Page 94 of Dancing for the Devil

Nora punched his nose. I heard a crack. She’d broken it without flinching. I was suitably impressed.

“You’re wrong. She wasn’t a nobody. She was my little sister. And you will pay for what you did to her,” she said, really getting in his face.

“Yeah? Well, whatever you do to me, you’re not getting her back. You can’t turn back time. You can’t stop all those thousands of men from using her body like—”

She punched him again, screaming with rage. He only laughed.

“You punch like a girl,” he said and spat a glob of blood at her feet.

Nora snatched the clamp from Katya’s hand and pinched Kirill’s other nipple viciously with it. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You know what? I think we’ll start with fifty k volts. How about that?”

Katya turned to the mobile ECT device we were using and turned it to fifty thousand volts. Kirill blubbered.

“No, please, wait! Stop! Boss, listen, I haven’t done anything. I wasn’t doing this to go against you. I did this for you. I swear—”

Katya turned on the voltage and Kirill screamed. I stood by the door with my hands folded. Katya and Nora had him well in hand. I looked at him blankly as the voltage was cut off, and he slumped as much as he could while tied up, panting audibly.

“Please,” he murmured, a line of drool falling from his lips into his lap.

“Who else were you working with?” I asked softly. “Tell me, and all this stops.”

“No one. Just Igor. I swear.”

“I don’t believe you.” I nodded to Katya, and she switched on the voltage again. Kirill screamed.

“Next time, how about I pour some cold water all over him?” Nora asked.

For the first time, fear flashed in Kirill’s eyes. He finally understood why he was fucked. “Please. I’m sorry, alright? I’ll tell you everything.”

“So, talk,” I said sharply.

“Anto Radic came to me with a plan. He wanted to connect me with some guys who were looking for girls. They were willing to pay top dollar. I came to you and made a proposal, but you turned me down.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Radic was involved?”

“Because I—” he cut himself off, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure what you would say since you were so adamant before…”

“And you wanted to keep your options open.”

Kirill didn’t say a word.

“Go on.”

He took a deep breath, looking resigned. “Igor… Before he came to the club, he used to work for the Italians as a carrier. Their cargo was mostly drugs, but the smuggling routes were the same for drugs, guns, and girls. The girls came from Eastern Europe, the drugs from Afghanistan, and the guns from Ireland, but the same ports meant transporters converged. He told me stories.”

“And you listened, all wide-eyed,” I said.

“Yeah… I mean the amounts of money he was talking about were crazy. And this wasn’t even the Epstein type networks. This was just whorehouses and such.”

Nora spoke through clenched teeth. “Epstein sold underage girls.”

“Yeah I mean… that’s why they were expensive.” He looked at Nora as if he thought she was dumb as rocks. She was huffing quite hard. Her patience was thinning by the second. It was best to move Kirill along quickly.

“Get on with it,” I said impatiently.

“He introduced me to some people. Buyers… y’know? They gave me their specifications, and I realized that a lot of the strippers fit the bill. But I couldn’t just make them disappear. They were making good money at the club, so I visited other, seedier ones. Strippers are pretty world wise though. Most of them weren’t interested.”

I was getting impatient, and he was just wasting time. “What a sad,sadtale. Get on with it.”

---