Chapter 19 - Nadya #2
Somewhere along the line, the pill starts working. I probably should be more concerned, but it mostly just brings me relief when it begins to soften and blur the acute edges of this cruel, agonizing reality that grows more and more like a fucked-up nightmare simulation.
“I care about him. I didn't mean to start, and now I can't stop.” The words leave me in a slur. Still, helplessly, pathetically, I beseech, “Yulia, please.”
She breathes in deeply and presses the knuckles of her fist into her chest, massaging the spot in slow, concentric circles.
Then she stands and slips her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans.
“I'll talk to Trifon,” she says. “Sweetie, if you go to sleep and promise that you will let us in and let us take care of you, then I promise you I will handle your brother. We will figure this out. Together, OK?”
I don't know where Yulia summons her tender surety from. From the look on Darya’s face, clearly, she is baffled too. All I know is that right now, maybe for the first time in the 25 years I have been alive, I could stand to borrow someone else's courage.
***
When my eyes flutter open, it is dark outside.
The whole universe has been dwindled to this liminal space I lie prone in with a neon reality on the other side of the windows and me and this single lit lamp on the side of them.
The sound of someone clearing their throat punctures the soupy stillness like an arrow. On instinct, I leap out from under the covers I don't remember pulling on top of myself. I look around this stagnant room and freeze at the waiting silhouette of my eldest brother in the corner of the room.
“Trif.”
“Hi, Pisklya. How’re you holding up?”
It must be a sign that I’m feeling better, because my brother’s forever nickname for me—an artfully insulting “squeaker”—is making an appearance right now, which almost reduces me to tears.
I manage to hold it at bay.
“Hi,” I say stiffly, swallowing against the lump in my throat. “I’m—I don’t know. I’m fine. Where’s everyone?”
“The girls went to grab some food. You should eat something,” he says, not unkindly, though I sense that something isn’t right. Then again, I guess nothing is.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Trifon nods, then picks up his phone from where he laid it to rest on his leg and types something into it. “Yulia spoke to me.”
I suck in a brisk, scalding breath. “And?”
“Get your shoes. Come,” he motions toward the hotel room door, and rises to his feet.
I don’t bother questioning where he’s taking me. For once, I do as I’m told. I find my shoes, slip my feet into them, and follow him one step at a time.
***
In the backseat of his Escalade, Trifon wordlessly hands me a chocolate bar. He’s got his phone in his other hand again, and that’s where he looks, satisfied when he hears me tearing the candy wrapper open.
The entire drive, he doesn’t say one word to me. My stomach is full of tar. I chew the treat, letting the silky chocolate melt on my tongue, but I feel sick the whole time.
Yet I know that I can’t push it.
That’s what I’m already doing, making him do this for me.
Even if it was Yulia who bravely asked him to do it, it’s for me that he’ll allow it.
He is furious with me, that much is undeniable.
That anger wafts off of him in humid waves.
I’ve never known my brother to lead with anger, though, and never with any of us.
Somehow, it is worse than if he’d just explode and get it over with.
I can’t believe I used to wish, up until a week ago, that he would quit bitching.
Now, I think I’d do just about anything for him to yell at me.
As it turns out, Viktor wasn’t wrong to call me a coward.
When the Escalade comes to a stop, I look out the tinted windows. My breath catches at the sight of the warehouse.
He brought me back? Did they never pull him out of here?
In my mind, I’ve been envisioning a dungeon like the kind from the second Shrek movie. In my head, Viktor is hanging from chains. Inside my chest, my heart slams against my ribs, an eager, starving creature begging to be let out of its cage.
It trips over its feet and faceplants when Trifon steers me toward the wrong direction.
There’s no other choice but to follow him.
So that’s what I do, past wary soldiers who refuse to catch my eye, all the way to a vaulted-shut door of a fucking container outside the back corridor of the freezing building.
The paint on the brick-red container is chipped and peeling. This warehouse is just a warehouse, except worse. It isn’t even functional. It is abandoned and decrepit because of it.
“Trif,” I start, licking my dry lips.
My brother shakes his head firmly.
All I can do is stare as his hands land on my shoulders, squeezing, before he tucks me against his chest. He is an unmoving pillar, solid and unyielding.
I didn’t realize how much I’d needed this until he gave it to me, this gesture that feels so much like forgiveness I haven’t been shameless enough to ask him for, and I let loose a strangled cry.
His hand covers the back of my head, the other pats my back twice.
“I’m so—” I start and cut myself off when he rears back and looks down at me.
“Later,” he says as he steps back.
With both hands, he twists the handwheel and unlocks the bolted door with a rusty squeal. The words piled up on my tongue wither to ashes I swallow, and I can’t breathe again.
There he is.
Viktor.
Tucked into the corner of this glorified metal box, with his arms pulled behind his back and out of sight, he sits with his legs stretched out in front of him. He looks up at me with shadows beneath his eyes, blinking up at me like I’m a mirage.
I can hear my heart breaking.