Page 7 of Hacked For Love
I’m the youngest man in there—still a boy, really—not that anyone cares. My skin is a blank slate—no needle has touched it yet and no knife. That’s about to change, but not because I invitedit.
My cousin had told me to ride my bike around the neighborhood and keep watch while he sold something I never saw. When the police roared up, I thought they were there for something else—until they shot at him. Now he is dead, and though I never knew why I was watching things for Leonid, they tried me as anadult.
Now I am here alone in this prison forkillers.
Don’t you dare look scared, I remind myself. I walk quietly around the edge of the yard, not getting too near anyone, just trying to stretch my legs while my breath steams around me and occasional snowflakes drift past my face. I can feel dozens of icy stares on myback.
Heavy bootsteps trail behind me. I tense and stop, squashing myself against the fence, praying that the owner of the boots will pass and go his own way—away fromme.
“Hey.Kid.”
Sick with terror, I turn around, trying to remind myself:I have done nothing. I have offended no one. “Yes,sir?”
I look up into a scarred, grinning face with an uneven beard and then feel a hard blow to my gut. I stare up at him in shock as I double over, completely confused. He’s laughing and so are hisfriends.
The bruising feeling spreads, accompanied by cold nausea. My hands are getting wet where I hold myself. I watch him walk back to his friends, still wondering why he’s done this, and I see him toss the bloody shiv over the fence and wipe off hishand...
I wake up holding my scar, letting out a little shout as I sit up. I orient myself almost instantly, but my heart keeps pounding. “Unh...shit,” I mutter, waiting for my breath to even out before reaching for my waterglass.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,I think as I swallow the water down without tasting it. It puts a small dent in my headache, but I know it will take a while for the throbbing in my temples to clear. If I get stressed enough, the nightmares come back, and all my skill with lucid dreaming won’t let me grab control ofthem.
Right now, I’m pretty damned stressed. I’m pissed off, but I don’t have a face to punch yet. Nothing that has been uncovered about the Bitcoin theft makes any sense at all, and after a whole day of searching, we’re no closer to finding out who is behindit.
My staff is focusing on two transactions. Temporarily, someone actually swelled my accounts by almost eighty thousand Bitcoin, before sending that—plus twenty-five thousand of my own Bitcoin—on to someone else. The troubling parts are the names—of my unexpected donor and of the person who apparently stole from me on that samenight.
Don Rocco Marcone, a violent bastard with a brain like a brick, is the supposed donor. And Dr. Taki Yoshida, the quietly effective local oyabun, is the supposed thief—which makes no goddamned sense atall.
Yoshida is not a thief. And Marcone would never send me money, so he’ll likely end up thinking that I stole from him. Also, twenty-five thousand of the Bitcoin dumped into my account from Marcone belonged to Yoshida before that.Round and round it goes...and I’ll bet after the stop in Yoshida’s accounts, it gets withdrawn andvanishes.
I look at the open notebook beside me, which has a triangle with arrows drawn in it. The money moves from account to account and snowballs as it goes, then zaps off in an arrow without a label on it yet. I blame Yoshida; Yoshida blames Marcone; and Marcone blames me. We fight…while someone else makes off with ourmoney.
Where have I seen this plot before?It seems awfullyfamiliar.
Get people to fight each other while you make off with their money. The name of the movie’s on the tip of my tongue. The circumstances are a lot different, but the principle’s thesame.
I take a deep breath and get up to put on my track pants. I used to like just cranking up the heat and exercising nude, or nearly. But after being the cause of an almost fatal distraction for a female window-washer, I now at least wear something over my bottomhalf.
Though for all I know, she might have just wanted to count all the marks on myskin.
To gain the favor of abratvayou must do many things. The brotherhood of thieves has no tolerance for cowards, for betrayers, for those who take from them and give back nothing. I was sixteen when I got my first tattoo, even before the stitches in my belly were takenout.
I look down at the formerly black and white design wrapped over my bicep: a rose coiled around a dagger. Its original outline had been gouged into my skin with home-mixed ink on the tip of a needle that had been fastened to an electric shaver. It had taken twenty hours in two long, painful sessions. I was told that if I cried, they would kill me instead of taking meunderwing.
My eyes stayed bone-dry, though I almost bit through my lip. They were impressed. Then they found out that I have a natural talent for math, computers, and money, and they were even moreimpressed.
They put me to work as soon as I was processed out—which took four years, even though my conviction was eventually thrown out. I never went back to prison after that; my new family instead sent me away from Russia and to the States to handle a localbratvaleader’s money. I trained my mind as brutally as I had my body, getting rid of my Muscovite accent and learning everything I could about computers andfinance.
The whole time, I put aside what they paid me as often as I could, looking for something to invest in that would free me from them. That’s where my seed money came from. I’m not proud of it, but a man has to survive, and I had no control over my fate until I repaid my debt tothem.
I warm up with some yoga in my home gym, which takes up a quarter of my penthouse’s lower floor, and then hop on the elliptical for some cardio. The walls of the gym are mirrored so I can check my form; sometimes, the tall, tattooed brute in the mirror startles me alittle.
He doesn’t seem like me. He’s not the man my employees know—but then again, none of them have seen me under mysuit.
I remember defending my brothers with a shiv in the prison yard, and I remember paying for my freedom by laundering massive amounts of cash for thebratva. But just like everything else that happened to me, from the day the Moscow police picked me up, until I started my new life half a decade ago, none of it seems like my life. It was more like an act I had to carry on at until I had earned my way out and I could liveagain.
So, half the time when I look in those mirrors, I expect to see that skinny, hungry, oblivious kid who didn’t even have the sense to ride away when the police pulled into hisneighborhood.
I’m burning up the miles on my elliptical, arms and legs pumping, a sheen of sweat rising on my skin. I have more scars now than tattoos, the stiff, leathery patches of skin growing thinner and smoother after years of treatment, but still pulling in spots as my musclesstrain.
