Valon: What Once Was (Volkov Bratva Novella)(32)

It took seven minutes to get the boy from the chair to the wall, binding his wrists together, and then stretching them out above him. Valon didn’t bother removing the knives Jetmir had left in his chest, merely cut through the back of his shirt until the material split and he had unrestricted access to the length of his flesh.

While Valon headed for the tray of tools, Strom stood next to the girl, the smile he sent her way making renewed fear spark in her eyes. Fatos…he stood back, watching Valon’s every move. He would undoubtedly join in on the fun soon enough, but he seemed content to just observe for the time being.

Picking up a blade that was at least six inches long with a cold, steel handle, Valon turned it over in his hand, getting used to the feel of it. He’d never had much of a predilection for knives until one was used on him. But now? Now, he liked them more than his own hands.

These cold, inanimate things could do more harm than his fists could any day. This knife was an extension, something that was not quite a part of him but made up so much of who he was.

“What are you doing?” Fatos asked in Albanian so that the boy wouldn’t understand.

Valon picked up a bottle of vodka that had been left behind, dousing his hands and the knife in the liquor.

“Wouldn’t want it to get infected,” he muttered, too busy concentrating on his task to pay Fatos much attention.

Spinning the knife around in his hand, he went back over to the boy, leaning back against the wall so that he could see him. His eyes were on Fatos as he spoke, but his words were low enough for only the boy to here.

“Tell them what they want to know,” he ordered, for his sake as much as the boy.

Sometimes his self-control even surprised him, but Valon didn’t know what he was capable of when he used a knife, and after what he had suffered because of one of them…he wasn’t sure he could rein himself in before he did more damage than he meant. Maybe he could end this before it even began.

The boy’s eyes darted frantically, but when he couldn’t offer a response, Valon couldn’t wait any longer.

Pushing off the wall, Valon circled him until he was at his back again, staring at the wide expanse of his skin. Using the very tip of the blade, he ran it across the boy’s skin, following a pattern that was all too familiar to him.

He pictured what he was going to do first, each line he was going to carve…

Before he could check the impulse, he dug the blade in, watching as it sunk in easily, cutting through his skin with ridiculous ease. Pulling back after a second, he watched the blood drip down his skin, the red coloring stark.

A shudder rippled through him as he felt the ghost of a knife going through his own back.

“Do you have an answer?” Valon asked, ignoring the shaking of his own voice.

He desperately wanted the boy to answer now, just so he could avoid what he had to do next. With just one careful line, he felt that familiar draw, the need to hurt someone else the way he had been hurt, but he rationalized it in his own head by thinking he was giving them an out, something he hadn’t been given.

Valon liked to believe he gave him a chance to answer before he started back in, but he didn’t remember because once he made another cut, he was lost.





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16




In the last few years where he had learned how best to make a person hurt and the various ways he could achieve this, Valon didn’t think he had seen anything like this. Over the course of two days, Valon had done unmentionable things to the boy, had lost himself a time or two throughout the torture, but through it all, the boy held out.

That wasn’t even to mention what Strom had done to his lover.

Valon might not have shied away from what he and Fatos did to the boy, but he refused to take part in the gang rape. His morals might have been questionable at best…but he did have some.

After only a couple of hours of sleep on the first floor of the house they were in, Valon headed back upstairs, ready to begin it all again.

Ignoring the others, he looked at the boy as he always did; feeling that familiar stab of guilt at what he’d endured. He was sitting in a puddle of his own urine, his face a mass of bruises, and Valon didn’t have to see what his back looked like…he’d done that himself.

The girl was passed out, unlike the boy, and Valon was glad for this. It was enough that the boy was suffering. She didn’t have to, too.

He was nodding off, his dark, sweaty hair hanging around his face like a dark halo. Valon was not in any mood for carving his back up any further, so he kept to the back of the room, giving him a reprieve for as long as he could, but that idea was short-lived as Jetmir came charging up the stairs, a bucket of water in his hands.

His every step was clipped as he moved across the room, a desperate gleam now present in his eyes.

If Valon had to guess, then he was frustrated as to how long the boy was holding out. Not many people would have been able to keep quiet with the sheer level of pain Valon had put him through, not to mention what the girl had suffered. So, either the boy was a masochist…or there was something else, something that Valon was beginning to consider…

There was a timeline. Valon remembered that much from the day they’d visited the Besnik mansion to get the details of their assignment. Since he had held out for this long, they were running out of time.