When I was ten, I’d taken knife-throwing classes. They weren’t like the normal ones where you aimed at a person or at a target, these were based on immobilizing someone without killing them. At night I had to study the human anatomy, so that I knew where every major organ was and every major blood vessel.
The areas where there wasn’t a lot of fat were the areas you wanted to hit first, because your blade would go through it more easily, and do what mine was doing right now.
After I’d finished the classes, I’d designed a set of knives, slightly thicker than a regular hunting knife, that would slice through muscle, tendons, and skin, then penetrate a harder surface.
I had twenty of them available in my kit, along with some other blades I’d designed that were used on other areas once the person was immobilized.
I’d thrown another five in quick succession, aiming for his other shoulder, the areas of his quads just above his knees, and just above his hips. These locations made it almost impossible for him to move unless he wanted to attempt to rip his flesh out with the knives, which some men still attempted.
Watching it, Hunter shot a grin at me. “Neat trick.”
Bruce, though, wasn’t amused. “Anything you wanna get off your chest yet?”
The man had stopped screaming after the third blade, and was now panting as he looked between us all. “I don’t know anything else.”
When I’d first learned the art of interrogation and torture, I’d been hit by crippling pity for the person it was being done on.
No matter what life you were born into, there was an instinct inside you that wanted to believe them and send them off to be patched up. It was how you grew from the instinct that changed your ability to switch off to that pity, and instead focused on detecting bullshit.
Bullshit which this man was full of.
My hands were a blur as I threw another three knives, this time aiming for bone which was more painful.
Both members of the Road Kings were standing watching it with blank expressions on their faces, but Vadim was grinning as he watched me in action. He had better skills than I did, but he used his to interrogate terrorists and people who would stop at nothing to use their own skills back on him. It was a case of whoever could move the fastest to take down their opponent, came out of it breathing—albeit bleeding badly.
So this style of torture was like watching a cartoon to him.
“She— They— She wanted information,” the man whimpered, his head sagging forward as he tried to gulp oxygen into his lungs. “She said you beat her during your visits, and wanted information to divorce you.”
Now, this I hadn’t expected.
“Donna Azarov told you this?” I asked, walking closer to him and spinning a different type of blade now. This one was small and designed to make small wounds that bled badly.
Not lifting his head, he nodded, and then followed it with a whimper as he sagged, pulling the knives up through the skin of his shoulders slightly.
“She showed me the bruises. My mother was beaten by my father… every day of her life, until he killed her.” The words were said so quietly that I’d had to strain to hear them.
“The suka isn’t so stupid,” Vadim mused, his eyes narrowed at the new information, and mainly keeping to English for the sake of Bruce and Hunter apart from calling Donna a bitch. “She’s investigated your men to find ones with a weakness she can manipulate.”
“Apparently so,” I agreed, but I wasn’t altogether surprised by this revelation. It was one of the reasons I’d gone ahead with the wedding.
The wedding had been agreed on after a conversation between my dad and the Azarovs. During it, Donna and her father had referred to large deals that were stalling after years of negotiations. They were worth billions, so naturally, we wanted them. They’d also dropped the names of the Bratvas who were proving problematic for us, which is what’d given their true intentions away.
All of the ones they’d mentioned were ones few knew we had issues with, which would have weakened us if they’d all been revealed before we could calm the situations down.
After it, the threats to Nell, ourselves, and the MC had begun to arrive, and we’d known it was linked.
It was a discreet attempt at blackmail, but no one outside of the Fedorov Bratva knew about the problems we had with them, so we knew they had eyes and ears inside the brotherhood.
The saying to keep your friends close and your enemies closer is one of the wisest ones ever created, so we’d given them the illusion of a copacetic marriage agreement, and hadn’t given away how much we knew even without investigating who’d told them. It’d enabled us to get more eyes on the two, as well as the other factions we had issues with.