Chapter 9 - Nadya
Fuck my life.
I didn’t really fall asleep. It was more of a worn-out, passing-out, I believe. One minute, I was sitting on the floor with my back against the door, plotting Viktor Zakharov’s slow, painful demise. The next, I’m here: blinking up at the unfamiliar ceiling through a cloudy, heavy-lidded gaze.
I know before I ever move that I’ve got a crick in my neck. That’s just the cyanide-laced cherry on top of a diarrhea sundae. But hey, I can probably thank the drugs that were still in my system for the overly-deep and totally unmoving slumber.
The sheets are in a disarray around me.
With great care, I force myself upright. My headache’s gone nowhere, though it’s dulled to a residual throbbing now. I’ll survive, I’m sure. It’s nothing that’s going to stand in my way from tearing Zakharov limb from fucking limb.
I look around and see the room is exactly as I left it, except for two noticeable changes.
Firstly, the door I’d wrestled with like a feral beast is now open.
It’s like it never happened. Unsurprisingly, the primary emotion that unfurls within me at the sight isn’t relief; it’s fury.
This fury only ratchets when, secondly, the side table I’d thrown against the door in my Hulk-smash moment is now back in its place, unblemished and upright.
On top of it rests another pair of pills. Again, I ignore them. My attention is drawn to the new—notably plastic—glass and a matching jug of water. Stuck to the jug is a bright yellow Post-it note, bearing what I assume is Satan’s scrawl.
Go explore, Nadya Zakharov.
All I can do is stare at the words for an endless, simmering moment. My brain glitches at his sheer fucking audacity. In a haze of red, I rip it off the vessel and proceed to tear it into small, small, smaller pieces. I toss it away from me in a burst of neon confetti.
There’s no satisfaction in the act.
The four glasses of water don’t quench the red-hot rage bubbling inside me; I pour them down my gullet in quick succession.
Nadya Zakharov?
He can pry the Yuri name out of my cold, dead hands. I’ll never be a Zakharov. I’ll fucking end myself before I let him do that to me.
Stomping out of the room, I locate a bathroom just outside it. I wish I were above needing it. Despite the hideous, hospital-like white tile, it’s got more frills than one would expect in a place like this, including a supersized box of fucking tampons.
I don’t even want to know why he was thinking about my period, which I already got through last week, thank you very much.
“Creepy-ass fuck,” I mutter.
My eyes keep flicking to the door while I pee and clean myself up, going through the motions as swiftly as I can, unsure how much of a suggestion the dingy lock on the door is or isn’t.
***
A brief foray through the place, and it’s pretty obvious this is a safehouse. The warehouse has been mostly converted. Whoever was hired to make this place inhabitable, since it’s almost surely a run-of-the-mill factory on the outside, makes the exposed brick and pipes work.
The mammoth windows along the walls are swathed in thick, velvet drapes in deep burgundy.
However, the ones in the ceiling let me know it’s morning now.
Lightbulbs hang from the ceiling beams on black corded wire, in mini-chandeliers, like an art installation.
There are more eclectic rugs in various jewel tones than in a recording studio.
I refuse to mull over what acoustics Zakharov likes to test out.
The discordant patterns shouldn’t work, but do.
Especially with the rustic, leather-and-wood furniture scattered all around the space.
Much like the bright cherry red refrigerator in the open-plan kitchen setup, it is a fucking vibe. It’s bizarre. I dig it.
My bare feet pad past the oak-brown sectional sofa, and I trail my fingers across the back of it in passing.
My curiosity gets the best of me. I pick up the book left open there.
It’s a Russian crime novel. There’s a chess set with a half-finished game, abandoned.
Who the hell does he even play with, in this annoyingly cozy warehouse in the middle of fuck-knows where?
Soon enough, it becomes clear to me that there are no other bedrooms hiding behind doors. There’s only the one he sealed me away inside all night.
That begs the question of where he slept.
I’d say I wouldn’t put it past him to abandon me here and go back to the cushy Zakharov compound, but the truth is that I just don’t know either way. I don’t know what to think.
And it isn’t like he’s around here to fucking ask.
Just when I’m certain no one is, the particular, pressurized hiss of a coffee machine releasing steam damn near makes me piss myself. I didn’t set that up. Infuriating fear lashes at me, and I whip around to confront it.
Whatever worst-case-scenario I’d been bracing myself for, it isn’t the man who just saunters in from a sliding door I’d mistaken for part of the wall and starts fucking with the machine without further ado.
“Oh, hey, you’re up,” he says, looking up at me.
I am loath to admit that my brain immediately compares his stature to Viktor’s.
This is an enormous man, and my mind argues that Viktor is taller than him.
This man is broader, though, and barrel-chested in a way that looks dangerous.
There are scars all over his bare chest, ensuring I don’t mistake him for anything but a bratva man through and through.
Viktor has them, too—I eerily remember mapping them with my tongue.
His hair is the same dark chocolate brown as Viktor’s, except he is wearing it in a long, kind of douchey man-bun I’ll have to mock him for.
Even though the snakebite piercings and tattoo sleeves on both bulging arms warn me against it.
Whatever. I’ve grown up with five big brothers. Both younger and older than him, since he looks to be in his late-30s.
“I can fucking take you,” I growl, snatching the closest weapon I can. Unfortunately, it is a whisk. Why is there a whisk? “Who the fuck are you?”
He scratches at his scruffy, unkempt beard lazily. There’s no urgency to his movements. He eyes the whisk in my hand with unparalleled amusement. “That would definitely be one way to beat me,” he quips.
I refuse to laugh at that. I fucking refuse.
“Where is he?” I demand, eyes narrowing.
He doesn’t pretend not to know who I’m talking about. He also doesn’t give me an answer. Instead, he prompts, “Coffee?”
“I want you to tell me where he is.” So I can kill him. And then leave. Maybe I’ll run him over. Kill two birds with one stone by killing him as I leave, you know?
“Coffee it is,” he says cheerfully. Pulling open a cabinet, he pulls out two massive mugs that don’t match at all. “Milk? Cream? Sugar?”
My eyes roll profusely. I fling the whisk at his head. Like Viktor, he dodges the projectile. It’s because he has good reflexes, by the way. I have excellent fucking aim.
“Splash of cream. Where is he?”
“I was one of the witnesses at the wedding, by the way,” he informs me, conversationally, as he pours coffee into the mugs. “Maxim. Hi.”
I stare, watching him open the fridge door and pull out the cream.
“One of them.” I don’t bother to conceal the horror in my voice. It’s the same horror I felt about no one stepping in to help the girl who fell off her bike.
The girl who never needed help at all, I remember belatedly.
“Okay, Maxim. I’ll bite. How many motherfuckers watched him do this to me? Besides your own sick fuck self.”
“Me. The notary. Your dashing groom, of course. Though I can’t really speak to any biblical relations or lack thereof with his mother. And mine is really, really dead. No matter how sick of a fuck I am, I haven’t yet fucked the urn holding mamochka’s ashes.”
All I can do is gape at this, albeit hilarious, lunatic.
In return, Maxim’s umber gaze meets mine with the equanimity of a man who has decided, obviously, that he isn’t going to be rattled by anything I do, say, or hit him with. It would impress me, or at least piss me off, if I could keep up with my goddamn emotions.
Maxim gives me a second. Then asks, “You want some eggs? The tranquilizer he shot you up with does leave the stomach a little tender.”
The bullshit sympathy in his voice doesn’t go far with me.
“Is he here?” I ask back, rephrasing the question I’ve asked him twice already. “And yes. To the eggs.”
Maybe it’s agreeing to let him feed me that does the trick. Whatever the reason, Maxim relents and answers, “No, Nadya, he’s not. He’s out. He’ll be back, eventually. Always is.”
That really doesn’t bring me the comfort he seems to expect.
I let him go about cracking some eggs into a bowl and rinsing off the whisk I chucked at him to beat them. He treats me to a grin that probably works wonders on other women.
I look at him bleakly. Ordinarily, I would offer to help. But that’s with my family and my friends. This guy is funny and whatever, but he isn’t either of those. He is Viktor’s—
“You aren’t Anton,” I say, and it comes out sounding like an accusation.
“No. I’m Maxim. Still drugged?”
Not funny. “He only has one brother. Why do you look like him?”
My chin juts out proudly when he looks taken aback. This dude can try all he wants to be thick-skinned, macho, and blasé—but I’m nothing if not a savant at pissing men off. Turns out, I’m quite the fucking detective, too, huh?
“I’m his cousin.”
“Maternal or paternal?”
I don’t like the way he laughs at that, with an edge to the sound. I can’t decipher what it means. I like that even less.
“Does it matter?” he counters, exasperation evident.
I steal an apple and bite into it with gusto, bolstered by my minor win. “I haven’t decided yet. The devil is in the details, or whatever, isn’t he? And just in case you’re all looks and no brains, that’s me calling your cousin the devil.”
Maxim bursts into laughter.
Unfortunately, a symptom of youngest child syndrome I’ve yet to escape is the helpless joy at earning someone’s delight. It’s fine. Maxim ruins it pretty thoroughly when he huffs, “I see why the fucker’s obsessed with you.”
My mood plummets like a body from a plane. “You have the ‘the fucker’ bit right, that’s for sure,” I mutter, biting viciously into the fruit.
It’s mystifying, the way the venom in my words catches him off-guard.
“I hate him,” I add, just in case he needs more clarity.
Maxim’s brows, markedly more delicate than Viktor’s thick ones, raise at my announcement. “Do you?”
It’s the disbelief chasing those words like a shadow that does it for me, I think. I bark a scornful bark of laughter. “What do you fucking think? He fucked me. He stalked me. And then he drugged and kidnapped me. What, you think that’s a great love story in the making? Go fuck yourself.”
I hate the way Viktor’s cousin looks at me, somewhere between appraising and entertained. It’s fucking insulting. It’s like he’s studying me, the way spectators study animals in zoos. I’ve always hated zoos. Even as a little girl, I knew I valued freedom. I used to try to set the animals free.
“From what I heard, I’m pretty sure you fucked each other.”
I choose to believe it’s fury that heats my face.
“Before I knew who he was.” I still don’t know if I believe that he didn’t know me, either. I doubt that if I ask Maxim about it, he’ll tell me anything I could wholly trust.
With a maddening, cocky, knowing little chuckle, Maxim shakes his head. “You still don’t know him, Nadya. But don’t worry, you will.”
Fuck. Why the hell does that sound like a fucking threat?