Chapter 16 #3
His hand closed on my arm. Not my injured arm—the other one. His grip was immediate and total, his fingers wrapping my bicep with a pressure that left no ambiguity about who was holding whom. I twisted. I pulled. My feet slid on the carpet.
I hit him.
My free hand—my right hand, the bleeding one—came up and I hit him across the mouth.
Not a slap. A punch. I had never punched anyone.
My fist connected with his lower lip and the impact jarred my wrist and my knuckles and the cut on my palm opened further and the pain was white and immediate and I did not care because his head snapped sideways and blood appeared on his mouth.
For one second, his expression changed.
The warmth was gone. The dinner-party civility was gone.
The face beneath the performance was something I had never seen directed at me—a flat, blank ferocity that lived behind his eyes like a door that had briefly opened.
His pale eyes widened. His mouth tightened.
The blood on his lip was bright against his teeth.
Then the door closed.
He grabbed my other arm. Both arms now, his hands around my wrists, and he pulled them down and held them at my sides with a grip I could not break.
I was strong. I was not this strong. He was six-three and broad and he carried the weight of a man who had spent his life using his body as a weapon, and I was five-five and bleeding and bare-armed in a tile showroom.
He drew me against him. My chest against his. My face against his jacket. The smell of his cologne—heavy, sharp, applied with gusto—and beneath it the faint iron smell of the blood I had drawn from his lip.
“Let me go.” My voice came out hoarse. “Let me go or I will—”
He reached into his jacket. He drew a pistol. Compact, dark, the kind of weapon that disappeared into a palm. He did not point it at me.
He pointed it at the woman.
The woman from the counter stood four feet away. She had not moved. The telephone was still in her hand—the cord stretching from the receiver to the base, the line still open, the police dispatcher still listening. Her face was white. Her hands were shaking. The receiver trembled against her ear.
“Your friend called the police,” Oleg said.
His voice was calm. The warmth had returned—the conversational register, the pleasant tone, the manner of a man explaining something simple.
Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. He did not wipe it.
“That’s very civic-minded. Unfortunately, the police are going to take several minutes to arrive.
Several minutes is a terribly long time. ”
He adjusted the pistol. The muzzle pointed at the woman’s chest.
“Mrs. Sokolov is going to walk out of this showroom with me. Quietly. No screaming. No running. She is going to get into the vehicle outside and she is going to be perfectly fine. The woman behind the counter is going to stay where she is and she is also going to be perfectly fine. She is going to finish her phone call and she is going to tell the police that a customer left in a hurry and everything was a misunderstanding.” He smiled.
The blood made the smile red. “Or the woman behind the counter is going to die in a tile showroom at noon on a Thursday, and Mrs. Sokolov is going to watch it happen, and then she is going to get into the vehicle anyway.”
The woman was shaking. Her eyes were wet. The telephone receiver shook against her ear and I could hear the tinny voice of the dispatcher asking questions she could not answer.
I stopped struggling.
The fight went out of my arms. They simply stopped, the muscles releasing, the tension draining, because the woman behind the counter was a stranger who had called the police for me and I could not let her die for it.
Oleg felt the change. His grip loosened a fraction. Enough.
“Good,” he said. He lowered the pistol. He tucked it back into his jacket. His other hand moved to my back—the same position Boris had used, the same pressure, the same gesture, and the perversion of it made my skin crawl.
He walked me to the door.
“Where are my guards?” I said.
He did not answer. He opened the glass door. The cold air hit my bare arms. The vehicle idled at the curb—a black SUV, windows tinted, the engine running. Two men stood beside it. One opened the rear door.
“Where are Ilya and Boris?”
Oleg wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at the red smear on his knuckles and then at me.
“The deadline hasn’t passed,” I said. My voice shook. I could not stop it shaking. “Viktor gave him forty-eight hours. There’s still time.”
Oleg’s mouth curved. The split lip made it lopsided.
“Precisely. We are just going to ensure your husband makes the right decision.”
His hand closed on my arm. He guided me into the vehicle. The rear door closed behind me. The two men got in. The vehicle pulled away from the curb.
Through the rear window, I could see the tile showroom. The glass front. The woman inside, standing behind the counter, still holding the telephone.
Then the road turned and the building was gone.