Chapter 21 The Abduction
The van came from the left and everything I'd built in six weeks collapsed in the time it takes to scream into a hand that isn't yours.
I was three steps from the bakery door. Three steps from Nora's flour-dusted counter and the radio she sang to and the hug that would have lasted six seconds and smelled like butter and felt like the last normal thing left in my life.
Three steps. I could see her through the window, wiping the counter, her curly hair bouncing, and I was thinking about whether to tell her about Viktor, about the penthouse, about the McQueen dress, the training, the Council dinner where I'd renegotiated a clause that saved millions.
For three seconds I'd felt like a person who mattered.
Then the tires screamed. The doors slid open.
Two men who smelled like cigarettes grabbed my arms. My feet left the ground.
My mouth opened. A palm crushed my lips into my teeth until I tasted blood.
The bakery window got smaller. Smaller. Gone.
The bag was black. Rough. It caught my hair when they pulled it over my head, ripped a chunk from my scalp.
The pain was bright, specific, the kind that makes your eyes water before you've chosen to cry.
This is how it happens, I thought. This is how women disappear.
In the ugly ordinary violence of a Wednesday afternoon.
The smell of someone else's cigarettes in your nose.
Zip ties biting into your wrists. A van floor vibrating through your ribs like the whole vehicle is humming with the frequency of the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
I kicked. Hit a shin. Heard Russian I didn't understand.
Then a fist in my stomach and all the air left my body like someone had pulled a plug and the world deflated around me and I folded, knees to chest, choking on nothing because my lungs had forgotten how to work and my brain was screaming where is Pavel where is Pavel Pavel was supposed to be two blocks behind me Pavel was supposed to be watching.
Pavel was gone.
Someone had moved him. Like a chess piece.
Like a distraction. Someone inside. Someone who knew the schedule.
Wednesday. The bakery. Two blocks distance.
Someone who'd calculated exactly how many seconds it takes to grab a five-foot-six woman off a Brooklyn street and get a van moving before two hundred and seventy pounds of loyal muscle can close the gap.
The drive lasted. I don't know how long.
I tried to count. Viktor counts everything.
Seconds. Steps. Floors. I'd caught the disease from him.
The precision infection. But the counting kept slipping.
My hands going numb. My face pressed into ridged metal that stank of motor oil.
My stomach still trying to remember what breathing felt like.
So I stopped counting and started praying.
Gaeilge. The prayers my grandmother taught me.
The ones I said at my mother's funeral. The ones that sound like music and taste like salt and mean nothing to anyone in this van but mean everything to me because they're the last room in my head that no man has ever entered.
"Is breá le Dia mé. Is breá le Dia mé. Is breá le Dia mé."
The van stopped.
Hands. Gravel under my shoes. Then concrete. Then the sound changing. Opening up. The echo of a large empty space, the acoustic equivalent of being swallowed, the sound a building makes when it has more room than purpose.
A warehouse. I knew because abandoned warehouses have a smell. Rust and rat piss and the wet, defeated mustiness of a structure that gave up on itself years ago. They dropped me in a metal chair. Cold through the McQueen. The zip ties stayed. The bag came off.
Fluorescent light. The kind that makes everything look like evidence. The warehouse was enormous and empty except for the chair I was in and the chair four feet in front of me and the six men standing around the walls like pillars in a church that worshipped nothing.
He was already sitting.
White suit. Linen. Tom Ford. Legs crossed, ankle on knee, a glass of amber in his hand.
Whiskey. The expensive kind. The kind he always drank when he wanted to feel like the man he thought he was instead of the man he actually was, which was a smaller, meaner, more desperate version of his older brother wearing a better-fitting suit.
Dmitri Kotov. The ex. The man I'd changed my name and my city and my life to escape. Sitting four feet from me. Smiling.
The smile. God, the smile. The smile I knew in my sleep.
The smile I saw in the mirror some mornings when I was brushing my teeth and my brain decided to remind me what fear looked like wearing a handsome face.
The smile that came before the throat grab, before the photographs, before the you're already dead.
The smile that wasn't a smile at all but a countdown dressed in teeth.
My stomach dropped. Elevator cables cut.
The McQueen suddenly felt like a costume I'd been caught wearing, a child playing dress-up in her mother's clothes, and underneath the structured black I was the same woman who'd run from this man three years ago with a bruise on her neck and a suitcase packed in the dark.
The same fat girl. The same mon petit gros.
The same woman who'd spent two years learning that love was a word men use to explain why they hit you.
"Маева."
My name in his mouth. The insect crawling up my spine. The sound that lived in my nightmares and my body memory and the flinch that Viktor had spent weeks training out of me and that came roaring back now like it had never left, like the training was paint and Dmitri was turpentine.
"Ты выглядишь... по-другому." You look... different. His eyes traveling the dress. My body inside it. The curves the McQueen weaponized that he'd once called something else. Something smaller. Something that made me smaller.
"Je n'ai rien à te dire." I have nothing to say to you. French.
"Toujours le fran?ais." Always the French.
He sipped. "Tu sais, quand on était ensemble, ?a m'aga?ait.
Ce petit numéro de snob intellectuelle. Le Camus.
Le Baudelaire. Les mots fran?ais que tu utilisais au lit comme si baiser était un séminaire littéraire.
" When we were together, it used to annoy me.
The little intellectual snob act. The Camus.
The Baudelaire. The French words you used in bed like fucking was a literature seminar.
"Détache-moi." Untie me.
"Non."
"Détache-moi, Dmitri."
"J'ai dit non." I said no. The smile widening.
The countdown accelerating. "Tu n'es plus dans le bureau de Viktor.
Tu n'es plus sa petite traductrice de luxe.
Tu es ici. Avec moi. Comme avant." You're not in Viktor's office anymore.
You're not his little luxury translator. You're here. With me. Like before.
Like before. Two words. Two years. The dinners where I smiled when he told me to smile.
The clothes he picked. The hand on my throat in the restaurant where the waiter knew not to look.
The photographs taken while I slept, my body spread across his sheets like evidence he was collecting for a case he'd prosecute later.
Like before. The two ugliest words in any language, and I speak three.
"Viktor est fini," he said. Viktor is finished.
He uncrossed his legs. Leaned forward. Close enough that the bergamot hit me like a wall and my body remembered what that cologne meant, what it preceded, what came after the bergamot and the smile and the soft voice.
"Le Conseil vote. Cette semaine. Mikhail a les voix.
Ton précieux roi va tomber de son tr?ne, et quand il tombera, il n'y aura personne entre toi et moi.
" The Council is voting. This week. Mikhail has the votes.
Your precious king is going to fall, and when he falls, there'll be no one between you and me.
"Il y aura toujours quelque chose entre toi et moi, Dmitri.
" There will always be something between you and me, Dmitri.
My voice was steady. I don't know how. My hands were shaking behind my back.
My face numb from the bag. The zip ties cutting into my wrists.
Every cell in my body screaming run, except I was tied to a chair in a warehouse, and the man who taught me to run was sitting four feet away telling me running was over.
But my voice was steady. The voice Viktor trained.
The chin he leveled. The spine he drilled straight.
"?a s'appelle mon dégo?t." It's called my disgust.
The smile cracked. The brown eyes going flat. Old pennies. The eyes from the restaurant. From the booth. From the moment his hand closed and his mouth said you're already dead and the world shrank to the circumference of his fingers.
"Je vais te reprendre," he said. Low. Quiet.
The quietness that lives in the gap between a threat and the thing that follows it.
"Morceau par morceau. Souvenir par souvenir.
Tout ce qu'il t'a fait croire que tu étais, je vais le défaire.
La robe. La coiffure. Le rouge à lèvres.
La fa?on dont tu te tiens droite maintenant, comme si tu avais le droit d'occuper de l'espace.
" I'm going to take you back. Piece by piece.
Memory by memory. Everything he made you believe you were, I'm going to undo.
The dress. The hairstyle. The lipstick. The way you sit up straight now, like you have the right to take up space.
His hand reached out. The hand. The one I knew.
The one that had held my throat. That had aimed a camera.
That had stroked my cheek in the morning and hit me at night.
His fingers touched my face. The left side.
Along the jawline. Light. Tender. The tenderness of a man who pets a dog before he kicks it.
"Tu m'as manqué, mon petit gros," he whispered. I missed you, my little fat one.