighs.

  I keep shouting at him in my head. Stop, stop! It’s too much! She’s sobbing, choking, on the verge of passing out.

  “You’re done!” I yell at him. I can’t take any more. Not a second more. I’m going mad. I’ll kill him if he whips her one more time.

  “No, it isn’t,” Pasha taunts. “Harder! She’s not screaming loud enough!”

  I will find a way to kill Pasha.

  “If we whip her any more, she won’t heal in time for the auction. You gave your word that she’d be up for sale,” I protest.

  My stepfather makes a sour face.

  “Get the cattle prod,” he instructs me. “That won’t leave a mark.”

  Fuck. Me.

  But I think of my little sister, and what will happen to her if I disobey a direct order. Hell, my stepfather might not even marry her off, if he gets mad enough. It’s not out of the question that he’d put her up for auction too.

  I fetch a cattle prod, and jab Anya in the stomach with it. Her entire body convulses, and her scream tears my heart in two.

  Aleksandr stands against the wall, watching, and I can see the outline of his cock straining to escape from his jeans. Watching this torture turns him on. I choke down my anger.

  I walk around Anya, shocking her several more times, wrenching shrieks of agony from her. Finally, her eyes roll back in her head and she passes out.

  “She’s faking!” Pasha taunts. “Do it some more!”

  “She isn’t faking. And a dead slave earns us nothing.” I look at the screen. “Sir, my reputation is on the line too, here. I am getting messages from our buyers, saying how much they look forward to the auction. The Auctioneer is checking in with me regularly too. As it is, we’ve now injured her to the point where I’ll probably have to suspend my training for at least the next few days, and we can only pray she heals up in time to be sold.”

  “Very well. You may end the session – for now,” my stepfather says smugly.

  “Fuck! That was so hot!” Pasha is dancing in place, his eyes lit with unholy glee.

  As soon as the video turns off, I release Anya from her chains. She moans in pain as I gather her in her arms.

  “Shall I return her to her room, sir?” Aleksandr says happily.

  I glare at him with the rage of a berserker army. “You should get the fuck out of my way while you’re still breathing.”

  His smile vanishes. “But...I was following orders. I was helping you.”

  I shoulder past him, and rush her to my room, where I tenderly lay her out on the bed. She stirs, moaning in pain. I hurry to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and fetch some extra-strength pain killers, a bowl of warm water, some towels, and salve and bandages for her wounds.

  Aleksandr appears in the doorway as I begin gently washing the cuts on her skin. “Sir.” His voice has taken on a pleading tone. “Your stepfather thought you were going soft on her. Now he doesn’t think that. You heard him, he was going to drag your sister home. And God knows what he would have done to your mother. Your family is your priority, you’ve always said that. I was helping you!” There’s a desperate urgency to his words now.

  He hurries towards me, his face gone pale.

  I stand up and advance on him, fists balled. “No, Aleksandr, you went above and beyond what you had to do. And you didn’t do it to help me, you did it because you’re a sexual sadist and torturing women turns you on.”

  “So what? It’s never been a problem before,” he says defensively. “Not until she got here.”

  That’s not entirely true, it’s always been a problem. But I’ve let him get away with doing most of the training of the women, let him do the heavy lifting, because I hate doing it.

  “You hurt her because it excites you. You could have gone much easier on her and still made it look good. If you wanted to help me, if you were truly loyal to me and not to your twisted fucking needs, you wouldn’t have tortured her. Get the fuck out of my house, Aleksandr. Go back to Russia, stay in Chicago, shoot yourself in the fucking head, I don’t care. But if I ever lay eyes on you again, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “Sir!” he shouts. “Serving you is my life! It always has been!” He sways where he stands, his face gone slack with shock as he absorbs my words.

  “You. Weren’t. Serving. Me.” I spit the words in his face. “You were serving yourself.”

  “You’re right, you’re right!” His voice shakes, and he bobs his head frantically. “I went too far with her! I shouldn’t have done it! I’ll do anything! I won’t train women any more, I’ll just be your bodyguard! I’ll...I’ll go to therapy, I’ll get help! You can’t send me away, sir!”

  In response, I lash out with my fists, punching him so hard in the stomach that he doubles over and gags.

  “If I have to tell you to leave again, I’ll do it with a bullet to the head.”

  “Yes...sir.” His face is white, wretched misery as he stumbles from the room.

  Then I rush back to Anya. She’s regained consciousness, stirring on the bed. “Are we done yet?” she mumbles. “Fuck, that hurt.”

  “I’m so, so sorry.” I begin dabbing salve on her cuts, and she flinches.

  “I know.” Her voice is a breathy moan. She struggles to sit up, and then collapses on the bed again, breathing hard. “As soon as I saw the video feed of your stepfather and Pasha, I knew what was happening. You had no choice.”

  My heart soars with relief. She understands. She forgives me.

  “I won’t let it happen again.”

  She shakes her head. “If it buys us time, then do what you have to do. I stand with you, Kostya. As long as I know you’re on my side, I can endure anything.”

  My heart soars with relief. She understands. She’s still with me. And my God, she’s the strongest woman I know.

  But as I slowly, carefully, tend to her wounds, a chill settle over me. No matter what I do, someone I love is going to condemned to a life of torment, because of me.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kostya

  I have Leonid move from the employee apartment, to replace Aleksandr. Aleksandr is frantic. Over the next few days, he tries texting me several times, begging for forgiveness. He stops after I tell him that if he texts me one more time, I’m going to find him and skin him alive.

  I will never be able to forget the look of savage glee on his face as he whipped Anya. The visual evidence of his arousal.

  I know that I’ve devastated Aleksandr, and he could betray me. He could call my stepfather and tell him everything, and I’d be a dead man. But I also know he’d never do that. Aleksandr’s got a moral code, like all of us in the Bratva do. It’
s a moral code that no outsider could understand, but when you pledge loyalty, it’s a pledge for life.

  It’s something I’m struggling with personally, because what I am doing now could be seen as disloyal. I took the vow, in front of the Elders. I proudly followed in my father’s footsteps. My father never trafficked women, though. I never dreamed that this was the kind of thing that Yeger would ask of me.

  At the time, I also respected Yeger. I thought he worshiped my mother – and he probably did, back at the time I took the vow. Four years after my father’s death; I was twenty. They’d only been married a few years, and she was beautiful, elegant, and eager to please. As the years went on, it seems the shine wore off. And he was never the kind of man who loved; he only coveted. He bought and sold cars and houses and million-dollar watches, but a wife, he couldn’t get rid of quite so easily. The Bratva are very traditional in their own way. Divorce is seen as failure.

  So he’s stuck with a woman who is no longer young, who is no longer a novelty, whose only value is as a bargain chip to control me with.

  And I am trapped in a life I never wanted. I sympathize with Mikhail. Like him, I signed up for a way of life with certain rules and expectations, and then the rules changed. Neither one of us expected to be trafficking women when we became Bratva.

  Rack my brains as I might, I can see no way out of this. The men that are watching my sister’s summer camp are ready to swoop in and grab her at a moment’s notice, but that would be equivalent to declaring war on my stepfather. And I don’t have any way to get my mother out of the house. The cook and a couple of the older maids are still loyal to me, but they’d be useless against the army of bodyguards surrounding the house.

  And my mother is still in denial. If I told her that I thought my stepfather was poisoning her, or doing something to make her sick, over the last year or so, I don’t think she’d believe me. Her entire identity is wrapped up in her marriage. If she were to leave her marriage, she’d feel as if she’d failed in her sole purpose. So even if I could have my men help her escape when she was out on a shopping trip, say, she wouldn’t go for it.

  She’d go running right back to him.

  Anya is slowing healing, limping around the house, grimacing with pain when she moves. The redness of her whip marks is fading a bit, and I think the cuts will heal with minimal scarring. I bathe her, I keep her wounds clean, I wait on her hand and foot, bringing her plates of food. I even sit there and watch stupid romantic comedies with her.

  “Now, you know it’s true love if I’m sitting through this crap,” I tell her on the third night after her whipping. I lean forward and refill my vodka glass. Hers is half empty and she’s been nursing it for an hour.

  Her laugh tinkles like silver bells. She has the prettiest laugh. Why didn’t I notice it before? I guess because she hasn’t had many occasions to genuinely laugh, at least not when she’s with me. “Come on. I watched those shoot-em-up military thrillers with you, and you didn’t hear me complaining.”

  “But they’re entertaining. And they’re not pure fantasy, like this.” I gesture at the screen, where a man is bursting into a church so he can shout his love to the girl of his dreams, before she has the chance to marry some stuffy well-meaning loser.

  “You wouldn’t run into a church to stop my wedding?” she pretends to look hurt.

  “Who are you planning on marrying?” That may have come out more threatening than I intended. Her eyes widen in surprise, and then she laughs.

  “Jealous, a little?”

  The thought of anyone putting their hands on her makes my insides boil with rage. “Jealous, a lot. God help any other man you show interest in.”

  Her smile is sad and wistful. “There’s only ever been you, Kostya.”

  Well, she’s not a virgin, so there was also someone else, at least once, I think sourly. But I have no right to bring that up. She’d practically begged me to ask her out, and I’d stood back like a pussy and let my father and Pasha ruin everything.

  “How is Raisa?” she asks out of the blue. “Have you come up with any way to get her out of there? I’d love to brainstorm with you.” I know she’s been dying to ask me all day. She asked me several times yesterday, and I kept changing the subject.

  “Still working on it,” I say shortly. The truth is, I’m starting to get a little worried. I tried calling over to Moriz today and left a message – just like yesterday. I haven’t heard back from him. I know that when he buys new girls, he tends to hibernate for a week or two – but he can at least be reached by phone.

  Then again, the police haven’t come knocking, so the girls couldn’t have escaped. If they did...well, Raisa knows who I am. None of the girls know where this house is, though, and the property isn’t in my name. Even if the police came, I’d be notified long before they walked in. The room where the girls were kept has been completely sanitized, as always – there will be no evidence of them having been there.

  Anya’s good humor fades. She grabs her glass and drains it. She refills it and takes a very healthy swig.

  “You’re taking painkillers, you shouldn’t drink too much. Not good for your liver,” I say to her.

  She gives me a sidelong glance. “Look who’s talking.”

  “I’m not taking painkillers.” Ha. Like that would stop me.

  “We both know odds are against me living long enough for liver disease to be a problem,” she shrugs moodily.

  There she is again, with that weird fatalistic attitude. She’s said it a few times. Her life is worth nothing, her life isn’t worth fighting for, she doesn’t expect a long life. Why?

  “What makes you say that? What if I come up with some way to persuade my stepfather to let me keep you?” I ask.

  “It’s not just me. It’s Raisa, and the girls...and the auction.” She drinks the rest of the vodka. “It’s being held at an old warehouse west of Chicago, isn’t it?”

  Jesus. First it’s her I have to save, then her best friend and those other girls, and now she wants to shut down the damn auction? And how the hell did she know about the warehouse?

  The same way she knew about Raisa, I imagine. There’s a lot of gossip and information leakage in our world. And she grew up in Chicago, she was very popular in the Russian community, and she was always good at ferreting out information.

  “The warehouse is surrounded by armed guards,” I warn her. “Whatever you’re planning, don’t. Dying for a noble cause is one thing. But you, alone, trying to rush that warehouse? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Something like that,” she says vaguely.

  “They’d mow you down before you got within a hundred feet of the door. It would be suicide. You’d accomplish nothing. And if you’re thinking of notifying the cops, don’t bother. We have men on the inside. If you warned them, no matter how hard you tried, word would get out before the cops could pull into the lot.”

  She reaches for the vodka bottle again. I move it out of her reach.

  “I love you, Anya. I can’t let you go on a suicide mission.”

  “I love you too.” But she sounds so quiet and sad when she says it. What is it that makes her so hopeless? She’s hiding a secret from me, and I don’t know how to get her to share. Then again, with Raisa and the girls still being held prisoner, it makes sense that she doesn’t trust me. Maybe if I found a way to free them, she’d finally open up to me.

  “I’ll figure it out, okay?” I rub my face with my hands. “Can you just give me a little time? I’m trying to figure out a way to persuade my mother to leave my stepfather.”

  My words don’t seem to be making much of an impression. I’m about to quiz her more on what she knows about the warehouse, when my phone rings.

  I grab it, and grimace when I see that it’s Diego. These days, that can only mean bad news.

  I answer the phone and leave the room so I can talk to him in private.

  “Your stepfather’s losing his shit,” he says. “He calle
d up Joe and told him that we’re in his territory and you’ll be taking over the protection racket for everything on Miller Street.” Miller Street has half a dozen restaurants that under the mafia’s protection. And of course, Yeger didn’t bother to clue me in on this.

  “Hey, Diego, so good to hear from you. How’s the wife and kids?”

  “My family is not up for discussion. You owe us, and you agreed,” he tells me. “I’m calling it in. I can give you a day or two to make preparations, but then you’ve got to take care of the problem.”

  Kill Yeger, he means. And dear God do I want to, and if it were just my life on the line, I would risk it, but I have too much else going on right now. Fortunately, I have an alternative.

  “Let me come to your house so we can talk in person,” I say.

  “Meet me at my bar instead. One hour.” And he hangs up.

  I take Mikhail with me, and leave Leonid in the house guarding Anya. Diego, Carmelo, Rocco and Claudio are all waiting for me at Capri. It’s a dingy dive bar in a run-down neighborhood in central Chicago, frequented only by mafia.

  Diego is not in a good mood, but when Leonid and I sit down facing him at the table in his private meeting room, he already has a double shot of vodka waiting for me. It’s sad that they know me so well.

  “It seems to me as if you want to weasel out of your agreement,” Diego says accusingly.

  "I will keep my word. But I’ve been asking around, and I think I finally understand what you have against Tiberio and Joe. From what I’ve heard, they sent your father on a bank job that was poorly planned, and resulted in his death. And your mother died shortly afterwards.”

  The lines on Diego’s forehead deepen, and his eyes flash with anger. “Doesn’t matter, Kostya. I can not make a direct move against them at this point. If I asked you to kill them would be the same as doing it myself.”

  “What if you had something on Joe Esposito that would blow him out of the water? And allow you to get rid of Tiberio as well?”

  He snorts impatiently. “What if a herd of unicorns galloped out of your ass? Because that’s just as likely.”