Chapter 21 The Abduction #2
In French, tu me manques means you are missing from me.
As if the absence is a physical hole. As if the person who left took a piece of your architecture with them.
Dmitri said tu m'as manqué and the words should have meant I left a hole in him but what they actually meant was I left a wound in his ego and he's been picking at it for three years and now he wants to make me the bandage.
I bit him.
His index finger. The one on my jaw. I turned my head fast, faster than he expected because he expected the flinch and I gave him the teeth, and I clamped down with every muscle in my jaw.
Every night I'd locked my door three times.
Every cardigan I'd buttoned to the throat.
Every time I'd sucked in my stomach because he told me my body was wrong.
All of it in the bite. I bit through the skin.
Through the flesh. To the bone. I felt it.
The crunch. The resistance of something hard under my teeth.
His metacarpal. Gleaming. White. The only clean thing about him.
Blood flooded my mouth. His. Hot. Metallic.
I bit harder. The biting was mine. The violence was mine.
Viktor had said violence is just desire with sharper teeth.
He was right. My teeth were sharp enough now.
The taste of Dmitri's blood in my mouth was three years of running ending in a warehouse in Brooklyn with my wrists tied behind my back.
Nothing left to fight with except the jaw a Bratva king had taught me to keep level.
He screamed. The first real sound I'd ever heard from him. The sound underneath the charm. The animal underneath the Tom Ford. He ripped his hand away. His finger trailing blood and torn skin, the white of bone visible through the wound.
"Putain de salope!" Fucking bitch!
He hit me.
The back of his good hand. Across the left cheekbone.
The blow landed where blows from men like Dmitri always land.
Where they've practiced. Where the bone catches the impact and the skin splits inside against the teeth and the brain goes white then red then the grey of a system trying to stay operational while trauma runs its course.
My head snapped right. My vision strobed.
The fluorescent lights multiplied, duplicated, smeared across my retinas like paint on wet canvas.
I tasted my own blood now. The inside of my cheek split open.
The pain was a living thing, spreading across my face in a hot, flat wave that didn't crest, just kept expanding, filling the entire left side of my skull.
The bruise started immediately. I felt it bloom.
The capillaries bursting beneath the skin.
The warmth that comes before the color. The dark flower opening on my cheek, petal by petal, the evidence of Dmitri Kotov's hand writing itself across my face in a language every woman understands and no dictionary defines.
I spat blood on his white shoes.
The Tom Ford. The three-thousand-dollar toe caps. My blood on them like modern art, like the kind of painting he used to launder money through, a red splash on a white surface that would stain forever.
"C'est tout ce que tu as?" I said. That's all you've got?
My voice wrecked. Blood on my chin. The bruise deepening in real time.
"Ton frère frappe plus fort. Et au moins lui, il n'a pas besoin d'attacher les mains d'une femme pour se sentir puissant.
" Your brother hits harder. And at least he doesn't need to tie a woman's hands to feel powerful.
His face. The rage cycling through it like weather through a hurricane.
He raised his hand again. One of the six men stepped forward.
Grabbed his wrist. Said something low. Mikhail's instructions.
One hit. One bruise. Enough for the message.
Too much and she's a corpse and corpses can't be leveraged.
Dmitri pulled free. Stared at me. Then at his bleeding finger.
Then at his ruined shoes. Then at me again, and in his eyes I saw the thing I'd been afraid of for three years and wasn't afraid of anymore, the thing that had kept me locked behind doors and hidden inside cardigans and running from city to city with a suitcase packed in the dark.
I saw a small man. A weak man. A man who tied women to chairs and called it power.
Hit them once and called it strength. Bled from the finger a woman bit through and couldn't do a goddamn thing about it.
The woman he used to own had grown teeth he didn't give her.
Viktor gave me those teeth.
Viktor, who was somewhere in this city right now looking at a GPS screen that showed nothing.
A blue dot vanished. A woman-shaped absence in his surveillance architecture.
He was counting the seconds since my signal went dark.
Calculating the radius. Activating the machine.
Becoming the thing he was underneath the Tom Ford, the coffee, the cufflinks.
The weapon. The blade. The man who said you don't look at her, you don't say her name, you don't remember she breathes and meant every syllable.
He was coming.
I knew it the way I knew my languages. In the body. In the bones. In the place where knowledge lives before words get to it.
I straightened in the chair. The metal cold against my spine. The zip ties biting. The bruise blooming. The blood drying on my chin. I sat the way he taught me. Spine against the back. Shoulders set. Chin level. Parallel to the floor.
Dmitri watched me sit up straight. Something in his face changed.
The beginning of understanding. The woman in the chair was no longer the woman he remembered.
The man who made her this way was coming.
The coming would be worse than anything Dmitri Kotov had ever imagined. Viktor Kotov does not imagine violence.
He architects it.
I sat like a queen.
I waited for the king.
And the king was coming.