There’s no running from it any longer.
I clutch the beads in my hand, pressing my fist to my chest as I close my eyes and think of Sasha. “Wherever you are,” I murmur, the words a prayer and a promise all on their own, “I will find you. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, Iwillfind you. I will find you and bring you home, and I will never, never leave you again.”
I whisper the words again and again, like a litany, my heart pounding beneath my fist. “I failed you. I lost you. And Iwillmake it right. No matter what.”
I can see her in my mind, clear as day, her soft reddish-blonde hair and petite face, her sparkling blue eyes, the infectious joy that she’d kept hold of despite how hard the world had tried to steal it away. The thought of her finally breaking, of her losing that, of my fucking brother and Edo and Obelensky and all the men like him finally turning her into a shell of her former self, makes me murderous in a way that I haven’t felt since Alexei.
I’d thought that was a weakness, then. The violence that I’d felt, the need to cut and destroy andbleedhim dry, the desire for vengeance that had been stronger even than what I’d felt when I’d pulled the trigger in that neon-soaked alley, and left my brother’s murderer bleeding out on the ground.
But that same violence, that same need, is what will get me to Moscow and back, if need be, to save the woman that I love.
A woman that I don’t deserve. It would serve me right, if she’s the one who walks away from me this time, after this is all said and done. If that’s the choice she makes, I won’t stop her.
All I can do is keep this last vow, one last time.
I will find you.
8
SASHA
I don’t know how I slept. It feels impossible that I managed it at all, even as thoroughly exhausted as I was. When I wake up sometime in the early dawn hours, my hands have gone numb, my shoulders and elbows aching from how my wrists are twisted behind my back. My lips are chafed from the gag, and my jaw is cramped. Although I can clearly remember other times when I’ve been this miserable, it feels like the worst thing I’ve ever experienced at this moment.
I know Art will be back. I know at some point, my fate will be decided. Whichever way it goes, the end won’t be good. I wake up with a strange sense of calm about it, and although I know it might not last, even just the absence of fear for a little while feels like a relief.
All these years, and I never knew who I really was.I have no memory of my mother, of course, and my heart aches to know that she’s dead now. The best guess that Max and Viktor had for me was that she’d given me up to try to protect me from my father, knowing he’d come after her unless she returned with no child. It hurts to think that she’d done all that only for it to fail in the end. I think of the years I’d spent in the orphanage in Russia, going from foster home to foster home, thinking that both of my parents were dead, when in fact, they were only miles away.
Did my mother give me my name? Did she call me Sasha when she handed me over, or did someone else give a nameless child that?I try to imagine what she might have been doing all those years, in her house in Moscow, and I wonder if she ever thought of me. I wonder if she had other children, if I have half-brothers or sisters I don’t know about–and now probably never will.
I wonder if she had hopes for me, if she’d pictured a life in which I was happy and somewhere far from the world she’d tried to save me from. It seems as if so many people, all my life, have been trying to save me–only for me to fall directly back into that same fate.
Maybe there really are no choices after all. Perhaps everything just happens as it does, and there’s nothing to be done to change it.
There’s a strange peace in that idea, even if it takes away any sense of agency. I roll it over in my head, wondering if it’s something I can cling to as this all plays out, to make it more bearable. I need something, because as much as I know there’s not much question about the outcome, there’s plenty of unknown between now and then.
The house is silent and still, and I close my eyes, trying to remember Max without grief. To summon a memory of him when we were happiest, the both of us–to remember him smiling at me on the path to the lake behind Viktor and Caterina’s house, the girls running to him, the joy on his face. There was so much happiness that we had, again and again, and I want to remember that at the end, not the worst of it. Not the goodbyes, or him telling me that he can’t love me, or the sight of him with blood spreading across his shirt, or a ring in his hand for another woman. Not the worst of the choices we made.
At the end of all of this, I only want to remember the good.
I think, despite my discomfort, that I fall asleep for a little while. I’m awoken by the door opening–no bothering to knock this time, and I peer through my lashes to see Art walking into the room.
My heart sinks instantly.Don’t let it be because Obelensky decided to give me to him for a payoff,I plead in my head, lying very still.
Art stands at the side of my bed for a long moment. I can feel him looking down at me, and my heart rate spikes, my pulse leaping in my throat. I don’t know if he sees it or not, but I feel him reach behind my head, undoing the gag and pulling it out of my mouth.
I can’t even close it at first. My jaw feels frozen open, and I have a horrifying second where I think I might never be able to close my mouth again. I hear thesnickof a pocketknife opening, and I feel that bone-deep chill of fear returning, but Art leans over me, and I realize that he’s cutting the zip ties loose.
The returning flood of circulation and sensation in my hands is painful enough to take my mind off of my jaw long enough for me to move it, wiggling it back and forth until something lets go, and I’m able to close my mouth, albeit with plenty of soreness.
Art steps back, looking down at me with barely disguised irritation. “That was a lesson for you,” he says, as I wince, trying to move my arms back in front of me. “A night like that is nothing compared to how I’ll punish you for misbehaving, when there are no restrictions on what I can do to you.”
“You don’t even know if you’re going to get that yet,” I snipe back. The words are less impactful than I’d hoped, slightly slurred from my stiff jaw, but it feels good to try, anyway.
Art’s hand closes in my hair, jerking my head back. “Listen to me, little girl,” he hisses. “This is the fucking Ritz compared to what you have in your future. I told you I’d treat you well if you were good, but you seem insistent on defying me, and I can make thissomuch worse. Edo is insisting on letting you sleep in this bed, on feeding you, on making sure you have clothes to wear.” As if to emphasize his point, his other hand fists in the neckline of my dress, yanking downwards.
The fine silk tears like wet tissue paper, shredding open and leaving me half-bare in an instant. Art looks down at me greedily, his eyes glinting. “You’re only making this worse for yourself, you ignorant little bitch.”
He steps back, shaking his head. “Get dressed,” he spits. “Edo is having food brought up to you. When you’re done, we have a meeting with Konstantin.”