Chapter Fifteen
Alexei
Katya fights me like a wildcat, her fingernails clawing frantically at my arm. I hear her suck in a breath, filling her lungs to scream.
It makes no difference if she does. The only one close enough to hear her is Anatoli. These Minnesota houses are built solidly, well-insulated. Even those neighbors with whom I share the street will hear nothing.
Her scream tears through the air, and my ears ring with it. Her bare feet drag upon the floor as I haul her bodily toward the couch. She cannot hope to win—not against me—and still she fights. Desperately; bitterly. I can be proud of her for that. Proud that she fights even when she is beaten.
Another fierce scream burns my ears as I maneuver her down to the couch on her back and pin her with the weight of my body.
She’s carved wounds in my arm with her claws.
I feel the wetness of blood as I extract her nails from my skin and wrestle her hands above her head, holding her wrists in one hand. “Christ, Katya. Enough.”
“Fuck—you!” she screeches, her body bucking beneath me. With fury, not passion.
“You’ll hurt yourself, koshechka,” I tell her as she rages. Already she has pulled out several of her own hairs by the roots in her thrashing. She wears nothing but my shirt, and it twists around her, riding up her hips. She is going to give her soft skin friction burns.
“Get off of me, you fucking psycho!” Her pulse is racing in her throat. Her breath comes in pained catches, as if she forces her anger through her grief.
Probably she wishes now that she had come for a shower with me. It was reckless of me to leave Nicola’s phone in the pocket of my jacket. But she was already growing suspicious of Anatoli sharing the train with her, and this game was always going to end.
I wish I could have enjoyed her sweetness a little longer. A few days at least; perhaps as much as a week.
With a feral shriek, she wrenches up her knee in an ill-fated attempt to strike me in the balls. It is a simple matter to pin her flailing limbs, and it evokes another ear-splitting screech of raw outrage.
Ah, well. I like spicy, too. And Katya burns in this moment.
Distantly, I hear the front door open, the press of the buttons that will disarm the alarm. Anatoli appears in the doorway of the living room a moment later. His expression is bored, as if Katya’s screams have succeeded only in annoying him.
For just a moment, Katya’s struggles still as Anatoli’s arrival snares her attention.
I see the moment she realizes that the help she has sought with her shrieking will not be forthcoming.
The recognition that dawns in her eyes, the understanding that I set him upon her.
That he has been following her at my instruction.
As she works herself back up to screeching again, Anatoli mutters in Russian, “Jesus Christ, she is loud.”
I respond in kind. “Can anyone else hear?”
“Nyet. I heard only because I was close enough.” He shovels his hand through his hair and produces a sharp sigh. “We are done here now, yes?”
Minneapolis, he means. “Yes. How soon can the jet be ready?”
“Half an hour.” He gives a nudge of his chin to indicate Katya, who still fights a desperate battle she cannot hope to win. “She will not come quietly.”
No. I know she will not. I never thought she would, but I had hoped to have better prepared.
A crushed pill slipped into one of her sweet wines would have been easier.
She would have drifted off to sleep. Awakened hours later already caught, with none of this futile struggling to be endured by either of us.
“What do you have?” I ask. And then, as another scream makes my ears ring again, I shove my free hand over Katya’s mouth. “For Christ’s sake, koshechka,” I hiss at her in English. “I can’t hear myself over your screams.”
She bites me. Of course she fucking bites me. She bites me like a rabid animal, while she still feels me between her thighs. While my come is still inside her. While I still wear the wounds of her little claws on my arm.
Anatoli scoffs, as if this scene we are creating here in the living room is beneath him. He slips his hand into his pocket and withdraws a syringe. Anatoli, at least, is prepared. Probably he has been for days, now.
A jerk of his head to where I hold Katya’s wrists above her head. “Vein is best,” he says.
For the first time in recent days, we are in agreement. A sedative will work fast, but it is still a matter of minutes—ten, perhaps twenty—if it goes into the muscle of her arm. A vein? Thirty seconds, maybe as much as a minute.
Vein is better. Less of a chance she will hurt herself in her struggling.
Katya is still gnawing on my palm, striving to tear my skin with her sharp little teeth. I stretch her arms farther above her head until she whimpers behind the cup of my hand. She gives a feeble jerk of her arms, but my grip holds fast. The motion forces my shirt higher, riding above her hips now.
“Do it quickly,” I bark at Anatoli in Russian. “And don’t fucking look at her.”
Anatoli’s boots crunch the stem of Katya’s discarded wine glass from earlier this evening, and the glass shatters into the carpet. It doesn’t matter. We have cleaners for such things.
Katya screeches again as Anatoli clasps her arm just beneath her elbow, applying pressure with his thumb to find a good vein. He flicks the cap off the syringe, holds her arm steady. The needle slides in smoothly.
A pained cry puffs into my palm. Katya’s eyes dilate, pupils blowing wide and eclipsing her irises.
“Shh, koshechka,” I soothe. In moments it is no longer me she struggles against—it is the rush of the sedative in her veins.
“It is done. Already over.” Anatoli has stepped away to make a call to the pilot to have the plane readied.
When I lift my hand from Katya’s mouth, she makes nothing more than a soft whimpering sound.
A drop of blood rolls down her arm. I trace it to its origin; the pinprick on the soft skin just below the bend of her elbow that marks the injection site. A few moments of pressure, and the small wound will close.
By the time I lift my thumb from the mark, Katya is unconscious, her limbs loose and lax as she sinks into the soft couch cushions. Good. I no longer have to worry she will attempt to flee or hurt herself with her struggles.
I wrench the hem of my shirt down over her thighs as I rise. “How long will it last?” I snap at Anatoli as I stride toward the kitchen counter.
“A woman of her size? Two hours. Perhaps three.”
I grunt, bending to retrieve Katya’s phone where she dropped it on the floor during our brief struggle, wrenching the plastic casing apart. From the nest of electronic components, I withdraw the tiny SIM card, toss it to the floor and crush it beneath the heel of my boot, damaging it beyond repair.
She will not need this any longer.
“Send someone to retrieve her things from the motel,” I say as I toss the remaining plastic components into the trash, where they will be collected and removed in the morning.
Probably the police will not care enough to try to trace the last known movements of this woman who has been a resident of their state for such a short time, one who has made all attempts to obscure her identity besides.
But even if they do somehow trace her last movements here, it will not matter.
The ownership of this house is buried beneath an avalanche of increasingly-complex LLCs, used as a short-term rental while the house and the land it sits on quietly accumulates value.
It will never be linked to me. And Katya’s disappearance will go unsolved. Just one more missing woman in a country full of such cases, and for whom few are looking.
“Waste of time,” Anatoli says baldly. “There is nothing much.”
Probably not, but she took only a suitcase with her when she fled Chicago.
Most of it, probably, was clothing. But anything else that she has taken with her that is not clothing—it means something to her.
Meaningful enough that she would sacrifice precious time to collect it, of import enough to sacrifice space in her suitcase. Things which cannot be left behind.
“Find someone or do it yourself,” I say, and I hear the annoyance simmering within my voice. It comes surging out in a lash of anger that I rarely inflict upon Anatoli, who does not often disappoint. “The fuck were you thinking?” I grate. “She saw you on the train. You frightened her.”
Anatoli’s brows lift. He gives a short, helpless shrug, as if to say I cannot help this.
Probably he is right. I’m angry over nothing, over something Anatoli cannot control. Katya was sensitive already to disturbances in her surroundings, suspicious of strangers.
Probably I am most angry at myself, for my own carelessness.
For the way she swayed on her feet as if she’d been struck when she looked down at Nicola’s phone in her hands and realized its meaning.
For the inevitability of having to let Anatoli shove a needle into her soft skin only so she did not harm herself in her terror.
I swipe Nicola’s phone off the counter and punch in the code to pull up this text she has sent to him, and which has cost me all of her sweetness.
I’m never coming home.
Despite my agitation, a short laugh bursts from my lungs.
No, she is not. Not in the way she intends. But she is going to what will be her home.
∞∞∞
Katya sleeps through everything. The ride to the airport, the turbulence the plane hits halfway through the trip back to Chicago.
Her head lolls against my shoulder, her breaths slow and deep and even.
Her blonde hair spills over my arm. I have tangled my fingers in it many times, but she is too deeply asleep to feel the pull.
Anatoli spends the short flight in silence, his attention riveted to his phone. He has dismissed Katya already as an inconsequential quirk of my capricious mind; a temporary diversion unworthy of his attention. A passing madness that will fade in time.