NovelEnglish
Chapter One Hundred Ninety-Five
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 a ss. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Where did you guys find her? Like,
clearly that girl has been through some shi t, but holy he ll 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 shi t. I ramble when I’m nervous. It’s a real problem. Like I can’t stop
talking sometimes and I say stu pid shi t out loud. Please don’t ki ll 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.”
Follow on NovᴇlEnglish.nᴇt“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 as shole 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 ho les in my
training. But at least I can admit it, unlike that poor ba stard.”
“I did warn him she was going to fu ck 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 di e. 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
Follow on Novᴇl-Onlinᴇ.cᴏmfeels 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 wh ore. He would tell her he was making sure she wouldn’t bring home another mo uth 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 di rty 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 an everyone else’s faces
too. Misha said, “I still feel ho rrible about bringing that up. I was just trying to tease her. I had no clue
that it would be that ho rrific.” 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.
Visit our social media platform to read fascinating stories every day and connect with the community!
