Chapter 31
Pain has a taste.
I always thought it was a literary metaphor, something poets said to describe broken hearts. But here, in the dark, I discovered it’s literal. Pain tastes like old copper. Like rust. Like dried blood on your lips and bile in the back of your throat.
I woke up choking. The first thing I registered wasn’t where I was, but the cold. A damp, greasy cold that seemed to seep through my pores and lodge in the marrow of my bones. It wasn’t the clean cold of Cassian’s air conditioning. It was the cold of places the sun never reaches. Basements. Crypts.
I tried to move my hands. They didn’t obey. My shoulders screamed in protest. My arms were pulled back, wrists bound by industrial zip ties. The plastic cut off circulation, and my fingers were numb, tingling like they were full of needles.
I opened my eyes. Darkness. Thick, heavy, absolute. I blinked several times, trying to force my pupils to find any source of light. Nothing. Only sound. Ploc. A drop of water falling somewhere in the distance. Ploc. Someone’s ragged breathing. Mine.
Memory returned in violent flashes, like strobes from some nightclub in hell. The door smashed in. Franco bleeding. The shot. The needle in my neck. I was taken. The fortress fell.
“Cassian...” The name came out in a hoarse whisper, almost inaudible. My throat was dry as sandpaper.
I tried to shift in the chair. It was metal, cold and hard. My ankles were bound to the chair legs too. I was immobilized. Vulnerable. Exactly like Cassian said I’d be if I stepped out of line. You have no survival instinct, he’d said in the car. You run toward the fire.
Well, the fire had caught me. And now I was in the ashes.
Panic began to rise. That childish, primitive panic of being alone in the dark with monsters. I felt hot tears gathering in my eyes. I wanted to cry. To scream for my father, for Cassian, for anyone. I wanted to beg.
No.
The voice in my head wasn’t mine. It was deep. Calm. Lethal. Fear is information, Cassian’s voice whispered in my memory. Crying dehydrates and shows weakness. Breathe. Assess. Survive.
I swallowed the tears. I forced air into my lungs, counting the seconds. One, two, three. Hold. Release. I wasn’t the girl who cried over dresses anymore. I was the woman who shot a traitor in the leg. I had spilled blood. I had marked my territory.
Ploc.
The sound of a heavy metal door opening broke the silence. The screech of rusted hinges was sharp, painful. A beam of dirty yellow light cut through the darkness, blinding me. I squeezed my eyes shut, turning my face away.
Footsteps. Heavy. Boots on concrete. It wasn’t just one man. There were two, maybe three. The smell changed. The mold was replaced by cheap tobacco and strong cologne.
“Look at that... Sleeping Beauty’s awake.”
The voice had a heavy accent. Russian. I opened my eyes, blinking against the light. A silhouette stood in front of me, holding a tactical flashlight pointed directly at my face. I couldn’t see who it was, just the blinding glare.
“Where am I?” I asked. My voice cracked, but I kept my chin up.
The man laughed. He lowered the flashlight, illuminating his own face from below, casting demonic shadows.
I recognized him. Not personally, but from the photos in the intelligence files I’d peeked at in Cassian’s office.
Ivanov. Nikolai Kovacs’s right-hand man.
A man known for using pliers instead of questions.
“You’re far away, princess. Far from Chicago. Far from your castle. And very, very far from your rent-a-husband.”
He walked toward me. He wore an expensive suit that seemed out of place in that damp hole. He reached out and grabbed my chin, turning my face left and right, inspecting the cut on my lip. His leather gloves smelled like gunpowder.
“Pretty,” he commented, as if evaluating a horse. “A little bruised, but pretty. Nikolai will like that. He’s always wanted a D’Angelo in his collection.”
A shiver of disgust ran through me, but I didn’t pull away. I couldn’t pull away. “If you touch me,” I said, channeling all the coldness I’d seen Cassian use with his enemies, “my husband will tear your hand off.”
Ivanov burst out laughing. The other men in the shadows laughed along. “Your husband? The Consigliere?” He spat on the floor near my feet. “He’s a glorified accountant, doll. He’s good with numbers and contracts. But war? Real war? He doesn’t have the stomach for it.”
He leaned in, his face inches from mine. “He’s running in circles right now. Chasing shadows. We have you. And he knows it. Know what he’s gonna do? He’ll negotiate. He’ll hand over the routes, hand over the money, and if you’re lucky, maybe he’ll pay to get you back in one piece.”
“You don’t know him,” I whispered.
“I know men like him. Businessmen. They calculate losses and gains. And you, sweetheart... you’re a very expensive liability.”
He stepped back, dragging a metal chair over and straddling it across from me, arms resting on the backrest. “But before we negotiate the price of your flesh, we need some information.”
He pulled out a knife. A dull, serrated blade. He started cleaning his nails with the tip. “Where are the unofficial ledgers? The Cayman Island accounts your father hid? Cassian changed the passwords, but you... you're the heiress. You have the master keys.”
I looked at the knife. Fear tried to crawl up my throat again. The image of the blade slicing my skin, the pain... But then, another image pushed through the fear. Cassian in the bunker. His calm. The right hand points, the left controls. I didn't have a weapon. But I had my mind.
I smiled. A broken smile, my cut lip bleeding again, staining my teeth red. But it was a smile.
Ivanov stopped fiddling with the knife. He frowned. “What are you laughing at, bitch?”
“At you,” I replied. My voice grew stronger. “At all of you.”
“You think this is funny? You think this is a game?”
“I think you're amateurs,” I said, looking him in the eye. “You think you kidnapped a bargaining chip. You think you captured Cassian Varro's weakness.”
I leaned forward as far as the restraints allowed. “You didn't get his weakness. You got his trigger.”
Ivanov stood up, irritated. “Shut up.”
“He won't negotiate,” I continued, speaking faster, injecting venom into every word. “He won't offer money. He won't beg. Don't you understand what you've done? You took the only thing keeping the monster on a leash.”
I started laughing again. A low, humorless laugh that echoed off the concrete walls. “You're already dead. You just don't know it yet. He's coming. And he won't bring lawyers. He'll bring hell.”
Ivanov's face contorted with rage. Fear, subtle and insidious, flickered in his eyes. I had planted the seed. The doubt. They knew Cassian's reputation. “The Ice.” The man who killed his parents' assassins at twelve. They tried to diminish him by calling him an accountant, but deep down, they knew.
“Enough!” Ivanov shouted.
He lashed out. The slap hit my face with the force of a wooden plank. My head snapped to the side. The taste of blood exploded in my mouth. The world spun, and white stars danced across my vision. The pain was searing, burning my cheek, buzzing in my ear.
I kept my head down, gasping, feeling blood trickle from the corner of my mouth and drip onto my lap. Silence returned to the basement. Heavy. Tense.
Ivanov stood there, breathing hard, rubbing the hand he'd struck me with. He had lost control. I'd made him lose control. That was power.
I raised my head slowly. My hair was plastered to my face with sweat and blood. One eye was starting to swell. But I looked at him. And I didn't cry.
I spat blood on the floor near his boot. “Is that all you've got?” I whispered. “My husband hits harder when we're fucking.”
The vulgarity shocked Ivanov. He stepped back, as if I'd transformed into a demon before his eyes. He'd expected the spoiled princess. He found the Consigliere's wife.
“Gag her,” he ordered the other men, his voice trembling slightly. “And get out. Leave her in the dark. Let's see if she keeps laughing when hunger and thirst set in.”
One of the men stepped forward and ran thick silver duct tape over my mouth, trapping my scream, trapping my words. They killed the light. The metal door slammed. The bolt turned.
I was alone in total darkness again. The pain in my face throbbed in time with the pain in my wrists and the ache in my heart. Fear returned, now that I had no audience to perform for. The tears I'd held back finally spilled, wetting the duct tape.
But even through the terror, something had changed. I was no longer waiting to be saved. I was waiting for vengeance. I closed my eyes and pictured Cassian's face. Not the gentle face from the birthday. The Executor's face.
Come, I thought, projecting the thought through the concrete walls, through the city, to him. Come and burn it all down.
I started counting the seconds. One. Two. Three. Not to pass the time. But to measure how much time those men had left. Because Cassian was coming. And I would have pitied them, if I had any pity left in me.