Fair Trade

A warm breeze and jewel-like sunshine touched Sei’s face. Perhaps the window was left open, since a subtle noise flowed in.

Sei, who had buried her head in a pillow, opened her eyes in surprise. Last night, she couldn’t remember at what moment she had fallen asleep. She obviously was pressed under Yuri and was being kissed by him…

She frowned and stared blankly at the half-open window. Then she smelled the sweet scent of the familiar after-shave and got up in a hurry.

It was Giulio who sat on her bed. He leaned forward, pressing his elbow against his knee, and then narrowed his eyes.

“I had told you to keep an eye on him 24 hours a day.”

Giulio was dressed neatly even in his suit, but his face was brimming with exhaustion from not being able to sleep all night.

Sei looked around the room, relieved that her attire was normal.

“I wasn’t feeling well. So I sat him in that chair to monitor him comfortably.”

But the chair was empty. Giulio, seeing the chair Sei was pointing to with a bewildered expression, gently grabbed her chin and tried to kiss her.

Sei flinched and tried to shake him off. Then, as he stared at her as if enduring something, he pulled up the blanket that was covering her and tugged on her white, thin ankle.

“You mustn’t bring another bastard into this room. Why would you bring in a bastard you’re not even familiar with? I knew something like this was going to happen.”

Sei, who was caught in the ankle, struggled to get out of his grasp. But as he climbed onto the bed, he continued to speak, crushing her with his mighty power. “Everyone is curious about why I keep indulging you. Why I am keeping such an ill-mannered and cocky bad girl like you alive… Do you know what happened to the bastard who said these words to me yesterday?”

The horror of that day replayed in her mind. The day she was almost strangled to death because she refused him…

“I cut off his tongue and threw it into the dog’s food. Then I stabbed his eye with a knife. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, but he probably won’t be able to live his life normally for the rest of his life.”

“What the hell… Please stop it. You’re scaring me.”

Giulio’s brown eyes looking down at Sei strangely quivered. He gently rubbed the corners of her eyes and suddenly lowered his head.

“The FBI took Valentin Orlov.”

“What…?”

“That’s what I got to know. So, I’ll never show up to threaten you again,” said Giulio, ruffling his neatly set hair as he went down from the bed.

She had a lot to ask. Where is Yuri right now? Just when she was about to ask what was happening, Romano grabbed her arm. Since he had been standing all along, he simply shook his head with a tired face.

After Giulio left the room, Sei asked Romano, “What happened? What happened yesterday?”

“… We got a message yesterday. It was about the coordinates of Valentin Orlov and we didn’t go to the port, but to the Marc Chagall Museum. Valentin really happened to be there. We chased after him to kill him but the moment we arrived at Place Masséna, the FBIs attacked us. I thought we were chasing that rat, but that bastard drove us into Massena like sheep. If I was a little late, I probably wouldn’t have been able to come back here.”

Sei covered her mouth in surprise. Suddenly her heart started beating fast.

This must be a warning.

“Ah, Lorenzo has been caught. That’s why Giulio is in such a foul mood.”

“Lorenzo…?”

“Yes, I told that idiot to lose some weight.”

With a deep sigh, Romano took a look at Sei’s condition and went outside.

The mafia were criminals and were just garbage that needed to be incinerated.

Garbage…

Sei trembled as she remembered the face of Lorenzo who served her food and poured her wine. She knew she had to be calm, but it was hard as he was more generous to her than others.

Leaving her room in her slippers, she walked looking for a place where Yuri might have been moved. The faces of the members were dark because the shock of last night was quite large. Everyone was drinking since morning due to the somber mood.

Sei, passing by Giulio’s room, looked into the wide-open room. Giulio, undressed, pulled out a cigarette, and said something to which a woman on the bed came down and buried her face in his groin. Looking down at the woman, he grabbed her dark hair and began to move his hips around. He thrusted his hips into the gagging woman’s mouth and then brutally shoved his penis into her throat.

Then their eyes met. After stopping his movement, he glared at Sei with a beastly gaze, and then made the woman stand up and lay her face down on the table. Sei left as soon as he rammed his length into the woman.

The screams and moans of pleasure leaked out into the hallway and followed her persistently. Sei ran to the end of the hallway, holding back the urge to vomit, and found Stefan standing in front of a white door. She grabbed his arm without hesitation.

“Where’s Kais?”

Stefan pointed inward with the tip of his chin in response to her question. In the room he pointed to, unlike yesterday, Yuri was dressed neatly. This was the only place in the house where wireless communication was possible and it was a place for the hackers belonging to the mafia organization.

But they hadn’t arrived yet. So…

“Guilio… gave you this place?”

Knowing Guilio’s personality, her doubts were greater than her relief that Yuri was safe. As she approached, Yuri scanned Sei’s outfit and covered her shoulders with the blanket that was lying on the armchair.

“You must have been scared. You’ve been through too much yesterday, and you now appear to have been bled dry.”

“I heard that Valentine was taken by the FBI…. Don’t tell me, the…”

“If Pablo had been a little smarter, he could have taken them all at once. What a pity!”

Did he intentionally cause all that commotion?? Was it why Lorenzo was caught?

“Yuri.”

Sei’s voice became cold.

“Sei, we live in a world where the principle ‘If I don’t kill, then I’ll be killed’ is followed.”

The man, Yuri Petrov, who read her mind, stared at her with a colder stare and continued his words, “You’re sympathizing with the mafia. Don’t be silly. The end is all but ruined. We all know the answer.”