Chapter 22 Touch Her and Die
Dmitri brought scissors.
Silver. Long. Tailor's scissors. He held them up in the fluorescent light, turning them so the blade caught the glare. A showman. Always a showman. Even in a warehouse that smelled like rat piss, Dmitri Kotov needed an audience for his cruelty.
"Tu sais ce qui m'a toujours dérangé chez Viktor?" he said. You know what always bothered me about Viktor? "Il habille les gens pour leur faire croire qu'ils sont quelque chose qu'ils ne sont pas." He dresses people up to make them think they're something they're not.
He hooked the bottom blade under the neckline of the McQueen.
"Non. Dmitri, ne fais pas ?a." Don't do that.
He cut.
The fabric split. I felt it go. The structured black opening down my chest, the bodice separating, the waistline giving way.
The sound. The crunch of scissors through expensive fabric, slow, deliberate, Dmitri savoring each inch, his bandaged hand steadying my shoulder while his good hand worked the blade lower.
Lower. Through the skirt. To the hem. The dress falling open around me like a skin being peeled.
The warehouse air hit my bare stomach. Cold. The six men along the walls looking. Their eyes flat. Professional. The eyes of men who are paid to stand in a room while a woman is stripped in a chair.
My body was exposed. The lace bra. Black. The underwear. Black. The body Viktor called a cathedral. The body Dmitri called fat. Both men's vocabularies written across the same skin, and the scissors were choosing Dmitri's version.
He pulled the ruined fabric off me. Dropped the McQueen on the concrete.
It landed like something dead. A pile of black on grey.
The dress that had walked into the Council dinner, that had stood next to a king, that had made five Bratva kings stop talking when it entered the room. On the floor. In pieces.
Dmitri reached behind the chair. Pulled out a shopping bag. Inside: an oatmeal cardigan. New. Tags still on. Size fourteen. He'd bought it. Planned this. The scissors, the cardigan, the reversal. This wasn't impulse. This was choreography.
He cut my zip ties. My wrists screamed as blood flooded back into my fingers. I rubbed them. Raw. Weeping. The skin shredded by plastic.
He held out the cardigan.
I put it on. What else was I going to do.
Sit half-naked in front of six men. The oatmeal swallowed me.
Shapeless. The fabric against my skin felt like going backward.
Like time reversing. Like every week in Viktor's penthouse unspooling, the training unwinding, the woman in the McQueen shrinking back into the woman in the cardigan who apologized for existing.
Dmitri crouched in front of me. Took my chin.
Pulled a tissue from his pocket. Pressed it to my mouth.
Rubbed. The dark lipstick smearing across the white tissue in streaks that looked like wounds.
The war paint Viktor made me feel like I deserved, wiped away by the thumb of the man who spent two years telling me I wore too much, then too little, the feedback loop that kept me guessing, kept me adjusting, kept me small.
He took my shoes. The four-inch heels. Placed them by the warehouse door. Side by side. Neat. The domestic tidiness of a man who destroys things in an organized fashion.
Barefoot. Oatmeal. No lipstick. The McQueen in pieces on the floor.
"Voilà," he said. "Te revoilà." There you are again.
He retied my wrists. New zip ties. Tighter.
He left. A metal door somewhere behind me opened, closed. The echo fading. The six men standing. The fluorescent light buzzing. Me in the chair. The concrete cold under my bare feet. The oatmeal cardigan buttoned wrong because my hands had been shaking too hard to line up the holes.
I waited.
I prayed. "Is breá le Dia mé. Is breá le Dia mé." The Gaeilge prayers my grandmother taught me in a kitchen in Galway that smelled like turf smoke and rain. I said them into my chest. Into the oatmeal. Into the quiet, because the quiet was all I had.
I waited for Viktor.
The metal door opened again.
Dmitri. Different shirt. The white suit jacket gone, just the trousers and a fresh button-down. He'd changed. He'd showered. He smelled like bergamot and clean cotton and the freshness of a man who has just had a meal and a rest while the woman tied to a chair in his warehouse has had neither.
He was carrying a glass of water.
He held it in front of me. Close enough that I could smell it. Close enough that my cracked lips ached toward it. My mouth so dry the inside of my cheeks had started sticking to my teeth.
"Tu as soif?" Thirsty?
I said nothing.
"Dis s'il te pla?t." Say please.
I said nothing.
He poured the water on the concrete between my feet.
Slowly. The glass tilting. The water hitting the floor in a thin stream that splashed my bare toes.
Cold. I watched it pool around my feet, watched it darken the concrete, watched the only drink I'd been offered in however many hours it had been soak into a warehouse floor while Dmitri smiled and the glass emptied and my throat closed around a thirst that felt like swallowing sand.
"Ton Viktor n'est pas venu," he said. Your Viktor hasn't come. "Tu sais pourquoi?" You know why?
"Il arrive." He's coming.
"Non. Il n'arrive pas. Le Conseil a voté. Mikhail a gagné. Ton roi est tombé de son tr?ne et il ne reste personne pour venir te chercher dans cet endroit." No. He's not coming. The Council voted. Mikhail won. Your king has fallen from his throne and there's no one left to come looking for you.
"Tu mens." You're lying.
"Peut-être. Ou peut-être que tu es assise dans cette chaise en train de croire à un homme qui installe des caméras dans ton appartement et appelle ?a de l'amour." Maybe. Or maybe you're sitting in that chair believing in a man who puts cameras in your apartment and calls it love.
"Il arrive." Louder now. My voice cracking. The dryness. The fear. "Et quand il arrivera, tu souhaiteras que je t'aie mordu plus fort." When he gets here, you'll wish I'd bitten harder.
Dmitri's face went flat. The pennies. The dead eyes from the restaurant, from the booth, from the hand on my throat.
He hit me.
His fist. Left side. My ribs. I didn't see it coming because I was watching his eyes, watching the pennies, watching the countdown finish.
His knuckles connected just below my breast, in the soft space between the bottom rib and the hip, where the body has no armor, where the organs sit close to the surface.
The impact folded me. My whole torso collapsing inward, my spine curving, my chin dropping to my chest. The pain was total.
Complete. A white light behind my eyes that erased everything, every thought, every prayer, every language.
Just the pain. Just the body trying to process the information that a fist had just rearranged something inside me that was supposed to stay where it was.
I couldn't breathe. My lungs locked. My mouth open, pulling at air that wouldn't come, the diaphragm spasming, refusing to inflate.
I made a sound. A wheeze. The sound of an animal that has been kicked in the place where breathing lives.
I bent forward as far as the chair allowed.
My forehead almost touching my knees. My wrists straining behind me.
The zip ties cutting deeper. My ribs screaming with every millimeter of movement.
When the air finally came back, it came with a sob. The first breath tasting like blood because I'd bitten my tongue when the fist landed, my own teeth cutting into the muscle, another piece of my body attacking itself.
Something in my ribs shifted. Cracked. The specific give of bone under pressure.
A rib breaking or fracturing or doing whatever ribs do when a man's fist hits them with the force of three years of wounded ego.
The pain changed. From sharp to structural.
From the lightning bolt of impact to the deep, grinding ache of something inside me that was no longer where it was supposed to be.
Every breath cost me. Inhale: a blade turning between my ribs. Exhale: the blade withdrawing, the relief lasting half a second before the next inhale drove it back in.
Dmitri shook his hand. Flexed his fingers. Looked at me bent over in the chair, gasping, bleeding from my tongue, my ribs rearranged.
"Je t'ai dit d'être polie," he said. I told you to be polite.
He left.
The metal door. The echo. The fluorescent buzz. The six men. Me. The pain. The thirst. The oatmeal cardigan buttoned wrong.
Time passed. I don't know how much. Time in a warehouse with no windows, no clock, no phone doesn't pass.
It pools. It collects around your feet like the water Dmitri poured on the floor.
You sit in it. You can't measure it. You can only feel it accumulate, heavy, wet, the weight of not knowing whether the sun is up or down, whether it's been six hours or sixteen, whether the man you're waiting for is tearing the city apart or sitting in a penthouse that doesn't have you in it anymore.
I stopped being able to hold my posture.
The spine Viktor drilled straight. The shoulders he set back.
The chin he leveled. My body couldn't maintain the architecture.
The ribs wouldn't allow it. I slumped. My spine curving.
My shoulders rolling forward. My chin dropping.
The posture of the woman Dmitri preferred.
The small woman. The sorry woman. The woman who took up less space because the space she occupied was always too much for the man she occupied it with.
The metal door opened.
Dmitri. Again. How many times now. Three. Four. Each return a new act in the theater he was staging for an audience of one. Each time a different blade. The scissors. The water. The ribs. What would it be now.