Page 149 of Lethal Torture
She turns her coffee cup in her hands. “I don’t think Bogdan planned to keep me. Not at first. He just held on to me as a way to rebel against Oleg. That was, until he methim.Simon Lowbridge,” she says bitterly when I look confused. “Simon has a knack for finding ambitious people who feel overlooked and putting them to use. He was trying to go legitimate and needed someone to run the illegal side of his business. Bogdan was perfect. He spoke Russian, was corrupt through and through, and he hated working for Oleg. Simon offered him the chance to build an entire business in Romania. Bogdan leaped at it.”
Simon. Bogdan.
The familiar way she uses their names is a jarring reminder that, for years now, these men have been her world, as real to her as Oleg the Whip was to me.
At the thought of those years, a flicker of memory tugs at the back of my mind.
“Wait.” I frown, remembering. “Did Kozlov go by a different name back then?”
“A nickname, yes.” Sophie’s mouth curls. “Oleg used to call him Oggie.Bogdan hated it.”
“I remember that,” I say slowly. “Oleg and his men teased him that he had a face like a Cornish pasty—”
“Yes!” Sophie looks almost animated. “Cornish pasties are called oggies,and it sounded like the name Bogdan. Like I said, though, he hated it. He wanted a threatening nickname, like ‘the Knife’or ‘the Fist.’Instead Oleg named him after a pasty and made fun of him.”
No wonder his name meant nothing to me.I’d forgotten about Bogdan Kozlov, his face and name lost in the blur of revolting men who frequented my father’s club in those early years.But I remember the way Oleg whipped me when Oggie disappeared.
I thrust the memory aside.
“Oggie was Oleg’s connection to the supply chain of girls he had working in his club,” I say. “When he left, Oleg had to find a whole new supply. He wasn’t happy.”
Understatement of the year.
Sophie nods. “Bogdan was gleeful about that. He thought Oleg’s club would die without him.”
“It didn’t.” I meet her eyes. “Not then, at least.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “I heard, later, about the fire, and how you ended it.”
I want to ask a thousand questions. But I know there isn’t time, not today.
“You said that things changed for you when Bogdan met Lowbridge,” I say. “Why?”
She grimaces. “Simon had big plans for a webcam business in Eastern Europe. Bogdan had contacts in Romania, but he was a criminal, not a bookkeeper. He didn’t understand the first thing about numbers or cash flow. After his first meeting with Simon, he came back to the flat with a business brief that Simon had given him. It included numbers, projections. Bogdan couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”
“But you could?” I look at her curiously. “You were eight years old, Sophie.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to survive for much longer.” She says it bluntly, and I do my best not to flinch. “At first, he played with me, like I was some kind of doll. He’d make me dance, over and over, to the music from one of those horrible jewelry boxes, you know the ones, with the ballerinas inside?”
I nod, doing my best not to react at the images I can see all too well in my mind.
“But the novelty wore off soon enough. Especially once he’d...takenme.” The dead expression on her face when she says it makes me sick inside. “Bogdan stopped feeding me, except for a few odd scraps. I knew he’d grown bored with having me around, and by then, I understood enough to know that unless I could make myself useful, I wouldn’t last much longer. The night he brought the file home he got angry because he couldn’t understand it and beat me to a pulp. Then he got drunk and passed out. I read the file while he slept. I’d always been good at maths, do you remember?”
I nod. “I do. Tetya Ana always said you had a gift for numbers.”
“Yes.” Her eyes flare briefly. “I didn’t understand what the file was about. Not then. But I did understand the numbers. They made sense to me. And I knew I had to find a way to convince Bogdan I had value. I knew by then I wasn’t pretty,” she says bitterly. “He told me that all the time. Not that it stopped him from—” She breaks off, her face closed and tight.
I wait, breathing through my own disgust and anger.
“When Bogdan woke up,” she goes on eventually, “I explained the numbers to him. For the first time since he took me away, he was actually listening. He asked me if there was a way to make more money for himself, and I told him there was. I didn’t know how, then. But I was determined to find a way.” She gives me a small smile. “That was how it started. We moved to Romania soon after that, where Simon gave us the money toset up the webcam business. By the time I was twelve, I was managing all the books for Bogdan’s end of the business—and making sure he was taking a decent profit for himself.”
For a time she talks about those years, her face even animated when she talks about the growth of the business. “I stopped really seeing the girls.” She admits it quietly, her eyes sliding away from mine. “I—now, I think I had to. Otherwise I couldn’t have done what I... had to.” The eyes flicker up, then down again. “The shipments. The containers.” She shudders. “But by then, Bogdan knew his business depended on me. So he let me keep my distance from it.”
Silence falls for a while.
“Then Simon won the Port Authority contract.” Sophie’s hands twist in her lap, her eyes avoiding mine. “And you stopped one of his shipments. It was the first time I had heard your name in years.” She shivers. “Bogdan and Simon were furious. For the first time since I was a child, Bogdan beat me.” She hunches in on herself. “Badly.”
Shame twists inside me. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”
