Chapter Thirty Three
Alexei
Fuck!” The shout burns in my lungs. With a vicious snap of my arm, I hurl my phone against the nearest wall. The violent strike dents the drywall, and the phone lands with a shattering crash to the marble floor.
Alyosha, please!
Does she think I will have sympathy for her? Was she foolish enough to believe there would be no punishment for what she has done? That she can make a fool of me and have this offense so easily erased from memory? I will never be so weak as that.
And still my fucking heart aches, like she has torn it from my chest with her pathetic cry. Nearly a week she has been gone, and I have missed her like a lost limb. I wake in the night reaching for her. I leave the fucking light on at night for her like she is still here beside me.
My boots crunch the pieces of my destroyed phone beneath them as I pace the floor.
Shattered, like the remnants of the computer and phone I bought for her, and which I also smashed into shards when I realized what she had done.
And still this is not enough to vent the rage that roils in my chest. For days those broken bits of electronics tortured me with their very presence scatted across the floor.
A taunting reminder of my own stupidity.
I sink into the chair behind my desk, and my hands tremble as I rake them through my hair. My fingers pull at knots and tangles, and the pain of this calms me temporarily. A physical pain which is soothing, distracting from the pain Katya has inflicted upon me, even if it does not last long.
Like a fucking fool, I want to go to her. It is for her own sake that I do not. The chaos of my mind frightens even me; I cannot be certain how I will react. The consequences of my anger have proven deadly for far less devastating betrayals than this.
So it is best Katya goes to the pit to be forgotten for a time. It is for her own safety that I confine her.
Until I can forget the worst of my anger.
Until the knowledge that she is mine once more suffocates the choking fear that I will never have her again.
Until my hands stop shaking and my mind is settled and my heart ceases to pump fury through my veins instead of only blood.
Until I can trust myself in her presence.
Perhaps, far into the future, when my anger has cooled, there will come a day where I can forgive her. But even should such a day come, I will never forget. Even then, I will never be so foolish as to trust in her again.
∞∞∞
By the second day of Katya’s imprisonment, I am no better. If anything, I am worse. I wake with a ball of rage in my chest, furious now that she is so close and still untouchable to me. Furious that there is no respite even in sleep from this wrath that consumes me.
I hear her even in my dreams. Calling to me in that voice rife with desperation. Alyosha, please!
I know this is impossible. The pit is too far away, buried beneath the house, soundproofed. But still I hear her voice in my head, and it claws at the open wound she has made of my heart.
Too often I find myself walking the dark hallway to the basement, moments away from punching the code into the keypad that guards the door. Too often I find myself tempted to check the security cameras, to watch her in her captivity like a voyeur. Every hour it becomes more difficult to resist.
Eventually I have to acknowledge the truth of it. I am weak. Too fucking weak when it comes to her. Too fucking weak to resist the temptation of her. Too fucking weak to control myself.
So I drown myself in a bottle of vodka until I cannot hear her in my mind, calling out to me. Until I cannot hear my own thoughts. Until the liquor has drowned the anger, and I am stripped free of the burden of consciousness, beckoned down into a mindless, thoughtless oblivion.
It’s still dark when Anatoli slaps me awake, but the time is closer to dawn than midnight. A firm strike to my cheek to rouse me from my vodka-soaked stupor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he snaps in Russian.
Nothing more alcohol will not cure. I stretch out my hand for the bottle, abandoned on a nearby table. “You were meant to return days ago,” I slur. Anatoli shoves the bottle out of reach of my fingers, ignoring the glare I slant at him. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Handling business you neglect,” he says sharply.
“While you amuse yourself here, things in Moscow go to shit. The government wants a larger cut to turn a blind eye. The enforcers grow cocky and careless. Half a shipment of cocaine goes missing and I have to beat information out of those responsible, make a few examples.” He scoffs as he throws himself into a chair.
“Sixteen fucking hours I am on a plane, and I return to this.”
“Give me the fucking vodka and go fuck yourself,” I tell him, casting one arm over my bleary eyes as he flicks on a light.
“You’re piss-drunk already,” he says. “This house feels like a fucking funeral home.” And then, speculatively, he asks, “Where is Catalina?”
I laugh. It is humorless, grating. “In the pit,” I tell him.
Anatoli’s sudden silence scores me. At last he says, “You’re joking.” He says this like he expects me to confirm it is so; that of course I would not do this thing to her.
“She fucking ran!” The roar rattles my ribcage, pulses in my head.
The renewed burst of fury is enough seize my muscles tight, to propel myself from where I lay on the couch far enough forward to seize the bottle of vodka Anatoli took from me.
“I trusted her,” I say as I wrench at the cap. “I trusted her, and she ran.”
Anatoli lurches forward and rips the bottle out of my hands before I can open it again. “You don’t do this,” he says. “Not to her. You ruin her this way. You ruin yourself.”
“Why the fuck do you care? You don’t like her.”
“I don’t have to fucking like her!” he snarls. “It should be enough that you do!”
“She betrayed me!” I struggle to shove my elbows beneath me, levering myself upright. “She ran away from the fucking bookstore a week ago. For a week she was missing, hiding from me! I have her back only because she called her worthless fucking father for help.”
“Idiot!” Anatoli bites off, and his palm slaps my face again, sharply. “Her father tells you this? And you are stupid enough to believe him? The man whose son you killed? Whose family you have by the balls with blackmail?” He sneers, “Do I have to guess what he wants in exchange for her?”
For the first time, I feel something beneath the anger that scorches my fucking soul. A stirring of shame. Of guilt.
“Drown yourself, then, if you really don’t give a shit.” Anatoli tosses the bottle of vodka back at me.
“Of course I fucking give a shit.” The words scrape the inside of my throat. “For her own safety, I put her there. I don’t trust myself like this! You think I want to hurt her?” She makes me feel too fucking much of everything.
“I think you don’t think,” Anatoli says. He makes a rough sound in his throat, a wild gesticulation of his hands in his frustration. “She might be bad for business, but you are less than worthless without her.”
The bottle of vodka is in my hands. Oblivion beckons as Katya’s voice again resounds in my head. Alyosha, please!
My stomach churns. “Anatoli.” My voice is rough, grating, thick. “I need you to look into this.”
“Idiot,” he says again, reproachfully, as he turns to leave. “I was already going to do this.”
Because he does not believe what I believed so readily. And I know, if there is anything to be found, Anatoli will find it. And already—already I am afraid of what he will find. What it will mean for me. What it will mean for Katya.
Whether the betrayal was hers, or whether it was mine.
∞∞∞
It takes hours to sober myself again. Hours in which I stew in a noxious blend of anger and guilt, uncertain which is justified. Hours before Anatoli finds me again and calls me to my office. I know instantly only from the expression on his face that I will not like what he has unearthed.
He is brutal. Direct. He says, as he shoves a memory card into my computer and pulls up a video file, “She didn’t fucking run. And this is what you do to her out of stupidity.”
It is the video feed from the pit. Dated days ago.
Over the grainy crackle of the speakers, I hear the thud of shoes on the stairs. Piotr comes into view just at the corner of the frame, carrying a metal tray on one hand. There is some sort of sludge-like gruel coating the surface.
“Your dinner,” he growls, and I hear the wet, phlegmy clearing of his throat as he spits a glob of mucus onto the tray.
He drops it to the floor, the sharp clang thundering over the audio.
With his boot he shoves it until it hits the very farthest corner of the room.
There is the soft chortle of his laughter as he turns, striding back up the stairs.
The feed switches to night vision. Night vision?
Bastard turned off the motherfucking lights. Left her in the darkness.
A choked sob drifts from Katya’s throat, and she uncurls herself from the tiny little ball she has wrapped herself into. Something uncomfortable skitters in my chest as I watch her slowly drag herself across the floor, hear the metallic rasp of the chain attached to her ankle.
She does not care that Piotr has spit in her food. She is reaching for it anyway. In the cold, in the dark. It is pitch-black down there, but still she keeps edging toward that corner where the tray is.
A hoarse cry rattles up her throat—she has reached the end of the tether.
The chain is too short, and the cuff around her ankle digs into her flesh until her breaths are short and tight from the pain.
Her fingers hover just a few inches away, and she swipes them desperately, searching for the edge of the tray in the darkness.