Chapter 28 Katarina
KATARINA
Lucy left with Nina at her heels. I wandered around the fancy hotel suite, tried watching TV, and finally just sat at the window and stared out over the city.
It hadn’t changed much in the time I’d been away, yet at the same time, it looked completely different.
I’d missed so much. Three years. Three years of life lost to Hallow Hall.
It felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.
I’d spent three years half asleep, dreaming, confused; and when I was lucid, following orders, toeing the lines of monsters.
I was bereft. I was angry. I was all the things I could feel, all at once.
I still found it hard to process that Vargas, Benedict, and Pavol were all dead. It seemed impossible. They’d grown so large and invincible in my mind, the knowledge that they’d actually died, and right in front of me, no less, was still processing.
Maybe one day I’d wake up and believe it. For now, it was too much to hope for. In a few short weeks, Massimo had come into my life and completely changed it.
Massimo. My heart raced at the thought of him. He was out there in the city somewhere. Searching for me? I hoped so.
What if he wasn’t? What if he felt his job was done here? What if he was hurt? He’d gone into the fire for Tatiana. He was angry. He was brave . . . He wasn’t as irredeemable as he thought he was. Just the thought that he might be lying somewhere unidentified in a hospital . . .
I couldn’t even stand to consider that idea. He had to come for me . . . he had to. We weren’t finished with our deal. At least, I hadn't delivered my part yet. Giving him my first everythings. He'd wanted so much more than I'd thought.
I could only hope he’d track me down. Everything between us felt unfinished. Meeting him had felt like a beginning, not an end.
All morning, my mind turned to him in a never-ending loop. I wondered where he was and what he was doing. Was he injured? Did he find Tatiana? Was she okay?
It was around lunchtime when the doorbell rang.
I jumped to my feet, hope hammering in my chest. Could it be him?
I rushed to the door and put my eye to the peephole.
Dr. Blackwood stood in the hallway outside the door.
I stumbled back, suddenly feeling sick. Oh my God, he’d found me? Why? Why wouldn’t he just leave me alone?
I stared at the door as I tried to get my breathing under control. I had to calm the fuck down. I was inside and he was outside. The door was locked. He couldn’t get to me if I didn’t let him in. Unfortunately, the new security that Lucy’s sister-in-law had organized hadn’t shown yet. I was alone.
Still, it was okay. He couldn’t get in. I kept telling myself. The door was locked. I tried to soothe my frazzled nerves.
Then, a man with a trolley appeared at the end of the hallway.
Blackwood turned to speak to him, gesturing toward the door.
He flashed some kind of lanyard that was around his neck.
Was he claiming to be checking on a patient?
The kid with the room service trolley seemed conflicted.
He glanced up and down the corridor. Blackwood impatiently looked at his watch like he was in a hurry to check on someone.
I backed away from the door. He was going to get in, one way or another. I just knew it.
I couldn’t stay here.
I ran through the hotel suite, shoving my sneakers on and pulling a heavy cream winter coat out of the closet. I’d just have to owe Lucy this one.
There was a terrace outside that attached to the one beside it.
It didn’t seem very security savvy, and Lucy’s bodyguard hadn’t been happy about it, but maybe the hotel figured that the people who stayed in such luxury, high-end suites wouldn’t be sneaking around and stealing from each other’s rooms.
Anyway, right now, I was grateful for it.
I stepped out onto the terrace. It had stopped snowing, but it was still very cold. My feet slid a little on the ice coating the flagstones. I shut the French doors and headed to the metal barrier between the two suites.
The room next door seemed to be unoccupied. There wasn’t anything out on the terrace that would indicate another guest was staying there. I had to risk it.
I climbed up on the partition, my hands freezing on the icy metal.
Slowly, I lifted my leg over the side, swaying scarily when I was halfway over, but I gripped harder and kept going.
I couldn’t look away from the wall toward the city.
We were ten stories up. It was the kind of height that would make my head spin, and I was dizzy enough as it was.
Slowly, I lowered myself on the other side of the barrier and nearly collapsed in a heap on the balcony. I had to keep moving.
I scrambled across the terrace, slipping and sliding, reaching the glass doors. With a quick prayer, I closed my eyes and pushed it.
It slid open. Relief hit me. I’d fully been expecting it to be locked from inside. That was the kind of luck I usually had, but today, it had worked out.
I slipped inside. The room was quiet, empty, and clearly unoccupied. I locked the door to the balcony and paced the living room, trying to think through my problem.
I could stay here, but Blackwood would work out I might have gone to a neighboring room.
Hell, my footprints were pretty obvious on the balcony.
I should have taken some time to go back and forth and make it confusing.
Then again, there was nowhere else to go once I was out here, so he’d still find me.
I couldn’t stay here, I realized slowly.
The desire to stay in the warm comfort and safety of the hotel was overwhelming, but I couldn’t give in.
I had to leave, and I had to do it right now, before Blackwood got access to this room, too.
I crossed the room toward the main entrance and listened to the hallway outside.
It was silent. Next, I peered out the peephole.
Not a single soul passed by. If I was going to go, I had to go now.
Slowly, I eased the door open. It felt like every single clunk of the electronic lock opening was a shotgun blast.
The hallway was silent. Blackwood and the room service guy had probably entered Lucy’s suite. I had to go.
I started down the hall, jogging close to the wall. When I got to the bank of elevators, I second-guessed my decision to take one. I went for the stairs instead. I padded silently down the stairs, ears straining for any kind of noise that would alert me that I wasn’t alone.
I made it all the way to the bottom and out into the foyer safely. Maybe I could do this. I really could. I was more and more confident with every passing minute that I didn’t get caught.
Outside on the street, I raised the hood of the heavy winter coat. I should wait somewhere nearby to watch for Lucy coming back, I decided. She had security with her, and her IT guy seemed like she could help with a lot. I shouldn’t just disappear on them.
I headed to an alley to the right of the hotel. I didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t wait in any of the nearby cafés.
In the alley, steam poured out of a vent in the wall, immediately fogging the cold air. A generator hummed, and it was less cold than being in the direct freezing wind blowing overhead. I leaned on the wall and shivered, folding into a crouch.
Outside, the street was bustling, considering the cold day. The people of Torino getting on with their work, taking kids to school, walking their dogs. Everyone too busy to notice a girl huddled against the wall.
Then I saw him.
Blackwood.
He’d left the hotel and stood in front of it, trying to hail a taxi.
He had his phone clamped to his ear, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying from this far away. He waited impatiently for the taxi, checking this way and that, a pissed-off expression on his face.
Where are you, Lucifer? I thought. Aren’t you coming for me?
“Don’t worry,” said a man speaking on his phone, walking in my direction up the alley, about to pass me by. "I've found her.
It took a second for the words to register. The man didn’t pass me by. He stopped right in front of me. Massimo?
I stared at the black dress shoes on the sidewalk before me and then brought my gaze slowly upward. The man was wearing a heavy overcoat, and in the years since I’d last seen him, he’d only gotten meaner looking.
My eyes met his, and I knew I was screwed.
I hadn’t seen Ivan Markovic in three years, and yet I knew him immediately.
Just like I knew my freedom was over.
“I’ve found my wayward fiancée at last.” His voice was full of mocking.
I sprang upward, but Ivan had been expecting it.
I felt the all-too-familiar sting in my neck before I even saw his hand move.
No. I didn’t want to get lost in my head again. Please, no. No!
“Come with me, Kat. It’s time to finally finish what we started.” Ivan grabbed me as I swayed, lifting me effortlessly.
The last thing I saw was Blackwood standing by a waiting cab, the interior a yawning black pit.
It swallowed me whole.
When your mind is not your own, you become an unreliable narrator.
You learn to mistrust yourself. At worst, you feel betrayed by your own mind; at best, you become apathetic to the events around you.
You have no control. You have no focus. You have no organization of thought.
You are just a person reacting to things without context, existing in the heat of the moment without a past or a future.
You stop caring about any of them anyway. They stop being real.
I was in a taxi on my way somewhere. Men were talking loudly in the smoky interior of the cab. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear.
“Sergei is pissed, so the sooner we pull this off the better. Where’d you find the priest?” the man beside me asked. He had a lanyard around his neck that said he was a doctor.
Where was I going with a doctor?
The other man twisted from the front seat. He was familiar. He made me think of my mother somehow.
“Where are we going?” I managed to ask, though it felt like my tongue was too big for my mouth.
“Home, don’t you remember?” The man in the front laughed.
I stared down at my clothes.
“I don’t want to go,” I found myself muttering.
“I don’t give a fuck.” The guy in the front was still watching me. “Don’t you get it yet, Kat? Nothing you want has ever mattered.”
Satisfied with those cutting words, he turned back around, tapping on the dashboard merrily.
“Step on it. It’s fucking freezing out here,” he said to the taxi driver.
The doctor was sitting beside me in the back. I turned to study his face. It was almost familiar.
“I don’t know that man,” I told him quietly.
He shrugged. “You don’t know anybody.”
“That’s not true. I know . . .” My mind came up blank. “I know my mother.”
I latched on to the thought of her. Her smell, the way her hair felt tickling my nose as I hugged her.
The doctor ignored me.
I turned to the window, putting my hand to the door. I tried the handle as discreetly as I could.
“It’s locked. You think I’m falling for that twice?” The doctor sounded tired.
“Do we know each other?” I wondered.
He let out a short, frustrated breath. “Fucking hell,” he muttered. “What a mess we’ve all made of your head, Katarina. I’m starting to wonder how much will be left, when all is said and done.”
“Hopefully not a lot,” the guy in the front called back. “She’ll be a much more pleasant wife without all those irritating opinions of hers.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but what was the point? They were laughing at me. They were cruel . . . and I was stuck with them.
Alone.
You’re not alone. You have me. The voice inside my head was startling. I jumped. She sounded just like me. Great. I was hearing voices. I’d gone insane.
I stared out at the white city rushing past until the view blurred with tears.
We pulled up outside an apartment building a little while later. I had no clear concept of time. It was stretching and bunching like unruly fabric.
I was hauled out of the cab into the snowy night and then forced up cold stone stairs and into a small, shabby apartment.
Inside was stuffy, the product of too-hot radiators and no air.
It was old-fashioned, like it had last been decorated twenty years before, and the surfaces of tables and counters were cluttered with bottles and plates.
“Shit, Ivan, would it kill you to keep the place clean?” the doctor demanded, following us into the apartment.
“You clean it if it bothers you so much, Mr. Uptight, OCD, Can’t Take a Little Mess Lying Around. When I have a wife, I’ll have all the cleaners I want, and I won’t have to live in this shithole anymore.” The man, Ivan, pushed me down a short hall and into a dark room.
A small double bed stood in the middle of it covered with a hand-crocheted quilt, and a host of religious icons decorated the walls.
“You can go ahead and get ready for bed. I’ll be there soon.” He gave me a smirk that turned my blood cold and then left me alone.
A scraping sound came from the door. A lock turning on the other side.
I sank onto the bed, feeling sick.
Outside in the hall, they argued.
“What the fuck are you talking about? You can’t sleep with her before you’re married and you get approval, or you’re a dead man!”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“It wasn’t what we agreed on, Ivan.”
Ivan let out a frustrated sigh. “You are such a fucking stick-in-the-mud, and you always have been.”
The sound of their voices moved away down the hall, and I glanced around the room. There was a window, but when I went to check it out, I saw a slender latticework in the shape of bars across it. There was no way out except the door. The locked door.
I sank down to the floor and took in the idols on the wall.
I recognized most of them. The Madonna, and Saint Nicholas of Myra.
Sitting directly over where I sat slumped was the most recognizable.
An angel with gleaming wings and a golden sword.
Archangel Michael. Defender against evil.
I groped for the cross I always wore at my neck.
A habit that apparently predated my confusion.
My hands met cool metal disks. There was something else on my necklace, but I couldn’t quite see what in the darkness.
The only light fell through the window and onto the wall, illuminating the icons.
I gripped the awkwardly shaped jumble on the chain and stared at the picture of Michael.
Please, please. Someone, somewhere . . . help me.