Chapter 41
CASSANDRA
Cold air on my face. The scent of metal. The dark hum of an old building.
I wake to the taste of tape, dust, and old oil, tongue dry, throat raw, wrists burning where the adhesive bites. One bulb swings above me on a long cord, like a small sun. It buzzes and flickers. Each time it dims, my world shrinks to a pin and then swells again.
I’m in a bent-steel chair with an uneven leg that stutters under me. My ankles are taped to the front ones. My hands are behind me, palms sweating, skin tender from fighting the binding.
There’s grit under my shoes and broken glass near the wall. Somewhere water drips in a slow, patient beat. Somewhere else a rat, I assume, scuttles and knocks a piece of scrap metal, causing it to ping against the floor.
The smell is rust, mold, food, cigarettes. It sits on my tongue, my hair. I breathe slowly through my nose. I count. I test each finger. Blood still flows. That’s something.
The ribbon is gone. I feel its absence. Silly as it sounds, it’s become a comfort for me, a safety net.
Footsteps. Far off at first, then closer.
Sharp, clean, wrong for this place. Heels tapping on concrete, steady as a metronome.
A woman’s perfume pushes through the smell before she enters the room.
The bulb swings, throwing an oval across the floor, and Raquel Chesterfield walks into it like a queen.
Fur collar. Perfect hair. Glossed mouth.
A small designer bag on her wrist. Another bag in her hand.
Cheap plastic, the kind with a smiling shrimp printed on the side, heavy with takeout boxes that press against the thin film and show their white corners.
The hem of her coat brushes the edge of a puddle.
She pauses, looks down, and lifts the coat with two fingers, as if the puddle might leap up and ruin her. Her face folds in distaste.
“Pigsty,” she says to the air more than to me. Her heels click closer, like a clock speeding up. “Adequate enough for you, though.”
She drops the plastic bag on a warped metal table. She opens one box, sniffs, makes a face, then closes it with a slap of the lid. Another box, another sigh. Grease pools on the torn cardboard lid she uses as a plate.
I keep my eyes on her hands, not her mouth. People give more away with their hands.
“You don’t look good,” she says, her voice coated in venom. “You should eat. You’ll need your strength for what’s coming. Oh—” Her gaze settles on the tape at my wrists, then on my mouth. “Right. Well, I’m sure someone will be along to help with that.”
She picks up a dumpling with two fingers, lets it drip, then sets it on the lid with a little tapping gesture. She glances around at the peeling paint, the rusted rails, the shattered windows smeared black with soot. She shudders. Her perfume fights the room and loses.
“Funny, isn’t it,” she begins, “how quickly the world decides what you’re worth.”
The gag is just a gray strip of cloth. It burns the soft corners of my lips. I breathe through it. I don’t try to talk because I know that’s what she wants.
She takes a step closer and peers at me. “You want to know why I’m here. You want to know what happens next.”
I slow my blinking until she has to work for it.
“I’ll tell you anyway,” she says with a small, cruel smile. “Ivan and I planned this together. We’ve been collaborating.”
Her hand circles in the air. A flourish. The diamond at her wrist glints once like a small white eye.
She leans in as if sharing gossip. “I’ll be blunt, Cassie. I don’t like you. You are in our way.”
The bulb swings. Her face moves from light to shadow and back again. She leans so close I can feel the warmth of her breath. She smells like citrus and winter, and a little like fear.
“But here’s the thing,” she whispers. “I have a plan of my own. I’m going to kill him. Isn’t that delicious?”
The words hang in the air.
“Ivan thinks he’ll get the crown at the end.
He won’t. I will shoot him, and then I will carry my own bruises to Damien.
Can you see it? The story? He abducted us.
He kept us in this filthy place. He killed you, Cassandra.
He was going to kill me too, but I—” She puts a hand to her chest, eyes shining, mock-innocent. “I managed to kill him first.”
She’s nearly breathless with her theatrics. Her voice drops lower. “And then I take care of Damien. I console him. I rebuild him. I give him something to hold when he thinks he has nothing left. He will be grateful.” Her smile sharpens. “Grateful men are very loyal.”
There’s a buzzing in my ears. I taste copper under the gag.
She wants me to crack, to cry, to plead with my eyes.
She wants to drink it all in. I refuse her.
I hold myself still. I hold myself tight.
I picture the ribbon. The careful knot. The way his fingers move when he ties it, thumb steady, index finger pressing the last loop down. I carry that and breathe it like air.
Raquel tilts her head. “Ah. There. See? You do understand.”
Her heel clicks as she shifts her weight. She lifts the dumpling, lets it wobble in the air, then drops it back to the greasy lid, wiping her fingers on a napkin like she’s erasing a signature.
“Eat,” she says, bored now.
It feels like a joke, her asking me to eat with my mouth bound.
I blink once. Slowly. My hands burn from trying the tape again. The chair’s uneven leg trembles when I shift my weight. I count ten heartbeats, then ten more. The drip in the corner keeps time.
She turns, half listening to something only she can hear. But then I hear it too: more footsteps, quiet and flat, not a heel. There’s a shift in the air pressure, the way the room breathes. She doesn’t notice it yet. She is still into her role-playing.
“Anyway,” she says to the table, adjusting the lid, the cartons, anything, everything, because control is how she breathes. “We’re almost done here. I’ll light a match and—”
A gunshot cracks the world in two.
Raquel’s head snaps to the side, hair lifting, mouth still shaping a word she doesn’t get to finish. A red hole blossoms neat and wicked in her temple. She drops straight down, knees first, then shoulders, then face, the sound heavy and ugly. One heel falls off her foot.
I flinch hard, the chair bindings biting at my ankles.
Ivan steps out from the dark like he was there all along.
He’s calm; there’s no rush in him. He’s still holding the gun up. His eyes are like winter. Not the beautiful winter of Damien’s eyes. Ivan’s are cruel winter, bleak and empty.
He looks at Raquel dismissively.
“I knew,” he says, gentle-like, as if explaining something to a child. “Of course I knew. She and I planned this. She believed she could keep her little secret from me. She believed many things.”
He crouches down near her. He doesn’t touch her face. He lifts the scarf at her throat, wipes his pistol, then drops the scarf on the floor with a flick of his fingers. His coat whispers when he stands.
He meets my eyes and smiles, a terrible, ugly sight.
“Pawns are useful,” he says. “They move in straight lines. They tell you everything about the board.”
He starts to circle me, each step slow, balanced, as if he’s walking the rim of a glass. I track him with my eyes. My pulse thunders in my throat, my heart beats against my ribs. The tape on my wrists feels tighter by the second.
“You were almost a queen,” he says, half to himself. He glances at the plastic bag, the cartons, the dumpling cooling on its grease-slicked lid. He looks back at me. “Almost.”
His shoes crunch on the grit. He stops behind me. The back of my neck tingles with the knowledge that he could easily put the gun to my skull, and that would be the end of me and my baby. The bulb hums overhead.
“When Damien gets here,” Ivan says, voice flat, “you all die.”
The words drop like lead, denting the floor.
He moves to my left so I can see him again. “He will watch you die first,” he declares confidently, like a fact, not a threat. “Then his men. Then himself. I will give him the kindness of a quick death.”
I start to breathe too fast. I force myself to calm down. I try the tape again. It burns, tearing skin, but doesn’t give. My throat works against the gag, and the cloth scrapes my mouth. I taste metallic panic. I swallow it back.
Ivan takes a step closer, his eyes softening like he’s recalling a fond memory. “He thinks he can simply go clean, overturn the order and ways of this city.” He tilts his head. “He should have learned by now. Men like him do not lead.”
He puts a fingertip to the chair back and taps it once. The uneven leg shivers. “You shouldn’t have let him tie you with pretty things,” he says. “Pretty things make pretty corpses.”
I want to scream at him. I want to bite him when he gets close. I want to break my own skin to make the tape slick and pliable. I want Damien to walk through the door. None of that happens.
I sit very still and count again.
I think of knots. I think of the way you can train your hands to undo them in times of impossibility. I press my thumbs together and try to slide one nail under the tape edge. It doesn’t work. I keep trying anyway.
Ivan studies my face. There is boredom there, with joy underneath.
“You should eat,” he says, nodding at the dumpling. “You will need your strength.”
With that, he reaches forward and yanks the tape from my mouth. The pain is instant, intense. I spit out the gag, but I don’t scream.
I close my eyes for two beats, then open them slowly. The bulb swings and throws his shadow long and thin across the room. He watches it move the way a cat watches a laser pointer on a wall.
“Screw you,” I snarl. “You’re dead. Damien’s going to come and—”
“Soon,” he says, cutting me off gently. His calmness is creepy.
There’s a sound out in the hall. Not a footstep but more like a whisper of air that wasn’t there before. Ivan turns his head a fraction. The gun shifts in his hand.
My heart kicks hard. My mouth is dry. My wrists burn. The drip in the corner speeds up.
“Soon,” he says again, as he makes his way out of the room.
I keep my eyes on the doorway. I don’t blink. I don’t even breathe for a count of five, six, then—
The light flickers. The hall darkens. The air tightens. And the factory, old and full of ghosts, holds its breath patiently with me.