Bluey moved his head only an inch, but it was enough for Jax to miss. The punch was so powerful there was no changing its trajectory mid-flight. His fist whizzed past Bluey’s chin and, as he’d thrown his entire weight into the all-or-nothing strike, the rest of him followed too. He ended up within Bluey’s range, fully exposed and way too off-balance to go on the defensive.

He grimaced and braced himself for the blow. Bluey didn’t need an invitation. He swivelled, loaded and fired. The left-hand rip felt like being hit head-on by a train, the blow smashing into Jax’s kidneys, the pain devastating. He doubled over in agony, but Bluey kept on him, delivering another series of blows to the kidneys before hooking upwards into Jax’s upper ribs. Pain bloomed and spread through Jax’s body. He dropped and collapsed onto his back, the pain eclipsing everything else.

‘You’re fucked now, cunt,’ Grub rasped. He was back on his feet.

Jax gazed up at the pair of them, looming over him. He was struggling to breathe and in pain. He wanted it to be over. Whatever fight he’d had in him had evaporated. Lying on his cell floor with the door locked and Rogers paid off, he was helpless. All he could do to defend himself was curl up into a ball. He lifted his knees to his chest and held on tight.

It didn’t help.

CHAPTER 9

St Petersburg, Russia

MOST people would have thrown up, or at least gagged or placed their hand over their nose, but Kostya Volkov wasn’t most people. The St Petersburg police detective had an iron gut and nerves of steel. There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen in his thirty-two-year career in Russia’s crime capital.

Volkov had begun as a pup in 1989, during the Perestroika-era crime epidemic. Amid the social upheaval of privatisation, redistribution of property, de-militarisation and unprecedented poverty, the Russian mobster was born.

And so was Volkov.

In the early 1990s, the Tambov Gang, the Malyshev Gang and the Kazan Gang ruled the streets of St Petersburg, not with iron fists but with Kalashnikovs. Armed to the teeth with ex-military AK-47 assault rifles, they extorted, kidnapped and killed.

So Volkov had been raised on death, force-fed a diet of corpses. At least one a week. He found them strung up, shot, decapitated, chopped up, skinned, even minced. Every murder was a message, each gang wanting to prove it was the most brutal.

Hence the contents of the suitcase, washed up on the banks of the Neva River, were never going to prompt theatrics from Volkov. He looked upon the dismembered corpse like a mechanic examining parts of an engine.