Chapter 10
Jordan
The hours bleed, smearing together until I can’t tell one from the next. Three days have passed since Kirill yanked me out of my life. Three days of threats and endless questions about keys and evidence I don’t even have, broken up only by meals.
And now this.
He’s changed the game. He sits in an armchair on the other side of the bedroom, hovering like a sharp-edged shadow with strange, washed-out eyes while I fake sleep. Even when I keep my lids squeezed shut, his abrasive stare sandpapers my skin.
Before, there were gaps of rest to regroup and rethink my plans. Spaces between questions, breathing room between his moods.
Now he’s a silent but constant presence in my little prison, pressed right up against me, tracking me from bathroom to bed to the tired little sitting area and then back again, never more than a step away. He’s coiled, expecting me to snap and spill.
I assume my attempted escape is the cause. Even if it was futile, he seems unwilling to risk another misstep from me.
I huddle under the covers, as still as possible despite my nerves. Years of meditation practice have finally amounted to something besides staged pictures and forced Zen.
Using a box technique meant to calm the mind and induce drowsiness, I take slow, measured breaths.
Except my eyes, hidden beneath the comforter, stay wide open.
My thoughts race, darting everywhere. Kirill doesn’t move or make a sound, yet the gravity of his attention rolls over my body. My muscles twitch, aching to run.
I tucked the knife he left on the breakfast tray beneath my pillow. He’s not scared of it, but I feel safer having the blade within easy reach.
My nerves are antennae. I hate that. I hate that my stupid body is so tuned to Kirill. I know when he shifts, even if he’s soundless.
Survival. That’s all. Instinct. Prey understanding the shape of a predator’s shadow.
Time stretches like elastic, unreliable and impossible to measure.
Minutes—perhaps hours—glide past, formless and meaningless. My mind flickers from prayer to prayer, half-remembered mantras looping in and out of fear, fragments of comfort dulled by panic.
I try to hold on to what I teach others.
Breathe in abundance. Breathe out fear.
But I find no abundance here. No peace. Just this room, four close walls, and the man who never stops observing me. The man with the key.
Manifestation proves an uphill battle here. But I won’t give up. I can’t.
At some point, exhaustion wins, and my box breathing does its job.
The body caves, surrendering where my will refused, and I sink down into blankness. I have no fear-fueled dreams, just a slow, deep descent into nothing.
An inhuman noise jolts me awake.
Raw and painful, as if torn from the chest.
My eyes snap open, my heart slamming against my ribs. Night swallows everything, leaving only a silver slice of moonlight to peer through the window.
Again, the animalistic cry prickles over my skin, arms, and the back of my neck.
Kirill?
I flip over to see if he’s alert now too.
He remains in the chair, his hunched, massive frame tensed up and almost shaking. Head down, hands in his lap. His clenched fists tremble, the knuckles white. He’s asleep.
A ragged half-growl, half-choked-off scream escapes his mouth.
I don’t move.
In the moonlight, the sweat on his skin glistens. The mask has vanished, all the threat stripped away. He could almost be someone else, here in the dark, trapped in his own prison.
The sound tears from his lips, raw and halting. “Kholodno.”
I don’t know the language, but I know the pain behind the word.
Before my senses can catch up, I’m slipping from beneath the covers. The floor bites cold against my bare feet, the silence stretching as I move.
I step softly, careful not to wake him. Another word spills out between his lips. So faint I wouldn’t have heard him if I weren’t already halfway across the room.
“Mama…”
Anyone else in my situation would probably prefer to watch Kirill suffer, might even savor the way he’s come undone in the middle of his nightmare.
But I only feel a sharp ache at the sight of him.
Nobody should hurt like that.
Maybe it’s the universe punishing him for keeping me here.
I did warn him about karma.
Regardless…no one deserves this. And I can’t just sit back and watch.
I kneel beside the chair, close enough to see the frantic flutter of his eyelids, each muscle rigid and straining.
Wherever he is, it’s worse than here. And he can’t get out.
My fingers skim his forearm, barely touching. His skin, fever wild and sharp, burns under my hand. Every fiber in him tenses and shudders. The reaction is too human. Too vulnerable.
“Kirill.” I trail my fingers down his arm and over the hard line of muscle, stopping where his fist knots white on his thigh. The tendons stand out, the cords stretched to the breaking point. “It’s okay.”
His other hand moves.
Fingers, vise-tight and unyielding, clamp around my throat.
I go completely still, my breath trapped in my chest, my pulse hammering against his palm.
My gaze snaps up to his face.
He stares at me with eyes as pale and cold as winter stars, but he’s not seeing me. Not really. Whatever haunts him still has its claws embedded, turning his stare wild and sightless.
For a heartbeat, we’re suspended. Kirill’s hand encircles my throat, my life in his grip, both of us caught in a moment between nightmare and waking.
Kirill
Cold.
Ice in my veins. Snow scorches my skin. Wind cuts through inadequate clothing.
The house taunts me. Warmth and light and Mama all locked away on the other side of that door.
I’m pounding—screaming—but no one cares.
No one comes.
My hand closes around some kind of warm entity. Too warm for this snowy nightmare.
The cold fractures as reality bleeds back in fragments.
Darkness. Moonlight. A gasp for air.
My fingers tighten on a soft object, with rippled rigidity underneath.
A throat.
Jordan kneels before me, her eyes wide with shock, my hand clamped around her windpipe.
I blink, disoriented.
After a few seconds, my surroundings solidify. The safe house guest room. The chair I’ve been sitting in for hours while watching her and waiting for her to break.
Not snow. Not that night. I’m not eleven anymore. I’m not freezing to death while my mother’s blood seeps into fresh powder on the other side of a locked door.
But the cold remains, lodged deep beneath my ribs like a block of ice that never thaws.
My hand still encircles Jordan’s throat. She’s not fighting, not clawing at my fingers the way anyone else would. Her rabbit-quick pulse throbs against my palm. Her eyes, which see too much, hold mine without flinching.
“It’s okay.” The words vibrate against my fingers, her voice strained but gentle. “It’s over now.” Her hand comes up, not to pull mine away but to stroke my arm in a soothing, featherlight gesture.
Like I need comfort. And I’m worth saving.
I release her instantly, the contact burning worse than frostbite.
“Don’t touch me.” The raw, ragged command claws out, shredded by the nightmare still clutching at my chest.
I shove away from the chair, stumbling to my feet because I need space, need air that’s not thick with her scent. That damn blend of lavender and citrus soap and sleep-warmed skin is messing with my head.
Four days of circling her, picking apart her every word and breath, searching for useful intel. And she continues to give me nothing. Just more of those airy spiritual lines.
I drag my hand down my face, desperate to wipe away the last sticky threads of the dream. It’s been years since the nightmare hit like this. Years since I woke up choking on the old horror I’ve spent half my life shoving under the surface.
She rises from her knees with care, as if I’m some wounded thing ready to lash out.
Amusement trickles through me.
I’m not the prey here. I’m the monster.
“What does kholodno mean?” The Russian term is awkward on her American tongue.
It means cold, but worse than that. Cold is the absence of warmth.
As a kid, I associated kholodno with a bitter, dying, endless freeze. The kind that burrows into bone and lives there, year after year, untouched by every fire you build.
Kholodno leeches life, leaving only misery and death.
Jordan inches closer. A single step, then stillness.
I brace, coiled for the hit I sense coming. She still has that knife I gave her. Last I saw, she placed the weapon under her pillow. And I fell asleep.
But she just watches me, her green eyes narrow. Not hostile but probing, like she expects to find an answer in my face. “You looked so alone.”
The quiet, understated words shouldn’t matter. But they punch past every line of defense, slide through the cracks in my armor, and bury themselves deep in my chest.
Worse than a touch.
It’s exposure.
Out of instinct, I react before I can think.
I’m on her, pinning her up against the wall, my palm flat on the cool plaster by her head, my other hand gripping her chin and forcing her to look at me. She’s small beneath my body, her bones light as glass under my skin, and I feel the tremor in her breath.
“You want to know what it means? It means you don’t know a damn thing.”
I expect her to shatter. I’ve seen fear a thousand times in all different flavors.
Pupils blown wide. A flicker of hope at a perceived exit, followed by her collapsing when she realizes the impossibility of escape. That the only way out is to give me what I want.
I’ve dropped murderous men to their knees. And she’s just a small, lone woman.
But Jordan stares back, steady, calm, and unblinking. Not afraid. Just waiting. “What happened?” She brushes the hair back from my face, her hand warm like summer grass on bare feet.
Everything in me screams to push her off, shut her down, and slam the wall back up.
But the raw and splintered part of my soul wants her to see my fury. To know precisely what kind of monster she’s locked in here with and sharing her light with.