Chapter Thirty Three #2
It is too far away. There is not enough slack in the chain.
Her hand hovers for a moment, fruitlessly stretching toward it.
I see the moment she realizes it was deliberately placed too far from her grasp.
Her shoulders slump. Her head drops. Her fingers curl back into her palm.
She makes a wretched little sound—a sigh of defeat.
She goes utterly limp there on the concrete floor. My stomach roils with the liters of black coffee I’ve consumed in the effort to sober myself.
“I didn’t order this,” I say, and I hear the defensive slant in my words.
I wanted her punished—I didn’t order her tortured.
I didn’t order her chained. I didn’t order her terrorized or starved.
And she would have to be starved, to be so desperately reaching for a tray she knew had been defiled.
To stretch herself past the point of pain in search of it.
“There’s two more days of this,” Anatoli says, and he is careful to keep any inflection from his voice.
I cannot drag my eyes from the screen, from the desolated image Katya presents, hiding her face against the cold slab of concrete beneath her. “How many times did he spit in her food?” I ask.
“All of them.”
“How many times did he place her tray out of her reach?” My hand swipes over my mouth, a sour taste rising in my throat.
“All of them.” Anatoli makes a rough sound in his throat. “She didn’t betray you. She didn’t run. She was taken.”
“What?” I’m only half-listening; Anatoli edited this video for my enlightenment.
It runs at high speed, now, rotating through hours of darkness and misery, broken only by brief snippets of the same—Piotr delivering food, spitting, shoving it to the farthest corner of the room, well beyond Katya’s reach.
“They took her from the bookstore,” Anatoli says. “They were careful. No store cameras. But he missed the bookstore owner’s dash cam. He parks his expensive car behind the store; wants to make certain no one damages it. It caught everything. He did not know to look until I asked.”
“You have this video?”
“Of course I fucking have it. You want to see this?” Anatoli asks, and his voice is reproving. “You want to hear her scream for you, for your help? To see her struggle and fight? To see her father’s man hit her with his gun, drag her inside the car?”
No. I don’t want to see this. What I am seeing is bad enough already.
“They had to knock her unconscious to take her,” Anatoli says ruthlessly. “They knew where to find her, when to find her, because Piotr told them.”
“He’s working with them.”
“He’s working against us,” Anatoli says.
“I hacked his phone, his computer. He blames Catalina for the time he spent in the pit; blames you for punishing him only for looking at her. The Russos promised him power when they kill you. They intend to use Catalina’s death to start a war, since they will never have vengeance for Nicola. ”
I have been manipulated into giving them the excuse for one, an excuse to call down the larger more powerful branches of the Russo family upon me. I surrendered my leverage against them in exchange for Catalina’s return.
I had assumed they had had her for at most a few hours. Instead, they had her for nearly a week.
Long enough for her to be so desperate for food, she would eat whatever was put before her, whether or not it had been tainted. Long enough for me to doubt whatever she might have claimed, had I given her the opportunity to plead her case. Long enough to believe them instead.
My eyes drift back to the screen. The video slows; the time stamp in the lower corner whirls down to a steady pace.
It is from only this morning. Catalina is on her back, staring up at the ceiling.
Her right side is pressed against the wall.
The film flickers, the video switching out of night vision.
She does not even blink at the sudden intrusion of light.
There is sound of Piotr sucking up phlegm from his throat once again. “Breakfast,” he says, as he shoves the tray once more into the corner. Katya does not react. Not to the clatter of the tray, and not to the stomp of Piotr’s boots as he stomps across the floor.
“You hear me? I said, breakfast.”
She remains motionless.
“Feh.” Piotr lashes one steel-toed boot out and catches her in the ribs. My fingernails carve crescents into my palm. “Stupid cunt,” Piotr says, and he spits again—right into her face.
Katya is silent, unflinching. She is already broken. Gone somewhere else. Past the point of stretching out her fingers in search of that tray. Past the point of feeling pain.
Just…gone.
She never betrayed me. I betrayed her.
My chair scrapes backward. “Find Piotr,” I rasp. “Put him in the pit. Make certain he feels every bit of what he did to her.” I am already striding for the door, but I pause to make one thing perfectly clear. “And, Anatoli—do not kill him.”
That pleasure belongs to me.
∞∞∞
My hands shake as I punch in the code for the door. The yawning emptiness swallows up the light creeping through before it can hit so much as the fourth step down. I swat for the light switch on the wall, and the eerie hum of fluorescent bulbs igniting fills my ears.
Katya hates the dark. She has been living in it for the last three days.
I careen down the stairs, snatching the tiny silver key to the chain as I do, and stumbling into the cold concrete room.
She is there, in exactly the same position as she was on the video feed—flat on her back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.
The pit was not made for comfort, but, then, I did not order the least concession for her.
Not a pallet to sleep on, or a blanket to shield her from the chill.
She is wearing the same clothes I last saw her in.
The tiny shorts; the wispy, thin top. Even in the dull light, I can see the ring of bruises around her throat, the dark, crusted blood oozing around her ankle beneath the manacle that keeps her chained to the wall.
There is a dark, sickly-looking bruise shading her cheek just beneath her right eye, countless small cuts upon her arms. All details that the grainy security video obscured.
“Katya.” It feels like her name is dragged out of my lungs. I cannot be certain how I even got across the floor, but I am there beside her in half a moment, reaching out to touch her arm. Her skin is so fucking cold, rough and dry with days of accumulated grime. “Koshechka, look at me.”
She does not react. My heart stutters in my chest; my fingers creep down her arm to her wrist, searching for a pulse. There—slow, but steady.
But she is not. And she is so cold. Her belly is concave; like it sticks to her ribs. Her breaths are slow and shallow.
I feel like am watching her fade. Like she is becoming a ghost before my eyes. Like every moment that passes pulls her farther away from me.
My fingers jam the key into the manacle locked around her ankle, tearing the metal away from her skin. But she has been so still for so long that the cuff sticks to her ravaged skin, and tears away a scab as it comes free. Blood pours freely from the wound, and I grit out a curse.
Not even a flinch. Her face is utterly passive. Almost serene in its chilling blankness.
I gather her into my arms, and I flinch as her gritty skin comes into contact with mine. She is filthy, and I see the sour yellow of infection in a laceration upon the upper swell of her breast. She is limp in my arms, like a child’s doll. Lifeless.
She needs to be clean and warm again. She needs food, and rest, and comfort. I am already carrying her back toward the stairs, murmuring to her in Russian. Things she will not understand. Things I hardly understand.
As much as I want to run, I cannot risk injuring her further. I bark out orders to the staff I encounter—fill the bath. Bring a first aid kit. Call a doctor. Make her a decent fucking meal for once.
The smell of roses permeates my room by the time I make it back, Koshechka held carefully—so carefully—in my arms. Someone has filled the bath, scented it with her favorite bath oil.
A pile of warm towels is stacked by the side of the massive tub, her dragon’s hoard of toiletries pushed neatly aside to allow this.
Whorls of steam rise from the tub, curling into the air.
Possibly it is too hot. But too hot is better infinitely than too fucking cold.
A first aid kit sits next to the towels. Before I can treat her wounds—and determine which, if any, should be stitched by a doctor—I have to get her clean.
Katya is not conscious enough even to keep herself upright. She topples over the moment I set her upon countertop, only avoiding a nasty blow to the head because I lunge for her before she can fall. Whatever survival instincts she once had, they desert her now.
Fuck. Into the tub it is, then. I snatch her back into my arms and climb into the tub fully clothed.
The water is almost searing, and still she does not react.
She cannot even feel it. She does not flinch as I pick the hairband from her grimy hair, or pull her sodden shirt over her head, or her tiny shorts off of her legs.
She does not blink when I strip her of her bra or panties.
I think she does not even know that I am here. That she is here. She lolls, limp and unresponsive. I think, if I were to leave her unattended, she would simply slip beneath the water and drown, none the wiser to the danger.
The water greys around us as the filth coating her skin sloughs off.
I bite off a curse, kick out the stopper so the water can drain, and begin the process of filling the tub all over again.
Her skin is a symphony of bruises and abrasions in various stages of healing.
Some not healing at all—some inflamed and oozing, some scabbed over.
Some, I know from experience, will scar her beautiful skin.
The water must sting in those wounds. She must be suffering.