Page 48 of Kings of Cruelty

We shut and lock the container door.

“You have buyers lined up already?” the guard asks. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, taking a casual puff.

“Maybe,” I answer, and this is one thing Kotya has left me in the dark about. We can offload four women on our current contacts, but if we’re going to expand, we’ll need more people who want to buy.

I guess he doesn’t trust me that much after all. So much for me still being his right-hand man.

I transfer the money to the seller, with the guard watching carefully. Once he gets the okay from his boss, he nods.

That’s it. The transaction is over. This stage of it, anyway.

Nikolai and I walk out of the container yard and toward where we’d parked our vehicles. I can’t wait to get on my bike and roar down the road. I contemplate not even wearing a helmet so I can feel the wind whipping in my hair—but my hair is short now, so it won’t even do that properly.

“Thanks for all the help,” I say sarcastically.

He makes a rude sound. “You can go tattle to Konstantin about how I didn’t do enough with his human trafficking gambit if you want. I really don’t give a fuck.”

My hands clench and I turn to face him. “I thought you were his new right-hand man? That you were taking care of all his shit while I was gone? But I guess you’re all show. Can’t do any of the actual hard work.”

“Hard work?” Nikolai barks out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. You tell yourself that I didn’t help because it was ‘hard work’ and not because it was totally fucked—which you already know, sowhy the hell are you bitching at me? Maybe you have a stronger stomach than I do.”

I stare in disbelief. The anger and the rage that has been coiling in my stomach all day rise up, and I storm over to Nikolai and grab his shirt collar. “You’re disrespecting Kotya now? You’re going to go against his orders?”

“I didn’t go against his orders,” Nikolai snaps at me. “I still helped. I didn’t help as much as you did, because I was going to lose it if I tried. Maybe you think I’m a waste of space for it. I don’t really care. But I have some scruples.”

“You are a fucking waste of space!” I shout, right as I punch him.

He’s so startled that he takes it right in the face, and blood spills from his nose. For a second, I don’t think he’s going to retaliate, but then he throws his own punch. I dodge it easily, but he comes in for a second blow.

Both of us have been in our fair share of skirmishes, and I’m so pissed that I don’t hold back. All of my anger from being left out, from being left behind while I was in prison, threatens to spill over.

I go for him with an angry yell, aiming for his throat the way Kotya had taught me all those years ago. There’s no point in fighting fair, Kotya had said. Nobody ever gets ahead by fighting fair.

And this is what we’re doing now, right? Not fighting fair. Ripping off naive young women who want a better life, but instead we sell them to a worse one.

This is how to get ahead in life.

He blocks the blow, but I launch another attack, then another—and while we might’ve been evenly matched before prison, I’ve been in enough altercations to where he can’t quite match up.

“What the fuck, Yuri!” he shouts.

“You!” I shout back. “Fuck you! You don’t get to pretend you aren’t part of this!” I send out a roundhouse kick to knock him on his back.

He shouts and falls backward, slamming his head into the concrete road.

Nikolai doesn’t move.

I freeze.

“Nikolai?” I ask, breathing hard. “Get up, you son-of-a-bitch.”

He’s still for so long that I start to worry, then he finally groans and my heart starts to beat again. He slowly sits up and looks at me, his eyes unfocused. “I think I’ll sit here a minute,” he mumbles.

I stare at him, my mind in complete disarray. The anger hasn’t dissipated, but I no longer feel like punching Nikolai.

I go to the motorcycle and pack the bag of passports into the small storage compartment under the seat. I pull my gloves on over my bloody knuckles.

“I’m going back to the house,” I mutter.

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