Page 70 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

“All women need these days is a man to take care of them. Jorik will take care of you. You’d be stupid to leave him,” she’d said to me when I filled her in on all the horrors I’d discovered my ex-fiancé hiding.

Something in my gut hated that advice. Rejected it outright. But I had no money and nowhere else to go. So I stayed.

Then the deaths started.

Newspaper headlines about a slurry of overdoses all linked to the same supplier began to appear rapid-fire. Every day, the body count grew. A mountain of dead. All with the same poison running through their veins.

Jorik played it off at first, waving away the news as nothing more than fear tactics.

Then Altin died.

I didn’t even know my friend was a user. Altin was a fellow bartender, back in the days when I was still working at the club, slinging drinks and dealing with rowdy, haughty, mob-connected patrons. He had kind eyes and a bright laugh.

But when paychecks landed each month, he went to Jorik and bought everything he could. Then he went home and pumped it all into his arm with a needle.

Until he ended up in a city morgue, like all those other poor, faceless addicts. Those kind eyes staring up at the fluorescent ceiling. That bright laugh silenced forever.

The night I learned that Altin was dead, I left work early. Ran home, locked myself in the bathroom, and cried until I felt like I was going to vomit.

The tears stopped eventually. I fell silent.

That’s how I heard Jorik barging into the apartment we shared. He was yelling at someone on the phone. “Am I supposed to care that a bunch of amateurs don’t know how much they can handle? Since when is the dealer at fault? They don’t arrest the bartender when some alkie motherfucker’s liver turns to jelly.”

A pause followed. I pressed my ear against the door, trying to hear more. Jorik never talked to me about work. He liked to keep those parts of his life “separate,” he said.For my own good.

That was the lie. I wish I could say I didn’t swallow it whole.

Finally, he sighed. “I’m only giving the laced stuff to new clients. People we’ve been working with for years are getting pure. It’s the only way I can justify not raising prices. So if you want to tell our best customers we’ll be charging them extra, be my fucking guest.”

Laced stuff?My heart dropped. I knew it at once. In my bones, really.

Jorik killed Altin. Sold him the poisoned shit that ended his life.

And from there, it was an easy jump to understanding the greater horror: Jorik had killed all those people. Every day, when another batch of overdose deaths hit the front page news, it was my fiancé who’d supplied the fatal hit.

I was engaged to a mass murderer.

What happened next that night it all came to light was mostly a blur. I stayed put in the bathroom until Jorik stormed back out. I packed my things. I got ready to leave forever.

But one moment amidst all that chaotic haze stands out clearly.

With a bag in my hand holding the essential things I owned, I went into the room he warned me never to enter. Into the closet he made me swear I’d never open.

Even though I knew what I’d find there, it still came as a numb shock.

Box after box filled with kilos of laced heroin. The poison running through the veins of the city.

And even though I knew what I had to do, I still hesitated. For one long moment, I stood there, looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs. It wasn’t the money that I saw there, though.

It was the lives they would cost. Altin’s and a million others.

In the end, that’s what broke through my daze. That’s what made me act.

I took the first kilo to the shower. Turned the water on. Sliced it open with a pair of kitchen shears and dumped the shit down the drain where it belonged.

Then the next.

And the next.

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