"I already know everything you know, kid." The voice sounded scratchy and distorted in Forrest's ears, an already hoarse and menacing whisper turned to a sepulchral growl by the dull, pounding headache that greeted him as he gradually surfaced from unconsciousness. Shifting position only made him aware of additional discomforts--stiffness in his arms from holding the same enforced pose, agonizing pressure against his wrists where they were bound, a lump at the base of his scalp that reminded him of the explosion of pain that came out of nowhere just before he collapsed into unconsciousness. "The only question I have is who you've told."
Forrest looked gingerly around for the source of the voice, but his eyes registered only darkness. As his brain slowly began to process the information of his senses, he realized he was wearing some sort of an opaque fabric hood, cinched lightly around his neck with a band of elastic fabric to keep it from falling off. Instinctively, he reached up to remove it before the painful tightness around his wrists reminded him that his hands were bound behind his back. He tried to rise, only to find more ropes trying his ankles, calves, and knees to the chair he sat on. "Whuh?" he mumbled, unable to hide his dazed bewilderment. "Wha's this, I, I don't....?"
"You know what this is. Don't try to lie to me, kid, or I'll give you the look, know what I mean?" The hood was whipped away, filling Forrest's world with blinding light that sent daggers of pain stabbing through his eyes into his still-aching head. He blinked, trying to force his vision to adjust, but the dazzling brightness was aimed directly at his face and the rest of the room was shrouded in darkness. It was impossible to see the person whose low, raspy voice came to him from the shadows. But Forrest didn't have to see him to know exactly who he was. A numb pit of despair settled into his stomach, a sick certainty settling over him that he wasn't going to get out of this room alive.
Still, he tried to put on a brave face. "The notes for my story are all stored in an electronic dropbox," he blustered, raising his head and looking at where he assumed mob boss Antony Voronin was standing. "If I ever go more than seventy-two hours without accessing them, my computer automatically emails the contents of that dropbox to the editorial desk of my newspaper, as well as seven other papers around the country and the organized crime reporters at CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox News. If you think you can--"
The rest of his speech was cut off by a yelp of terror as a blur of motion sped past him, faster than his dazzled vision could possibly follow, smacking his chair backwards so quickly that he barely had time to register he was falling before he realized that he'd been caught. He looked up, suspended at a forty-five degree angle, to see the delicate, androgynous features of a Caucasian man of indeterminate age staring down at him. "Kid," Antony snarled, his lip creasing in thinly-veiled contempt. "Don't bullshit me, okay? I can fucking smell it when you lie. Who knows what you know?"
Forrest's mouth opened and closed in stunned incomprehension. Voronin was something of a man of mystery, the trail of his past ending somewhere in the tangled thicket of immigration and citizenship records that marked his movement between Estonia, Bulgaria, Italy, Canada and the United States. Although his name suggested Russian ancestry, Forrest hadn't even come close to finding out his parentage, let alone his exact age and place of birth. But even if he was as young as his appearance suggested, the speed with which he came hurtling out of the darkness and the casual strength he employed to knock Forrest back in his chair was staggering. No wonder nobody in the Mafia wanted to talk about him. A guy like this didn't need threats to keep his lieutenants in line.
Voronin raised the chair back into a vertical position and dusted Forrest down politely. "Look, kid," he said, his voice softening into a smoky murmur, "I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to hurt anybody. Believe it or not, I'm actually a pretty decent guy once you get to know me. I know you probably look at me and think, 'Oh, he's a monster, oh, he's some kind of throat-ripping psycho,' but I'm really just like anyone else. A businessman trying to make his way in the world. And killing journalists? That's bad for business."
He laid a companionable hand on Forrest's shoulder, fixing the seated man with a cool stare in his russet brown eyes. "What I'd really like to do is tell you to just drop this story. Nobody's going to believe it anyway--really, what I'm doing is a public service to you and your reputation as a journalist. But if you've collected evidence, if you've told someone what you know... that could make things a little messier. It leaves some loose ends for you to tie up, people you might need to convince that you were a little, y'know, doolally." The slang struck Forrest as odd, despite his terror; he'd spent months with directional mics pointed at wiseguys, and none of them had used the word. Probably nobody did outside of old-timey movies.
"And I'm a meticulous guy," Antony continued, cupping Forrest's chin with an almost gentle grip. "I'm going to want to make sure that the job's done right. I'm going to want to keep an eye on your friends, your... confidantes. Just to be certain that they believe you." Forrest could hear the hints of a New York accent in the mob boss's voice, and beneath that... Russian? Hungarian? It was almost impossible to tell, even after months of listening in on his conversations. "It doesn't mean I'm going to hurt anyone. It just means that this is kind of a delicate situation, you know? I value my privacy. I don't want people finding out about my personal affairs and jumping to the wrong conclusions."
The gentility of the grip suddenly became firm, almost painful. "So talk," Antony snarled in tones of icy menace, glaring down at Forrest with those deep brown eyes that seemed almost red in the harsh light. "Or I'll use the look to get what I need." Forrest had heard Voronin talk about 'the look' a few times over the course of his semi-legal surveillance, bringing it up in the context of troublesome rivals and inconvenient people who'd subsequently disappeared. He assumed it was some sort of Mafia slang for torture, murder, torture that ended in murder... that sort of thing. But it was hard to be sure. Nobody else used the term.
Slowly, haltingly, he spoke around Antony's grip. "I'm not afraid of you," he said, summoning up a steel in his voice he didn't really feel. Deep down, he was scared shitless by the mob boss; Forrest knew all too well about the people who crossed Antony Voronin and wound up bleeding out in some secret torture chamber before their pale, lifeless corpses were found floating down the Hudson River. But he also knew that if he named any names, he'd be as good as signing their death warrants--for all that Voronin talked about being a reasonable man, Forrest had no reason to believe that he wouldn't cut a bloody swath through Forrest's friends and colleagues to keep his illegal activities a secret. "You do your fucking worst, I'm not saying a goddamn thing."
The mob boss let out an explosive snort of laughter. "Oh come on, kid, you and I both know that's a load of crap! You bought all those books, right? You know there's nobody who can fight the look once I hit them with it. Oh, sure, the ones who resist aren't good for much afterwards--they wind up eating bugs, talking all funny about 'Master' this and 'Master' that, all that shit. I don't want to do that if I don't have to, it'll look suspicious. But here's the truth. Once I get you lost in my eyes, kiddo, you're mine. Forever. And you'll tell me everything I want to know."
Forrest's brow furrowed as his terror was slowly replaced by genuine confusion. "Eating... bugs?" he asked, bewilderment shading every syllable. "Like... like Renfield in 'Dracula'?" He'd been reading a lot of vampire novels lately, part of his research for a screenplay he was writing that he was firmly convinced would never see the light of day despite his boyfriend's encouragement, but he never thought that his newfound expertise in the lore of the undead would come up in this particular situation. It was so bizarre and incongruous that Forrest entirely forgot to be afraid for a moment.
