Chapter 22 Touch Her and Die #3
My chin was on my chest. The chin Viktor trained me to keep level. Dropped. Pointing at the ground. The posture of a woman who has stopped believing the training.
Then the door blew open.
Metal on concrete. A crash that bounced off the warehouse walls, the echo multiplying. Something arriving with force. Something that had been looking for me through wrong warehouses and false GPS signals and the hell of a system failing the one time it couldn't afford to fail.
Three gunshots.
Pop. Pop. Pop. The sound flat. Undramatic.
Guns in real life sound like someone clapping too hard.
Three of the six men dropped. I saw one fall through my good eye.
He was standing to my left. Then he was on the ground.
The transition instantaneous. Vertical, then horizontal. The frames in between deleted.
A fourth sound. Wet. The crunch of bone twisted past the degree that bone is designed to turn. The fourth man. Down.
The fifth man ran. Boots on concrete getting farther. The sound of a man choosing life.
The sixth was Dmitri.
Viktor stood in the center of the warehouse. Black suit. No coat. A gun in his right hand. His left hand red. The knuckles of a man who had just broken a neck with his bare hands. His chest heaving. The first time I'd ever seen Viktor Kotov breathe hard.
He saw me.
The gun lowered. His body angling toward the chair.
His eyes moving over me. The oatmeal. The bare feet.
The face. I watched it happen through my one working eye.
His gaze landing on the swollen left eye.
Moving to the swollen right. Finding the split lip.
The blood on the cardigan. The wrists, raw, bleeding.
The posture. The dropped chin. The woman who had walked into the Council dinner in McQueen, sitting in a warehouse in oatmeal with her chin on her chest.
His mask broke.
I saw it. Two seconds. Maybe three. The face underneath. A man in pain. The kind that doesn't live in the body. The kind that lives in the gap between what he promised and what he failed to prevent.
He crossed the warehouse. Fast. Gun in his waistband.
Knife from his pocket. He cut the zip ties.
My wrists fell apart. His hands on my face.
Both of them. Turning me toward him. His thumbs moving over the bruises with a touch so light it barely existed.
My left eye. My right cheek. My split lip.
The jawline Dmitri had traced before I bit him, a lifetime ago, in a different version of this chair.
His eyes found the oatmeal cardigan. Found the McQueen in pieces on the floor. Found the shoes by the door, side by side.
I watched him understand.
The reversal. The undressing. The redressing. The erasure.
His jaw locked. The muscle jumping. His hands leaving my face. Slowly. The way a man sets down something precious before he picks up something violent.
He turned.
Dmitri was on the floor. Crawling toward the far wall. The bandaged hand smearing blood on concrete. The white trousers filthy. His face cement-grey. The face of a man watching his brother kill four men in ten seconds and doing math he doesn't like.
Viktor walked to him. Each step placed. The shoes on concrete filling the warehouse the way a heartbeat fills a chest. Steady. Inevitable.
He reached Dmitri. Looked down. Dmitri looked up. Brothers. Blood. The same jaw. The same cheekbones. One standing. One on the floor.
Viktor pulled the gun. Pressed the barrel to Dmitri's right knee. The metal dimpling the white linen.
"Я тебе говорил," Viktor said. I told you. Quiet. The quietest voice in the world. "Никто её не трогает." No one touches her.
He pulled the trigger.
The sound was different from the three before. Closer. Smaller. Muffled by flesh. Dmitri screamed. The scream filling the warehouse, bouncing, layering, the whole building full of the sound of a man whose knee had just been destroyed by his older brother.
Dmitri's hands went to his knee. Blood between his fingers. The white trousers turning red. Dmitri put me back in the cardigan to make me small. Viktor shot him for it. The math was that simple.
Viktor stood over him. Gun at his side. Said nothing else. The knee had said everything.
He came back to me. Knelt. His arms going under me. Knees and back. Lifting me out of the chair my body had been dying in. My ribs screaming. My face throbbing. My wrists raw. Every bruise reporting its location like a fire alarm going off inside my skin.
He carried me to the door.
Behind us, Dmitri screaming. The sound getting smaller. The way the bakery window got smaller from the van. The way everything gets smaller when you leave it.
November air hit my face. Cold. Clean. The first clean thing I'd breathed since the bag went over my head. I pressed my face into Viktor's chest. Gunpowder. Blood. The chemistry of a man who had just killed four people.
He put me in the car. Sat beside me. Pavel at the wheel. The engine starting. The warehouse disappearing in the mirror.
Viktor's hand found mine. Held it. Too tight. His thumb on my wrist where the zip ties had cut.