Hi there!
I don‘t know if my question was eaten by tumblr, so I decided to send it again or if you didn’t come to it yet (if that‘s the case feel free to ignore and don‘t feel pressured into answering pls🥺❤️)
It is Oc question time🥳
How does one usually end up as Volkovs Slave? (a.k.a. Bens position)? And for which character traits/body appearances does Volkov look for/ which spark his interest the most?
Was there someone who held out longer than Ben or who came close to him in any way? If yes, who was it and how?
This is a complicated question and I don't know if I have the answer. I'm ashamed to report that Tumblr didn't eat your question, I just didn't know how to answer it.
Volkov is a human trafficker who masquerades as a philanthropist. So he hides his cruelties well. The only people who know how cruel he truly is are the handful of minions he lets in close. And it's not a big group. He hires like minded people. If they're not like minded, then he ropes them in so they're essentially stuck with him and can't leave (Like Andrei). People don't cross him and live to tell the tale. But he learned a long time ago, you don't have to kill someone to destroy them. And he specializes in that.
Volkov likes being surprised. I think he fully intented to take Ben and do what he did, get bored and ship him off to a buyer. BUt Ben looks pretty when he's abused and I think Ben's faith and how he holds on to it intrigues him. He puts no stock in religion himself, but he likes to hollow people out and Ben has this otherworldly spark inside of him that he never fully quashes.
Ben is indeed one of his longer lasting captives. The longest? I honestly don't know. Volkov is driven by power and cruelty so he doesn't necessarily have a type. He'll take anyone that will let him play out his sick games. Male or female. He goes for guys more often because their bigger stature and strength means they're more likely to survive the abuse longer. BUt he's take women when it serves him or is convenient. You can bet that when he goes off on his business trips and leaves Ben alone, he's not actually alone. He's garanteed companionship on his trips by a network of people he does business with. None of these people chose it or enjoy their time with him. But they're also not going to say anything because that's the nature of human trafficking. Who's going to listen to them, and who's going to believe them?
Until Jake supplied his phone and all the evidence from it that the FBI was able to gather, there was never any proof that Volkov was directly involved with anything. The FBI only thought he might have been a money man. The Russians certainly weren't going to look into it. Their's has been a system run on corruption and bribery for years. And the sad thing is, Volkov isn't the only person out there like this. There are countless people just like him.
Where ever money is, traffickers are not far away. It also seems to go hand in hand with drugs and prostitution. Jake would NEVER have been involved in human trafficking. He finds it abhorrent, but drugs didn't seem like that big of a deal to him. Infact, when he initially took the deal, he didn't realize how much he was getting into. And by the time he did the cops were raiding and it was too late and too big to get out of.
That's a really long post to sort of not answer your question...