It is always a tango with him and HUNK; a tango with Death himself. Unfortunately, for both men, neither one of them would accept anything other than the lead. If one tried, the other would be quick to try to correct it and, then, the whole routine would be ruined in a blaze of whatever accounted for a weapon at that moment in time.
It was no different now than it had been years ago.
"Fuck you," Nicholai says plainly as he suddenly realizes he's bleeding all over carpet that isn't his own. "You don't deserve mercy." Bitter memories swell as he jumps to his feet and stalks back over to the kitchen. Somewhere, deep down, there is some sort of rationalization of this whole thing and while he would enjoy continuing to feel the blood dripping from his hand, imagining it was HUNK's own head that he had crushed instead of his glass, Ginovaef knows better. So, he forces his palm under the sink and turns on the water, while keeping the phone wedged between a shoulder and an ear.
"You kept in touch with that monster; that thing that should have died at the beginning of this entire mess." That monster was none other than Albert Wesker, a man Nicholai had thrown on the back-burner until his oh-so-glorious return to life only a few months later. "Do you have any fucking idea how long it took to figure out that the Colonel, my colonel, had been retired? Do you have any idea the storm that followed? Of course not."
There had been a storm; it was a shit storm that followed Sergei Vladimir's demise. Every Cold War operation, every coded Russian text that could be found was translated and brought forth for all to see. He had been in those files, muffed in both professional and private letters from the Colonel. That was why he had taken off so fast; he couldn't stay in the comforts of his home country with that kind of publicity. Especially not with Anti-Umbrella forces lurking about. And, with Carlos working in full cooperation with Jill Valentine, the risks had been extremely high.