The Dark Duet (2 page)

What kind of vile territory have I entered? What menace to mankind will I find once I meet face-to-face with the man who indirectly jumpstarted my journey into hell?

Dr. Rudoloph Burkenstein graduated from Leipzig University in Saxony, which is a town in the Free State of Germany, with honors. He is known for his accomplishments in neuroscience, the study of the human brain, but I only know him as one of the men who watched me squirm the night I was inducted into the Circle, the night that forever changed my life. This will be the first time we’ve seen each other in almost twelve years.

Once we step inside, someone snatches my blindfold away. Squinting, I focus on my surroundings: a large lobby, gray walls, a semi-circular desk, charcoal colored floors. It’s a picture of complete depression. “This way,” Gash orders me. I follow him into an elevator and we ride down about fifteen floors. My ears pop from the depth of the underground cavern, and I can only imagine what I’m about to find in this place.

The elevator bounces to a stop and we get out. At once, I feel the difference in the atmosphere. Cold dread fills my chest as I begin walking down a dark hallway, the stone walls reminding me too much of the time a little over a decade ago when I was kept prisoner in a place similar to this one, specifically during those times when I refused to obey my master. In the distance, I hear screams. The lights overhead flicker as we file past the experiments and technicians behind glass walls. The deeper we go, the more my skin crawls, the more I understand that bringing a man like this down to his knees is the right thing to do.

As we approach a large set of double doors at the end of the hallway, Gash turns toward me and says, “What’s the matter? Scared of a few little screams?”

My left eye ticks and I’m afraid I cannot stop the turning up of my lips. “Indeed,” I answer, holding his gaze without breaking a smile. Only someone like Burkenstein would be able to see the usefulness in a man like this.

Moving aside without taking his gaze away from me, he places a card in front of the reader. The metal doors slide open, revealing yet another long hallway leading up through a dark area. I step through and turn around to find Gash hanging back at the doorway, his beady eyes darting around the area. This is too good; the bastard’s afraid of something in this part of the building. “What’s the matter, Gash?” I ask in a mocking tone. “Afraid of what’s hiding in the dark?”

“Fuck you! The boss doesn’t like us fooling around in this part of the lab. Consider yourself lucky. Head to The Boardwalk at the top of those stairs. Now get lost,” he snaps, scowling just before he steps back and the doors slide close.

‘Consider myself lucky,’
he says. Luck plays no part in this night. Revenge owns this game—smooth, hard, and complete.

I turn and walk through the darkness, dimly lit by small lamps attached along the wall every ten feet or so, without stopping until I reach the top of the pathway. Leave it to Burkenstein to have a room named after a beach fixture. It has taken me almost five minutes to reach the doors at the end.

A sign above the doorway reads: “The Boardwalk.” As soon as I step within a foot of the reader, the double doors slide open. A burst of cool air sweeps across my skin and I find myself in yet another gray lobby, but this one’s smaller than the first one we entered. A console runs along the length of the far side of the room, and a set of doors sit to the left and right of the place where I’m standing. A large glass window is situated above the console and gray curtains hide whatever sits behind them. I’m inside some kind of control room.

The door to my left slides open. All of my senses instantly go on alert, and I slip my hand into my pocket, the coolness of the metal blade hidden inside the lining of my trousers comforting me.

A man steps through the doorway. He’s shorter than my six-foot-tall frame, but I can tell by the leanness of his body that he works out. Rudolph Burkenstein hasn’t aged much at all since the last time I saw him, the only time I’ve ever seen him. He wears a brown suit that highlights his coiffed hair; a shade that could be either dirty blond or light brown depending on the way the light hits it. A set of shrewd black eyes narrow as he approaches me, but the crooked smile does not once falter.

I will wipe that smile off his face.

“Nikolai Belikov. Surely it has been too long,” he says, embracing me. I fight the urge to push him back and beat the shit out of him. Images of the day he greeted Vladimir in this way as they debated on what house I’d be sent away to come flooding back into my mind. The way this bastard had stood there, watching as I was carried away and subjected to my first acts of humiliation and shame, was one of the last few normal moments I had in life. And then I was taken into a laboratory ... ironically, one that looked a lot like this place. Either he does not think I remember him or he does not care. I shake off the images of my past.
Focus, Kolya.

“You made me wait almost six months before sending for me,” I begin, cutting right to the point of our meeting. “I do not like to wait, or made out to be a fool.”

Smiling, he steps over to the largest console and says, “Still curt and straight to the point, I see.” I keep silent. “Patience will take you far in this organization. Loyalty will get you everything you need. I had to be sure you were a man familiar with these qualities, since the assignment you’ve been delegated to complete will require extensive use of both.”

“Do I even want to know what that statement means?”

“Easier for me to show you,” he replies, turning to the switchboard in front of him. He pushes a red button on the console, and the gray curtains hanging in front of the window that extends before us opens. I’m now staring inside a large room, the interior filled with white light. The sudden brightness after being shrouded in the dark for so long almost blinds me. I shield my eyes, squinting as I focus on the equipment in the center of the room. A woman lies on a bed situated between the two hulking machines; a life support contraption of some sort, no doubt. Either that, or she’s the recipient of some other type of degrading experiment this man has been known to perform on Vladimir’s enemies in the past.

“There lies your salvation. The key to your dreams,” he says to me.

“What is this?” I ask, my eyes focusing on the woman lying in the bed situated in the center of the room.

“Your assignment. Her name is Alestasia Broussard, a former CIA agent,” he answers in a smug voice. I can tell he enjoys playing God with people’s lives.

“Used to be?”

“She has no memory of her previous identity thanks to the evolution of my greatest work. The mind wipe serum,” he explains, pride swimming in the angled features of his face.

I steal a glance at him, narrowing my eyes.
What a sick bastard
. “This is not what I came here for. What are you playing at, Burkenstein?”

“Don’t fool yourself, Belikov. A seven-figure investment rarely comes without a down payment, without some type of collateral attached to the bottom line. I need a new negotiator to support you. Someone who can fight by your side. Someone who’s both beautiful and deadly.” As soon as he finishes explaining, a scream sails through the speakers surrounding the room. I rip my gaze back to the woman lying on the table. Two technicians have now attached some type of contraption to either side of her head. I grit my teeth; her wails cut to my core, shattering something inside me.

“No,” I answer. “I will not be a part of this.” Images of the day when I was thirteen years old flood my head again. That was the day I had awakened and found myself attached to some kind of mechanism similar to this one.

“Please. I want to go home,” I had pleaded in broken English to the face hovering over my bed. The man was shrouded in the shadows created by the lights hanging over his head, a monster come to whisk me away and torture me before scattering my remains throughout the streets of Siberia.

“You are home. You’ll be well cared for as long as you do as you are told,” the man’s voice had answered back. “But first, we need to tap into that delicious darkness inside of you. Your father has instructed me to mold you into a replica of his image. Making him happy, I shall do.”

Unbelievable surges of electricity shot through me, my body convulsing so hard that my back actually arched up into a U. That was one of the many conditioning-punishment sessions this man subjected me to on behalf of his invisible boss. Eventually, I learned to do as I was told, no matter what I had to do. I was turned into a slave of pleasure and violence, my life a rotation of acts that involved both seducing my enemies and putting down their adversaries, my future a vision of crimson and rage.

That was, until the day I met Aleksandr Dostovsky.

“It’s too late to say no,” Burkenstein states in a measured tone, his thick German accent ripping my mind back to the present.

“I can say what I damn well please.”

“You should consider the effect such rash decisions will have on your family, let alone your hefty ambitions,” he replies, holding my gaze.

“I couldn’t care less about the Belikovs,” I answer truthfully.

“I know. But I’m not talking about them.”

Son of a bitch.
He means the Dostovskys: Katerina, Alek ... Adriana. Anger stirs inside of me, and I can almost feel my blood pressure rise, my face heating. My fists clench and lips curl. Burkentstein watches me with a blank expression, as though threatening someone’s family comes as a normal part of his job, which I am fairly certain it does.

So he wants to play the psychotic game? Well, he just stepped aboard the train of the man who wrote the rule book of insanity.

CHAPTER 3

~
Nikolai
~

“Name your terms.” I keep my hands behind my back so he cannot see just how much his statement has affected me, or how badly I want to wring his scrawny neck. This bastard’s a creep, a predator that makes a snake look harmless, and he deserves what’s coming to him.

“I thought you’d see things my way,” he says, smiling as he turns back toward the window, his well-toned frame moving with confidence as he prepares to tell me about whatever monstrosity he has planned for me. “You’ve done well working as my liaison between my Italian and Swiss laboratories over the past six months. Now, it’s graduation day, my eager lad.”

“I am not your lad.” I meet his gaze and hold it.

“I stand corrected. I’ll provide you with startup money, a building, and the first year’s wages to any employees you hire. We’re talking seven figures. More than enough cash flow for a startup. In return, you provide the training for my new negotiator.” He turns back to the window, nods toward the woman on the table, and says, “That is where Ms. Broussard comes in to play.”

“I am a dancer, not a drill sergeant.”

“You’re an assassin, first and foremost, and she was the CIA’s most coveted talent. That is ... before I wiped her mind. My greatest creation. The technological advances of the present day not only pertains to the Internet. Science has been greatly affected as well.”

“How is something like that even possible? How does someone go about removing a CIA agent from the system without getting noticed? Surely they’re searching for her.”

“Freak accident, my friend. Body was never found. Happens to those in her line of work all of the time.”

I hide my annoyance by holding his gaze and forcing a smile. “What will you do when she wakes up and starts asking questions?”

“The advances in neurological studies surpass my intelligence level, if that’s even possible. Sleeping beauty won’t remember a thing once she awakens. All aspects of her new identity have been handled, and her old life wiped away, a memory blowing in the wind.” He’s beaming and I’m fighting nausea.

He disgusts me, but this will be my only chance to bring him down. I turn back toward the woman lying on the table, a victim in a game of power, lust, and deceit. She and I share a common bond: we’ve both been stripped bare, robbed of our identities, and then kicked out into a world run by jackasses like this Burkenstein. Although I realize she is only a way to get what I need, I still want to know more about her.

“Tell me more.” I turn my head away as the lab technicians prepare her treatment, and I tilt my head toward the room without looking at her. For some reason, watching the men administering the wipe or whatever the hell they’re doing to her bothers me in a way that’s hard to explain.

“Her full name is Alestasia Rose Broussard. She’s from a hick American town in Louisiana called Lafayette.”

“What did she do to deserve this?” I ask, stealing a quick glance into the room. The technicians administer another shock, which in turn, results in more screaming from the woman, each wail piercing through me as though needles are pricking me in the chest.

“It’s not what she did. The blood debt belongs to her parents and my boss,” Burkenstein explains, his fake smile fading for the first time since he emerged from inside that room a few minutes ago.

“Your boss?” I ask, even though I know the person he’s talking about is Vladimir; the man ultimately responsible for enslaving me and setting Alek up in a gang to perform fights that almost killed him.

“Enough questions. I’m afraid I must insist you give me an answer now. Do you accept my offer?”

I inhale deeply and hold the breath a short moment. The fucker knows he has me right where he needs me to be. I require the money to get on my feet. Katerina’s funds have almost diminished, and I do not want to be known as the vagabond who shot to success because of his keeper’s money. However, what this man does not realize is that I also have him doing exactly what I figured he would do. That’s my gift, my power. The ability to manipulate people.

I turn to Rudolph, bowing my head and say, “I graciously accept your offer.”

“Good man. Beautiful, isn’t she?” Rudolph asks, glancing toward the lab. “Perhaps you’d allow me to show you the extent of my masterpiece up close, seeing that you’ve obviously become intrigued.”