5. Vasilisa #2
The penthouse is dark. He isn’t in it. Light spills out of the back corridor to the service elevator, the one that runs down into the guts of the club. It carries a sound with it I’ve never heard in this building, a wet dragging with a beat under it. Every hair on my arms goes up.
I should go to my room. Every wired-in survival instinct I own is aimed straight at my room, flashing.
Instead, I go toward the light.
I know it’s idiotic while my hands are already driving me at it, and I’m right, but I do it regardless, because I spent two brutal years dragging myself up out of being the woman who sits in the dark and waits to be told what’s being done to her, and some doors you open for no richer reason than to prove to yourself the arms still work.
The service corridor is bare concrete and surgical light, and the smell reaches me a second before the sight does, copper laid over something sourer than copper.
Two men I’ve never met are hauling a third between them by the arms. His shoes drag and lay down a long wet shine on the concrete behind him, and his face is a thing I make my eyes swerve around, because I already know I’d keep it for the rest of my life.
He’s breathing. He’s the source of the sound.
Behind them comes Lev, shed of the coat, down to his shirt.
He rolls the left cuff to the elbow, then the right, up over the knife tattooed into his forearm, and there’s blood across his knuckles that didn’t come out of him.
He isn’t hurrying any part of it. Here he is, the man whose name I’m signing next to.
Not the one who knelt by my chair in the dark with a wrench.
The one that one stays in the next room and feeds through the bars.
He sees me.
He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t cross the floor to put his body between mine and the sight.
He doesn’t try to make this anything other than it is.
He stands there with his sleeves shoved past his elbows and another man’s blood going tacky in the lines of his hands, and he holds my eyes down forty feet of concrete with one broken body bleeding between us.
He lets me take the whole undiluted thing, because he swore to me in my own living room that he doesn’t threaten and he doesn’t put on a show, and now I’m watching both vows kept inside a single frame.
“Go back home, Vasilisa.” His voice isn’t cruel, but it isn’t soft either. “This part of it was never meant for you.”
“Is he going to die?”
“That went out of my hands about an hour back. It was in them, before that.” He takes a rag off one of the men and drags it across a knuckle.
“He sold your name to a man who buys names. That’s what he did, and he knew the price to the dollar when he opened his mouth, and he did it anyway.
So no. He doesn’t walk back out of this building, and I’m not going to lie to you to help you sleep at night.
Whether you want to or not, I’m the only reason your grandfather’s butchers can’t put a street and a number to your face.
That’s what this marriage does for you.”
The man on the floor makes the sound again, gone lower. One of the others says something quick in Russian, and Lev answers without turning his head. They drag the man through a door at the far end, closing it behind them.
I should be nothing but afraid. I run the count, and the fear’s all there, hands gone cold, heart slamming like it’s trying to make bail through my ribs.
Underneath it hides the other thing, the one that moved into my throat the first night he filled my doorway, and tonight it’s got teeth it didn’t have before.
He picked a bleeding honesty over a comfortable lie.
Nobody in the entire length of my life has ever respected me enough to give me the truth while it was still warm.
And I hate it. I hate that my pulse can’t tell fear from the other thing, that the two of them ride down the exact same wire, that I’m parked in a killing hallway with my mouth going dry for the least defensible reason a mouth can go dry.
So I do the only thing my body knows how to do when every other system trips offline.
I reach for the joke. The joke is the last muscle still firing after the rest have gone dark.
“You’ve got blood on your watch,” I say. “The dead one. Both hands already stopped, so I don’t suppose it’ll hold the stain against you.”
His eyes drop to the watch, to the two hands frozen wherever they froze, however long ago. I’ve hit a nerve, I know I’ve hit it, because his whole expression freezes and he goes still.
“Careful,” he warns. “You keep putting the knife where I’m not plated. One of these nights you’ll get through, and then it stops being your problem and starts being both of ours.”
“And what happens then?”
“Go home, Vasilisa. Go before you learn you didn’t actually want to watch the rest of it. Go before I learn I don’t want to make you.”
My throat’s doing the thing again, that treacherous warm climb. His eyes drop half an inch to the color coming up the side of my neck and then haul themselves back to my face.
I go. Not because he gave the order, but because I’ve seen too much already.
I roll into my room and sit and stare at the door a long, moronic minute. I reach out and lock it.
The bolt slams home with a good, solid sound my chair doesn’t make anymore, and I sit there in the dark on my side of a locked door, and I am not one inch safer than I was. I feel like a woman who threw a bolt because it was the only thing she had left to do, even though it’s just an illusion.