Chapter 304
Chapter 304
People weren’t talking the way they usually did. There was no idle chatter, no laughter, no ringing phones or footsteps rushing past. Instead, there was a thick hush, broken only by low murmurs and sharp inhales. Patients, visitors, nurses—everyone stood frozen in clusters, eyes lifted, bodies angled toward the large television mounted high on the wall.
I followed their gaze.
“Breaking news,” the reporter said, her voice tense, and clipped. “There appears to be escalating trouble within the Russian Bratva. Over the past year, countless unidentified bodies have been discovered across various regions—each death more gruesome than the last.”
My stomach tightened.
“But just last night,” she continued, “authorities recovered the bodies of two men believed to be at the very top of the Russian Bratva hierarchy.”
The screen shifted.
And the world tilted.
A collective gasp tore through the lobby. Mine joined it, sharp and involuntary, ripping out of my chest.
The first body filled the screen.
The man’s face—God—his face was wrong. Completely wrong. Twisted beyond recognition. His lips had been torn open, split wide all the way to his ears, stretched so brutally that every tooth and raw gum was exposed. Except—there were no teeth. No tongue either. Just a dark, hollow mouth frozen in a silent scream.
My breath caught painfully.
The camera panned lower.
His skin had been peeled.
Not cut. Not torn.
Peeled.
Every inch of it stripped away, leaving nothing but exposed flesh, slick and red and horrifyingly bare. It looked unreal. Like something out of a nightmare someone had dragged into the daylight.
People around me turned away. A woman sobbed openly. Someone gagged. Another person dropped to a chair, face buried in their hands.
I didn’t move.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
Then the screen changed.
The second body was worse.
Both eyes were gone, gouged out so deeply the sockets looked collapsed. His mouth had been treated the same way—split, ruined, emptied. But that wasn’t what made my vision blur.
His head wasn’t attached.
The body lay in one place. The head in another.
And the body—oh God—the body was covered in something metallic, reflective under the camera lights.
Nails.
Hundreds of them.
Driven into flesh like punishment.
“This is being described as one of the most terrifying and brutal killings not only in Russia, but beyond its borders,” the reporter said, her voice strained now. “Unlike the previous victims, these two men have been identified.”
My heart began to slam violently against my ribs.
“They are believed to be Sebastian Makarov, also known as the Pakhan of the Russian mafia, and his underboss, Tom Bernard.”
Everything drained out of me.
The room. The noise. The air.
Gone.
My ears rang as the rest of her words dissolved into meaningless sound. Tom was dead. The Pakhan was dead. Not just dead—slaughtered. Displayed. Shown to the world like a warning written in blood.
Who could do this?
How was this even possible?
My body trembled as reality tried to settle, but it couldn’t find a place to land.
I didn’t remember leaving the lobby.
I didn’t remember the walk.
I only knew I was suddenly in my office, my hands shaking so badly I had to brace them against the desk. My heart refused to slow, pounding erratically, and painfully, like it was trying to escape my chest.
Sitting felt impossible.
I needed to lie down. I needed the ground. I needed—something.
I moved toward the small bed tucked into the corner of the office, my legs unsteady beneath me. My fingers fumbled with the curtain, pushing it aside slowly.
And then—
“Ahhhhhhhhh—”
The scream ripped out of me before my mind could stop it.
A hand clamped over my mouth instantly, hard and unyielding—cutting the sound off at its root. My back slammed into a solid chest, breath knocked clean out of me as my heart tried to beat its way through my ribs.
My whole body went rigid.
“Ssh, Princess…” a voice murmured close to my ear, low and intimate, wrapped in something dark and familiar. “This was not how I expected our reunion to go.”