#zara volkov | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wadjaya · 3 years

Text

He was awoken with a solid thwap to the back of his head, his eyes registering the bright lights in front of him as they opened in alarm. His legs were still sore from his encounter the day before, or was it two days ago now? As his eyes adjusted to the lights shining in his face, he recognized a few figures standing around him. Ahead, seated at a functional desk at the end of the room, Lucien Cote. The man didn’t seem to notice his prisoner being roused, instead eyeing what appeared to be some sort of revolver mechanism like you’d see in a gun.

To his right, a larger woman stood with arms crossed. Beyond her own frame, there were bits and pieces of what appeared to be bones orbiting at varying distances around her. Zara, the mean one.

To his left, a thinner frame leaning up against the wall. He couldn’t make out the details of her face, but her eyes caught his attention for seeming to glow in the relative dimness of the room beyond his lights.

(CW for torture, potentially upsetting implication of trafficking, sexual assault, drugs, guns, the stuff you’d expect from mafia themes)

“Oh look, he’s finally awake. Nice call, Zara.” The figure he didn’t recognize stepped forward as she spoke, inspecting him it seemed. Her glowing eyes reminded him of a cat’s as she came closer, and he almost thought he could make out traces of feline fur where the light ran across her face. He counted himself as fairly informed, but who exactly was this chick? Has Cote been recruiting? He looked back down to the floor and spit.

He felt a weird gap in his teeth, but no obvious blood hit the floor. Healed.

“And, uh, to what do I owe the pleasure?” The man’s voice was gravelly against his throat, just another sign that he had been hit pretty hard leading into this experience. “I don’t believe I have any dealings with the Cote family.”

“No dealings,” the stranger began. She finished examining him and stepped toward the desk at the back. She held her hand out before reaching the desk, to which the seated man nodded as she stepped forward to pick up a roll of paper. “But you did have something that belongs to us, and we’d like to know why you took it.” She walked back, turning one of the lights just a bit off his face to encourage him to meet her.

He remained silent, but glanced up toward her. He felt something sharp prod his spine, though no one else had moved. Zara’s bones, perhaps? Glancing toward the small swarm orbiting the figure in question, it was impossible to tell if they were all accounted for. Another prodding came, but this time harsher. He gasped and bit into his lip to keep from crying out.

“Well?” The thinner woman stepped forward again, holding the rolled document as though to refresh his memory. “What does the Covenant want with this design? Why send you, alone, to try and steal it?” The man didn’t stop biting his lip, so she continued.

“If you don’t cooperate with us, we can and will kill many of the people you care about. From what I’ve been made to learn about your ‘Family,’” she paused, looking toward the other woman for confirmation and continuing when she received a nod. “We’ve learned that most of you are hurting in that area. But your anonymous shtick ends when we’ve got you in chains. Whatever you do or don’t tell us, we can find however few you’ve got left. We can do to them what we’re doing to you- and no one can stop us. So tell me-”

The woman raised her leg to kick just below his sternum, placed so that nothing could break but it would all be felt- an expert, probably. He coughed and groaned, the sharp burr in his back ever-present with the small convulsions. He responded.

“We are the Covenant. We have no bonds from our past lives, we have no loyalties to anyone but those of us spurned. Our blood is thicker than any other bond. We will not answer your questions.”

“Covenant, eh? That’s a weird way to spell,” The woman paused as she unrolled the document and peered through it a moment. “Samuel Whittaker, son of Eilene and Matthew Whittaker. Brother to Marissa Townley and Brandon Whittaker. Three-time silver medalist for your middle school’s track competition. Very impressive.” She cast the paper aside, clearly unconcerned with anything else that might be written on it.

Good, he called the bluff then. They hadn’t found the document he stole. There’s a small, triumphant grin under the circumstances.

“You can threaten them all you want, they’re nothing to me. Those that still live, anyway.”

“Oh? And what about Marcus Brown, then?”

His breath hitched, his pulse quickened. How could they even know about Marcus? He had already taken the Covenant, they’d never met without their masks- not in public! His eyes darted to the man at his desk, seemingly now watching the proceedings ahead of him as a faint, reddish aura swam from around his shoulders to the items at his table. His eyes glowed, now, in the dark- a devilish gaze with his heavy magical exertion.

“So, it seems you do have names. We did some checking around, made some friends in your little outfit. Tight-lipped bunch, y’all are. It’s too bad, then, that Marcus hasn’t been especially loyal to you.” The woman kneeled down to force his gaze to meet hers, raising his face so he could not avert it. Samuel swallowed and forced his breathing to settle.

“We don’t know ‘Marcus.’ We are only the Covenant. I was given the designation ‘Jackson’ upon accepting my last task, and that is the only name I call my own.”

“Ah, right, you all and your morbid codenames. Let me guess, Jackson was one of those idiots we caught the last time you tried an assault on our businesses?” He bit his lip again, narrowing his eyes with the effort of holding his emotions back. God, how wonderful it’d be to lose a few hundred bucks to Jackson, again.

“We lost several of those who’d taken the Covenant in that….unfortunate misunderstanding.” Even as he said it, Samuel could feel himself cringe.

Not Samuel. Just me. “But our losses were only small sacrifices in the interest of the greater good. Between that misunderstanding and this one, it seems we’ve come upon something we want.”

Zara stepped forward, the orbit of bones shifting as a line of them began to form between her and him, several breaking off to float threateningly near his hands, throat, lower back. All at once, several points of searing pain erupted and he groaned with the force of it all.

“Tell us what we want to know, Faceless. Why take the blueprint? What do you even want it for?! Tell us, and we might be convinced to deal with you peacefully, even let you live.” Zara paused as she looked back to Lucien, who did not seem to react. “There is always a value to be put upon our goods.”

The man looked away from the woman threatening to gore him upon her own dismembered bones, the unnamed feline character who’d done most of the talking, and Lucien Cote himself. That blood red gaze seemed to cock sideways with piqued curiosity.

“You really don’t know? All that intel about my former self, but you couldn’t find out about the current operation?” The painful burrs at his lower back sharpened as he felt his own flesh part around them, pressing deeper into his body with an apparent lack of weight or force. How sharp are these things?!

“Answer the question,” came the rather non-encouraging demand from Zara.

“Unfortunately, while Marcus was very talkative about his ‘ex,’ he was less forthcoming about his designation and orders. If it would please you to know, he has been put to rest.” The thinner figure rested her back against the wall to his left again, lightly bouncing on her feet. Bored?

Interesting interrogation methods, though. Good cop, Bad cop sure- but she was offering a lot more ‘carrot’ than Samuel- ‘He-’ he was used to.

“Why do you care?” He finally asked.

He felt the thorns threaten to move again, the slightest shift as they were ‘unlocked’ from their resting position, but no pain came. Glancing up, he noticed Zara looking, agape, toward Lucien, who had lifted a hand. The glow in his eyes dimmed as he pushed his seat back, standing up and stepping around to personally view their prisoner a bit closer.

Lucien Cote was normally a rather unassuming man, perhaps a little scary to look at with his hardened gaze and obvious strong hands. Here, however, there was an absolutely terrifying presence to the man- the glare of a man who felt he had just lost everything to a bad cheat.

He glanced left, right, and the girls stepped back without a moment’s hesitation. There was bittersweet pain, followed by relief as the bones pulled themselves from his flesh with a soft groan.

There’s a pregnant silence as he looks Samuel over, eyes darting about his wounds and face as though judging for some sort of pet show. He was about to speak up when Lucien’s mouth opened. And he whispered, though his voice carried as though he was shouting.

“Why wouldn’t I care?”

The voice, soft and gentle, felt forceful. As though by whispering instead of screaming he was holding back instinct by sheer force of will.

“I- I mean, it’s just a gun. Not even any mutanium in it, nothin’ for us in it if there was.” He swallowed as he caught his mouth feeling uncomfortably dry. “Just a pea-shooter, really. But subtle. Cote’s never dealt in subtle, right?”

“Just a gun?!” Lucien shouted, and Samuel felt as though he’d just been placed in front of the blasting end of a jet engine. It wasn’t so bad that his flesh hurt, but his ears were ringing when the silence fell in the echoey basement. When Lucien spoke again, it was again at a whisper. “What you stole is not irreplaceable, perhaps not even particularly valuable to scum like you. But to me--” Lucien stopped himself as his face tightened, a vicious glare pointed to his captive before turning and nodding to the strange woman and proceeding back toward his desk.

The woman pulled something from her ears- ear plugs?- and stepped forward as Lucien leaned against the back of his desk, crossing his arms with displeasure. Once more, his eyes began to glow as that red aura surrounded his shoulders.

“Er, well, Lucien Cote is very protective of his intellectual property- as you know. While this particular gun design may not be….catastrophic, it sets a precedent we don’t particularly like. That the Cote Family can be fucked with, his designs stolen. We’d like to-” with a glance toward Zara, the larger woman sent a few more bones his way. She hardly so much as tensed any muscle that he could see to do so- kind of marvelous to be honest. He felt a drip of warm liquid on top of his head, never needing to even look up to know some of the bones were dripping with his own blood. “We’d like to fix that little notion, and let everyone go their own ways. And if that can’t be arranged, we will find out why you wanted that specific design.”

The prisoner looked between his captors once again, taking the pause in their ‘conversation’ to consider the opportunity costs implied in what they wanted. Samuel would be killed for leaking the Covenant’s plans, even to an organization which was likely to support it. If he did that, he’d need a ticket out of this god-forsaken city. Alternatively, he’d spend the rest of his short life in this room, probably. He thought about what even awaited him out there- and almost couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to him.

Brandon would miss him at the next festival, and so would his mother.

It’s not like Samuel would even be needed in the plan going forward. Medici would fall. He had played his part.

Cote couldn’t stop it- not short of vaporizing all of them, and all innocents. He sighed, and noticed everyone else straighten up a bit as they watched his resolve break.

Samuel looked directly to Lucien Cote- the man he had stolen from and ordered his capture. The man’s eyes were fading from a heavy fog of crimson, back to being hardly visible in the dimness of the room.

“The Covenant plans to fulfill our oaths. To destroy the organization which broke us.” He watched the three of them glance between themselves, entire thoughts being broadcast between the group without any words.

“Historically,” the stranger began, stepping forward once again to kneel at eye-level with Samuel, “the Covenant has been especially aggressive with the Medici Family. Is that who you mean? The organization that broke you?”

Samuel never met her gaze, speaking as though directly to the boss man himself. If he was serving himself up on a silver platter, he’d at least do it with a little pride.

“We swore blood oath to bring down the Medici Family, the family which took many of us from the safety of our own homes and introduced us to their menagerie in hell. They made animals of us, so we swore to rampage through their establishment as beasts.

Anthony Medici will bleed before his time, and with him anyone who could even lust for his estate.”

Samuel remembered his time under the Medicis’ watch as he spoke of the generational hatred the Covenant all held for him. As he went on his voice grew louder, more confident, daring them to argue with his personal hatred. The personal hatred baked in from every single person who’d taken the oath, joined the Covenant. He recalled the cages, the drugs, how he had been ‘rented’ to the lowest scum with money.

“We all hate the Medici, for what they did to us. We will see them eliminated, no matter the cost.”

Uncertain gazes joined his fanatical smile in looking toward Lucien, who kept his eyes locked on the prisoner. After a long silence, the man allowed his soft voice to reverberate painfully about the room at a seemingly normal speaking volume.

“Where is the document you stole?”

“If it’s been as long as I think it has, long gone. I dropped it in the postbox on West Chicago and North Wells. It was to be recovered the morning after.”

Lucien slammed a fist against his desk, an obviously painful thud. The women to either side began plugging their ears in the brief moment of pause before Lucien stood again.

“You Covenant have been a thorn in all of our sides for decades. You fools dabble in interfamily politics that keep this city under control- only to play vigilante and get under our skin! You threaten to disrupt the balance.”

“Balance means nothing if people like them benefit from it! We would see the city in anarchy if it meant protecting those they would hurt!!” His protest fell upon deaf ears- including his own as the ringing overpowered his own voice. He hoped he sounded as confident as he felt. “There isn’t a hell man could imagine that is worse than what Medici does to some of its animals!”

Lucien stood, collecting the few items he had taken in here with his unhurt hand, and nodded to the women. From the way the two looked between the men, they hadn’t likely seen the man so angry in a very long time.

They looked to him again, his breathing ragged as his last hope of getting out of this seemed to fall apart. The stranger nodded to Zara, and he called out.

“Wait! I know her, and I know him.” He nodded toward Zara and Lucien. “But if I’m going to die anyway, who are you? It’s been bothering me since I woke up.” His fanatical gaze fell onto the stranger, someone so elite amidst Cote but so unknown.

“Oh, honey.” There was a satisfied smirk on her face as she checked the placement of her earplugs. She stood, stepping between Samuel and her boss. He watched her reach behind herself, pulling a small handgun from the waistband of her slacks. Deftly switching off the safety without so much as a thought as the weapon never once leaves its target upon its reveal. Him.

“If Lucien pulls the trigger, then I suppose you could say I’m like the Hammer.” As she said so, she mimed the motion of pulling an imaginary hammer back on her firearm, though that was clearly just to punctuate her point. “But this little gun has a name, y’know? Since you die with it anyway, I’m Eliana. Sorry about this.”

She offered a sympathetic smile. He heard the loud boom, saw the muzzle flash as she pulled the trigger. He imagined a hammer hitting the back of the weapon.

And then, nothing.

#therabloggin #evoearth #eliana fenwick #lucien cote #zara volkov #oc #dako writes

2 notes · View notes