“Oh, yeah? And you want to figure out the rest of me?” he asks. The innuendo is impossible to ignore. “There are parts of me you want to get your hands on?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I don’t have to. You’re doing it for me.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughs, clearly enjoying how easily he can get to me. “Tell me, Renata: why do you even care about understanding me in the first place?”
“I was taught that it’s important to know your enemy.”
“Is that right?” Kian asks, more interested now. “I guess your brother was your teacher, then?”
“In this case, he was right.”
“Maybe. But getting to know someone can be dangerous, you know.”
“Because you’ve done heinous things that will make me hate you worse than I do right now?”
“No,” he says calmly. “Because you might learn that you don’t actually hate me at all.”
Before I can respond to that, he slides the partition shut. I hear his footsteps recede before they disappear entirely.
I stare at the spot where his face was and I feel the cold more keenly than I did before. Hugging myself a little tighter, I try to shove his words right out of my head. His voice has an echoing quality about it, though. Every time I think I’ve succeeded in drowning him out, I can hear the reverberations of what he just said to me.
“Don’t let him get in your head,” I whisper to the cement walls.
Problem is, he’s already in my head.
He has been for twenty fucking years.
* * *
At some point, I doze off, weighed down by exhaustion and hunger. But my eyes flutter open sporadically, forced awake by discomfort or the cold.
My dreams start twisting in and out of reality. There are moments that I feel like I’m awake when I’m really sleeping. And there are moments when I’m sleeping that feel so vivid, that I’m sure I’m awake.
“Hello, little sister.”
I gasp and turn my head so fast that I crack the back of it against the wall. “Drago?”
He’s sitting in the opposite corner of the cell in the same position I am. Except he’s so shrouded in shadow that I can barely make out his features. A part of me is happy about that, though. I’m not sure seeing his face would help me here.
“Of course it’s me,” he says with annoyance. “Who else would sacrifice everything to come and see you here?”
“How did you get in?”
“I have my ways,” he replies. “I have my connections.”
“Connections,” I repeat bitterly. “Connections like Yannis Rokiades?”
“You were a fool to run from him,” Drago snaps at me. “He could have protected you.”
“He was going to rape me.”
“That’s a husband’s right.”
I shake my head in horror. “Rape is not a right,” I hiss. “It’s a crime.”