Free Infernal: Bite The Bullet by Jess Raven, Paula Black Page B

something that didn’t have
the potential to blast my head off: his passport. Well, Ivan Zelenko’s
passport. I flipped to the photo page and stared at his face. Fiercely
handsome, angled, those full lips retained an edge of savagery even in his
photo. His hair was slightly longer, not so cropped, and fairer, but there was
no mistaking him.
    I skimmed the name again, the date of birth,
nothing that told me the truth of who he was. If he had one false identity, he
could have countless others.
    “Who are you?” I murmured, looking down at the
sadness I had to be imagining in the picture’s face. Photographs could lie, but
the desperation in his eyes when he’d spoken about his sister was something you
couldn’t fake, not with someone who knew.
    I recalled what he’d said to me: Your brother
is dead. For Mariya, there may still be a chance . Harsh words, but true.
Nothing I did was going to bring Daniel back. Closure was as much as I could
hope for. Was I insane, risking my own life, chasing justice for my brother’s
ghost? Then again, if Konstantyn spoke true, if there were others?
    There were others.
    I had evidence, and it lay in the pillowcase I
upended on my duvet. I squeezed my eyes shut as the photos spilled out, and
steeled myself to look at them again. Opening one eye, and then the other, I
took up the image closest to me.
    It was grainy. They all were, I discovered when I
dared to flick through them, just as they all had time stamps printed on the
bottom, along with the words Gilles de Rais.
    Gilles.
    That was the name of the person Konstantyn had
said would kill me.
    Taking a breath, I gathered the photographs into a
pile and made myself really look, even though, deep down, I was only searching
for one face. They were stills taken from video footage, I realised, full-face
and body shots, chosen to best identify the victims.
    It was painful to concentrate on the people in
them. Young, beautiful, naked and bound. Men and women, their tortured eyes
stared out at me, their bodies marked with that same symbol I’d seen on Daniel’s
neck, and on Lazarenko’s arm. The peace symbol, that maybe wasn’t a peace sign
at all, but something much more sinister, because there were other patterns
too, cut into their skin. The whole scene reeked of an occult ritual.
    Each victim had been spread out on a strange metal
contraption, and it took flicking through a few different angled shots to get a
clear view of what they were bound to: a seven-pointed star. Their limbs were
locked down to four points, and on the remaining three… a candle and some
serious hardware I didn’t even have names for.
    In some of the shots, I could make out other
people, mostly blurred figures on the periphery, but I could see enough to tell
they were shirtless, and wore horned eye-masks and gut-churning smiles.
    One photo captured the frozen scream of a woman as
a thick-set man thrust between her thighs. Her chest was splattered with a dark
substance I could only assume was wax, though for all I knew, it might have
been congealed blood.
    I shut my eyes. Swallowed hard. Carried on.
    There were more shots of the same scene, taken
from an angle that illuminated something through the coarse thatch of hair on
the masked abuser’s back, something that was familiar in the worst possible
way: It was Konstantyn’s back tattoo, inked on another man’s skin. My soul
shivered at the sight. Lazarenko was in this deeper than he’d admitted. If he
bore the marks of both the victims and the abusers, where exactly did that put
him on the scale of good versus evil?
    Through the silent, angry tears welling in my
eyes, the images began to blur into one another, that damned seven-pointed star
the focus of every shot, keeping the victim locked into frame, no matter how
they positioned them on it. There was no escaping the pain in the photos, and
no escape for the victims in them. None at all. Not from the camera, and not
from the abusers.
    Blinking to clear my