Chapter 19 #2
“He’s never going to believe that,” I say, trying to make my tone less argumentative and more despondent.
He’s already taught me what fighting with him will earn me, and I don’t want another permanent mark from him on my body, the scars on my hip already too many.
If I seem desperate, he’ll feel in control, and that’s where I need him right now.
“He will. Because you’re going to convince him,” Ilya responds, brokering no argument.
He pulls a switchblade from his back pocket, the movement so similar to Emily’s that I feel a pit open up in my stomach.
But this time, I am afraid. He is out of his mind, and every word I speak pulls tighter on the tripwire of his desperation.
“You will be bruised and bloodied, have a few new scars, of course.” Ilya flips the handle so the tip of the knife is pointing directly at my heart.
“But you will sob at his feet and tell him how grateful you are, how horrid your captors were, how you need a hastened wedding to thank your ever-dedicated fiancé for refusing to give up on you. For going to the ends of the Earth to bring you home. For killing his enemies in the faint hope that you were still out there.”
Ilya walks backward, his frame disappearing into the shadowed warehouse.
Eventually, I can’t see him, but I can hear his footsteps stop.
A shifting of something heavy, and then the sound of something being dragged across the concrete.
For the first time since I woke up in this room, I feel the pure, undiluted terror Ilya was hoping to inspire in me.
“And of course, her head will be evidence enough.”
I know what I’ll see before the light shines on her.
Ilya drags Emily by the scruff of her shirt, her limp body barely twitching as he tosses her on the floor in front of me.
Horror slices through me, my blood feeling like it's made of ice shards as it pumps faster and faster through my veins. I’m so consumed with the sight of her, alive and groaning and obviously hurt, that I don’t see where Ilya goes.
But he comes back with a bucket in his hand, and a moment later he tosses the contents on her frame.
Emily gasps and chokes as what must be freezing water hits her skin. Her hands are bound behind her back, and her ankles together, but she rolls over to a sitting position as Ilya pulls a handgun from the small of his back and points it directly at her.
“Ilya, no, you don’t understand,” I say, my heart sinking with guilt over assuming she was in league with him. I didn’t even consider that she could be his victim too. That she could be scared and alone, confused and tied up and at the whims of his icy rage.
All those weeks I spent worrying that she would be collateral damage, just for her to end up exactly where I feared she would be.
“Oh, I understand very clearly,” he replies, with more emotion than I’ve ever seen from him. I don’t have time to unpack my confusion, to wonder why Emily angers him so.
“She’s a researcher. We were working together. She has nothing to do with this,” I beg, pleading for him to see the reason, even though I know he’s not capable of it. Ilya is calculated, but once he sets his mind on a path, he is not easily deterred. Certainly not by the pleas of his fiancée.
“A researcher?” he repeats, a laugh erupting from him that leaves me frozen solid in disbelief.
I’ve never heard him laugh. It sounds hollow and empty, like it’s as unfamiliar to him as it is to me.
“You know, for a moment I thought you had at least done something in your best interest. But you really are as stupid and useless as you look.”
The words don’t hurt the way they did last time, and I imagine the blows to come won’t either. What is unbearable, though, is the way he looks at Emily. Like he knows her.
And if she’s not working for him…
“Don’t speak to her like that,” Emily nearly growls, spitting at Ilya’s feet. He cocks his head to the side, examining her like a rare specimen.
“She really doesn’t know,” he says in disbelief that matches mine. My head swivels between the two of them, trying to make sense of the scene before me.
“She’s no one to me,” I lie, assuming that Ilya’s disdain for her stems from her touching what he considers his. “I didn’t tell her anything.”
“You know, I wish I could say I was impressed, but she threw herself at me like a common whore, so it doesn’t take much,” he says, ignoring me completely. Emily lunges, pulling against her restraints, pushing herself closer to the barrel Ilya extends toward her.
“Watch your mouth,” she warns, staring down the barrel like she doesn’t fear it at all. My Emily, who fears heights and depths, the unknown and the uncontrollable, is stalwart in the face of certain death.
“Or what, you’ll cut my tongue out, too?
” Ilya spits, releasing the safety of his gun with a definite click.
Emily doesn’t flinch. “I know your work well, Emily. Carlo may be the hand of that sanctimonious matriarch you serve, but you have a legacy all your own. The Snake of The Syndicate, they call you. Did you know that?”
I can’t process what’s happening in front of me. None of their words make sense. He can’t know her.
“Cut off my head and three will grow back.” She swears it like an oath, like a curse.
Who is she?
“We’ll learn if that’s true tonight,” Ilya promises, tapping the barrel against her forehead.
“I don’t…” I whisper, not really meaning to say the words aloud. Emily whips her head toward me, but Ilya keeps his eyes on her.
“Alice, I’m so sorry—”
The crack of Ilya’s gun against her cheek silences her.
I lunge forward, my chair nearly tipping over in my effort to get to her.
A scream—her name—rips from my throat, but she says nothing at all.
When she looks up again, she’s licking away the blood dripping from her lip and coating her teeth.
Her face doesn’t reflect an ounce of pain or terror.
“Who are you?” I finally ask aloud.
“A pest,” Ilya responds on her behalf, yanking Emily by her hair so she’s further from me again. “And a deadly one.”
“I wanted to explain,” she says, staring at me like she needs me to know the truth of her words. “Last night—”
“She’s a spy,” Ilya cuts in, pushing the barrel of the gun, now spotted with her blood, against her temple again.
Emily closes her eyes and breathes deeply through her nose.
“A daughter of The Syndicate of Fate, a family of morally superior, meddlesome fools who imagine themselves superheroes. They believe themselves to be the only righteous villains in our world, and use their overblown sense of influence to dictate how our world operates.”
“Influenced your brother right into an early grave,” Emily mutters, earning another crack across the face. This time she smiles through it, but I can see the flicker of pain in her eyes. He might have broken her cheek, with how deep the gash is there.
Is Lev…did Emily kill Lev? My synapses are firing too fast to make any real sense of the words coming out of their mouths, but I know one thing for certain. I’m the least dangerous person in this room by a mile.
“I imagine Emily hid quite a bit about herself,” Ilya taunts, somehow breaking my heart and making me feel unbearably naive at the same time.
“She likely didn’t mention that her fearless leader and aunt was nearly killed by your father a few years ago.
Or that her little band of vindictive vigilantes have been trying to find ways into Konstantin’s stronghold ever since. ”
Emily’s gaze is locked on mine, and I know he’s telling the truth, because they’re filled with an apology she can’t voice.
I feel another shard of whatever ice lives inside me now lodge into my lungs, making it even harder to breathe.
“She probably never mentioned that you two have met before.”
Everything inside me feels cavernous. I’m empty, like a shell abandoned by its host on the sand. Losing my mother filled me with indescribable grief, which existed like a living, breathing thing for so long. But this? It is hollowing me into nothing at all.
“That’s not possible,” I say, the words broken from my lack of oxygen. I can’t inhale. It hurts too much.
“You must remember Lucia Costa,” Ilya chides, like I’m a forgetful child.
Which is what I am to him. The name rings a distant bell, but I can’t place it.
“It was what, fifteen or so years ago, Emily? Konstantin invited her into your home to discuss a partnership. Short lived, those negotiations. But Lucia brought her niece with her.”
I search my memory for Emily’s face, but I come up empty. I would have been in my early teens, and I remember my mind was consumed with making my father proud. With earning his favor, and waking up to shiny new gifts as a token of his approval of my behavior.
I rarely looked around the rooms I was in. At the time, the only indulgence I provided myself was sneaking out to play—
“You brought it here?” I ask, certain she knows what I mean. Emily is silent for a few moments, but eventually she gives me the smallest nod.
She brought the viola to Nesika Beach. She sold it to the pawn shop so I could find it in the window. And she bought it back for me.
And I can’t decide if it’s the kindest or cruelest thing anyone has ever done to me.
“I imagine if you had given it a few more days, maybe a week or so, you would have found yourself in a very similar position to your current one, but with a different hand holding the gun,” Ilya says, shrugging.
I mean nothing to him, except the power I can bring him.
My heartbreak is inconsequential to him.
“How could you?” I plead, not fully understanding if I mean the words coming out of my mouth. She looks equally anguished, her face crumpling under the weight of my words.