*Andrei*
Having to deal with dead bodies on a semi-regular basis meant we had a cleaning crew on standby. Not your normal cleaning crew, either. They could come in and make a place look as if nothing happened in under half an hour. It was one of the most amazing sights I’d ever seen, to be honest. They erased all traces of Mike from the gym in record time.
While the cleaners worked, we all gathered on the other side of the gym. It helped that Viktor and Misha weren’t worried about Chris and Keith, but I still couldn’t help but worry. I didn’t want this to cause problems in the future, so I was glad Viktor wanted to talk to them right away.
My fears were put to rest almost immediately. Keith looked at Viktor, asking, “did you guys train her?” Viktor nodded. “And that’s how you want to train us?” he asked. Viktor nodded again. “Yeah, I’m all the way in for that. She’s unreal. But please don’t make me fight her. I already know. I need to start at the beginning.” His eyes were slightly wide, at the thought of going against Sephie.
Chris nodded his head in agreement. “Start me at the beginning too. I will happily admit that she can easily kick my ass. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Where did you guys find her? Like, clearly that girl has been through some shit, but holy hell it’s just made her stronger. Is she immortal? Can she be killed? Because I don’t think she can be.” He looked up at all of us, looking at him seriously at the mention of her dying. “Oh shit. I ramble when I’m nervous. It’s a real problem. Like I can’t stop talking sometimes and I say stupid shit out loud. Please don’t kill me. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Ivan chuckled. “It’s a legitimate question, if you knew what she’s been through.”
“Our job is to make sure we never find an answer to that question,” I said. “Which also means your job is to make sure we never find an answer to that question. If there’s a problem with that, we need to know now.”
“Not in the slightest,” Keith said. “I’ve only seen a glimpse, but I’m starting to understand what you all see in her.”
“Nope, no problems here,” Chris said. He looked to Viktor, a curious look on his face. “What are we going to do about replacing that asshole though?”
Viktor sighed. “I haven’t decided yet. One of you can have his position.”
Keith said, “if I may, and I don’t want to speak for Chris, but it’s painfully obvious to me now that my training is severely lacking comparatively. I would be fine with deferring to you guys for the time being until I catch up.”
Chris again nodded in agreement. “Same for me too. I realized today that I have major holes in my training. But at least I can admit it, unlike that poor bastard.”
“I did warn him she was going to fuck him up. People don’t listen,” Misha said, shaking his head in dramatic disgust. It made me laugh.
“I’ll talk to Boss about it. We’ll come up with a solution for Mando’s security,” Viktor said. “You guys are free to go. I know Mando has meetings soon. He’s going to need you.”
They both nodded and left the gym. The rest of us stayed, needing to talk about what to do for Sephie. We stood in silence for a moment.
Ivan looked at the rest of us. “I think at this point she won’t care that I told you guys. Sephie killed her uncle the night she got those scars. She had blocked it out until the night of the ball. When she was out on the plane, she relived that night. All of it. The beating, the whip, all of it. But this time, her memory let her remember everything. She sliced his Achilles’ heel like she told all of us, but she stabbed him in the heart once he went down. She says she remembers standing over him and watching him die. He reached for her leg as he was struggling, but she picked her leg up out of his reach and stomped the knife further into his heart.” He paused to look at our faces. Ivan enjoyed shocking us, so he wanted to drink this in for a moment. “I told Adrik that I had told Sephie her beast mode was activated that day she shot the guy in the face when they were trying to grab her. But then I said her beast mode has always been activated once he told me about her uncle. I think I was wrong both times. I think we just watched her beast mode activate for real today. I’ve never seen her so angry and yet so in control as she was today. We woke the beast and the beast is now fully under her control.”
I couldn’t help but feel excited about how her training would progress, assuming she handles the day’s events well. “I have so many ideas on how to progress her training from here. Not even going to pretend I’m not excited about that.”
Viktor smiled, but in his true reasonable fashion, said, “while I share in your excitement, we need to make sure she’s okay with what happened today too. It could set her back and we don’t want that.”
I looked to Ivan. “You seem to know what she needs to hear about this. How do we help her through this?”
“I think she’ll handle it better than you guys think. When I said that she just delivered his sentence? She said that to me when I told her about my past. She said, ‘sometimes Karma uses you to deliver justice. You just handed down their sentences.’ I think the more she hears that Mike wasn’t walking out of here alive today, the more she’ll accept it. I also reminded her that what’s said in anger is the truth. Then I told her how thankful I was no broccoli was harmed today,” he said, chuckling. Misha and I looked at each other laughing, remembering that awkward day with Tori in the kitchen at the house.
“I think she knows on some level that Mike never would’ve stopped. Before you guys walked into the ring, Boss had told me that Mike was done, but he was going to let him live. Sephie disagreed. She said he was never going to let this go and that he’d spend the rest of his life trying to get to her or that he’d run straight to Sal and tell him everything he knew. She was right. That’s when I told her I bet her ten bucks he was already dead,” Viktor said.
“She told me that day at the house that she felt nothing about killing her uncle. I think that might be the case here, too. We all know how emotional she can get when something is really bothering her. She feels her emotions very strongly. She was completely void of emotion standing there looking at him,” Ivan said.
“She shouldn’t feel anything about killing her uncle. Or Mike. They both had it coming,” Misha said.
Stephen said, “we all heard her on the plane struggling against what her uncle used to call her. I think he and Mike were cut from the same cloth.”
Ivan looked at him, his anger visible. “That’s not even the half of it. He used to kick her in the stomach, calling her a whore. He would tell her he was making sure she wouldn’t bring home another mouth to feed. One night, she hemorrhaged and couldn’t stop bleeding. Her uncle thought she was having a miscarriage so he took her to a dirty doctor that would do back-room procedures for cash. The doc did an ultrasound and found scar tissue in her uterus from her uncle’s repeated kicks to her stomach. Her uncle was convinced she had gotten pregnant, so he told the doctor to take her uterus. She pleaded with him not to, but she was 16. Her uncle had guardian rights over her, so the doctor did it anyway.”
I felt my anger rise, as I cursed under my breath. I could clearly see the anger on everyone else’s faces too. Misha said, “I still feel horrible about bringing that up. I was just trying to tease her. I had no clue that it would be that horrific.” He ran his hand through his hair, his face turning red as he struggled to control his own emotions.
“You didn’t know, Misha. She’s not going to hold it against you,” I said.
“I’m going to hold it against me,” he said as he walked away from us. I started to go after him, but Ivan stopped me.
“Give him a minute. This is a lot and we all know he blames himself first,” he said.
“Does anybody know who this doctor is?” Stephen asked.
“I haven’t been able to find anything so far, but I’ve been looking into it. I haven’t asked Sephie for specifics on where she lived with her uncle, but from what she’s told us about her story, I’ve sectioned off a few areas of the city. I’ve got people trying to find out in each area if they know of a doctor that used to do those kinds of procedures. So far, I can’t find anything,” Ivan said. “But I’m not stopping until I find him.”
“Good,” we all said at once.