Chapter Thirty Seven
Catalina
I’m going out,” Alexei says. “Dress warm today, koshechka.”
It’s an order, not a question. I don’t respond. There is not much difference between one day and another, and the temperature can be adjusted with a dial. I don’t feel much like getting out of bed, anyway.
The bed depresses next to me. Alexei’s broad shoulders block the light streaming through the window. I don’t flinch when he touches me. It never hurts, physically. But it still hurts.
I wonder if this is what the rest of my life will be like. However long it is.
“Anatoli will come for you in an hour.” His hand finds my waist through the blankets. “Dress warm,” he reiterates. “It is cold out today.”
Outside. Something in the vicinity of my heart lifts for a moment, only to crash once more. I haven’t been out of the house in more than a month. Not since I was taken. It’s impossible to say if it’s for my safety, or to keep me confined. A captive held in a gilded cage.
It’s a bribe. A consolation prize. A quick jaunt to the shops and then back once more into my prison.
Anatoli serves as my jailer by proxy. The weight of Alexei’s hand on my waist is just as heavy as the manacle that was once fastened around my ankle.
I can still feel it, sometimes. The scabs have gone, but the scar remains.
It itches sometimes; that peculiar itch of newly-healed flesh.
I’ve scraped it raw more times than I can count.
Alexei fusses at me when I do, but still bandages me back up.
They don’t make the sort of bandages I truly need.
I close my eyes when he bends, and there’s the cool press of lips to my forehead.
“Ya tebya lyublyu, koshechka,” he says. “Remember.” The pressure at the edge of the bed lessens. I hear the faint sounds of footsteps heading toward the door. “You won’t see me for dinner,” he says tersely, and then the door opens. Closes. And there is silence once again.
I don’t open my eyes until I’m sure he’s gone.
I suppose it must be an hour later when there’s a knock at the door, and Anatoli comes striding in, tapping out a message on his phone.
“Get dressed,” he says laconically. I guess he’s still upset about me propositioning him.
I don’t know what he said to me in response, because he said it in Russian, but it was most definitely a strong and swift refusal.
“I don’t want to go out,” I say. It’s not true; not really. I just don’t want to be expected to be grateful for it. I don’t want to be forced to be thankful for the minute loosening of my chains.
“Not negotiable.” His footsteps thud across the carpet, and there’s the sharp slide of drawers along their tracks in the dresser. Fabric piles up around me as he casts items of clothing in my direction. “You have five minutes, or you go as you are.”
He slams out of the room, clearly annoyed to have been assigned to be my keeper. It’s probably not fair to put him in an even more difficult position. Reluctantly, I slip out of bed and dress. Warmly. Since I’m going out.
∞∞∞
Anatoli barely acknowledges me in the car.
It’s a massive black limousine; the kind with bulletproof windows and miles of seats.
He might as well be in Europe for the distance between us.
He’s not a talker, and I don’t try to engage him in conversation.
He’s got a large, overstuffed manila envelope tucked beneath his arm, but his attention is on the phone in his hand.
So I curl up against the window and watch the outside world pass by.
My first sense something is off comes about twenty minutes into the drive. We’ve turned off the highway we should be taking to the mall and we keep driving. At last we come to a tiny airfield, and the limousine pulls up right alongside a private jet.
For a while, I nurtured the hope of escape—even in a city largely controlled by Alexei.
At least in Chicago, there was hope of finding safety in a city I know well, with a largely English-speaking populace.
If I’m being moved somewhere, somewhere international, my chances dwindle into near-nothingness.
For human cargo, at least I’m being moved in style. Like a cherished possession instead of an afterthought. I don’t want to be a possession at all, but that choice was never in my hands.
Anatoli gets out to speak to the pilot, and for a long moment I don’t even move. I’m not stupid enough to believe that the doors have been left unlocked. I only sit, strangling on the last, fading bits of hope in my body.
Long minutes later, the door nearest to me opens. Anatoli makes a gesture I know I’m meant to interpret as, Get out, and don’t waste my time.
Panic claws at my throat. “I don’t have my ID,” I say. “I don’t even have a passport. I can’t get on a plane!”
I didn’t really expect this to have any effect, and it doesn’t. Anatoli grunts, “You don’t need this. Get on the plane.”
Like Alexei, he doesn’t take kindly to disobedience. There’s a severity on his face, a determination, and I know—I am getting on that plane. One way or another. The only choice is whether I walk on my own two feet, or whether I’m forcibly shoved onto it.
I climb out of the limousine, collecting the shreds of my dignity around me.
“If you’re taking me to some other country, they’ll deport me without my passport,” I tell him as I walk slowly up the stairs.
“Alexei will be angry. Without identification—” My heel catches on the step leading into the cabin.
“Without identification, they might arrest me.”
“Your identification doesn’t matter,” Anatoli grunts. He tosses the manila envelope inside the cabin over my shoulder, and it sails through the air, landing upon a table between two seats where it slides to the very edge and teeters. “Catalina Russo is dead.”
What? My knees tremble, and before I can form a question, the door of the plane slams behind me. I watch through the window as Anatoli descends the stairs without me and climbs back into the waiting car.
The whirr of the engine drowns out my racing thoughts. Catalina is dead isn’t literal, of course. I know I’m not dead; I’m not delusional. But the implication is legally, not literally.
It means no one will be looking for me. It means a body with my name buried in a plot in the ground.
It means that effectively, I no longer exist. It means that I am a nameless, stateless entity—and any claims I might make to the contrary will be immediately regarded as suspicious, suspect. Possibly even criminal.
I topple into a seat as the plane begins to taxi down the runway, picking up speed. I feel like I’ve died in this moment. Like I’m on my way to my own funeral. Like the plane that has lifted its nose into the air is pulling me away from the earth and onto my next life—whatever that happens to be.
The clouds zip by outside the window. There’s a chilled bottle of champagne collecting condensation in an ice bucket just beside my seat.
I don’t know how long I sit, staring through the window.
But eventually I come back into myself. The brain protects itself the best way it knows how.
And that way is to press on, through the worst of it all.
The manila envelope slides a bit more as the plane turns, tilting in the sky. On reflex I catch it, surprised by the weight of it. It’s bulky, and I turn it over in my hands.
Koshechka is scrawled across the front, in Alexei’s masculine handwriting.
My fingers peel up the edge of the flap, and I pour the contents upon the table. Stacks of papers emerge, amongst other things. A phone. A set of keys. A wallet. A folded slip of paper drifts into my lap, and I open it.
This is my last promise to you.
You will never see me again.
-A
I don’t know why the words make me want to cry. But my heart squeezes in a strange, fierce ache. My hands sift through the papers, the items tossed haphazardly on the table before me. The wallet is stuffed with cash. There’s half a dozen credit cards and debit cards.
The picture on the driver license is mine, pulled from my old ID.
But the name is Catherine Miller. The passport, the same.
The debit cards, credit cards, even a library card—all in the same name.
There’s high school transcripts, university transcripts.
Catherine Miller has a Masters in Early Childhood Education, just like me.
She lives in La Jolla, California. She’s got a bank account with a ludicrous number of zeros trailing the first digit.
She’s got medical insurance, dental insurance, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance.
A birth certificate and a social security card.
Death certificates for family members—Catherine is an orphan, as well.
There’s a copy of Catherine’s fictional father’s will, leaving the bulk of his fortune to his only child.
She had her appendix removed at thirteen, just like I did.
There’s tax returns for the last several years and dozens of family photos—photoshopped, but so cleanly no one would ever know. A school ID from her alma mater, which I know must be new…but the picture looks old, and the lamination is peeling, like it’s seen a lot of use.
It’s a background so clean, so thorough, that there aren’t even stitches to suggest it was manufactured. No one would ever be able to tell that Catherine Miller didn’t exist until recently. Probably not even the government.
And now I understand why Catalina is dead. I had to die. I had to die, so that Catherine can live. No one will ever search for a dead woman. And no one will ever tear apart the pieces of my new identity.
I’m free. I’m safe. Forever.
I curl into my seat, choking on sobs.
But I’m no longer certain what I’m crying for.
∞∞∞
There’s a driver waiting for me when I land, holding a sign that reads Catherine Miller, and I can tell just by looking at him that he’s not mafia.
My new life starts now, and there are no connections to the old one.
He’s only a hired driver, paid to pick me up from the airport.
I’ve never been to San Diego, but I can tell I’m going to like it already.
It’s the end of summer, but it’s a gorgeous seventy-five degrees and the sky is clear.
There’s the tang of salt in the air, and palm trees line the sidewalk.
I slide into the back seat of the waiting car, which glides smoothly into traffic.
It’s not a long drive. Maybe twenty or so minutes later, the car makes the turn into a gated neighborhood and stops at the security desk. It’s the first test of my new identification, and the guard peers at me through the window as he takes my ID and checks it against his system.
He hands it back. “Welcome home, Ms. Miller,” he says, and the gate opens.
Just like that. But it’s clear as we proceed up the winding road that there are lots of homes here.
Probably many of them are vacation homes, and we’re so close to the beach.
The guard doesn’t know everyone’s face—he knows what his system tells him. And the system tells him I live here.
The house I arrive at doesn’t look overly large.
There’s no risk of getting lost, not like there was in Alexei’s sprawling mansion.
It’s probably two thousand square feet. But the look of it is faintly tropical, with a Spanish flair in the exterior detail.
The driver waits until I reach the door to proceed back down the driveway, and I clutch the keys in my hand, pressing the most likely-looking one into the lock.
The door opens, and it becomes immediately clear—I’m not near the beach. I’m on the beach. The large sliding glass doors visible straight through the open floor plan of the house reveal waves sliding against the shore. A little private oasis.
It’s like this house was made for me.
No—it was chosen for me. Alexei was always listening to me.
Everything I told him about where I would go, what I would do—he took all of that and crafted the perfect life.
I have enough money that I never have to work, but gave me my own education back so I can still teach.
I have a house on the beach. Near my feet are two tiny ceramic bowls with a paw print motif, ostensibly meant for the cat I told him I wanted.
My heart aches a little more. I want to ask him why. And I think of his last words this morning, the terse, “You won’t see me for dinner.”
They were a goodbye. They were goodbye and I didn’t even know it.
Strangely, in this house that belongs to me, with a fortune in my bank account, and encapsulated within the safety of a gated community, I feel more adrift, more helpless, more lost and alone than I ever have before.
My hand slips inside the manila envelope and fishes around for the new phone, begins the process of scrolling through contacts. Hoping.
There’s a handful of numbers programmed in already. A veterinarian. A housekeeper. A financial adviser. A primary care physician. A fucking therapist.
No Alexei.
The first sob catches me completely by surprise. I sink into a plush armchair, drop my head into my arms, and cry. My house is still and silent. This time, there’s no one to hold me.