Chapter 20 #2
The words came out the way they needed to. Measured. Confused. Slightly wounded. The helpless blind girl who couldn't possibly be running an intelligence operation from a piano bench.
I don't know what you want me to say.
It was the best performance of my life.
The first blow came without warning.
His open hand connected with the side of my face and my head snapped to the right, the crack of impact echoing off the warehouse walls before the pain registered.
It arrived a half-second later. A hot, spreading burn that radiated from my cheekbone to my ear, blooming through the entire left side of my face.
The world tilted. My hands flew off the chair and I caught myself on air, listing sideways before my palm slammed against the concrete floor. Grit bit into my skin. The cold seeped through the heel of my hand and up my arm.
I tasted copper.
"Who is your contact?"
The same question. The same flat voice. Like the blow hadn't happened. Like he hadn't just struck the woman he'd claimed to love across the face while a camera recorded it.
I pushed myself back upright, a bit stunned. My cheek was pulsing, the skin already swelling under the heat. I found the chair edges again and gripped them so hard the flaky rust bit crescents into my palms.
"I don't have one."
The next hit came from the other side. Harder. My teeth sliced the inside of my cheek and my mouth filled with blood. I choked on it, coughing, blood and saliva dripping from my chin onto my dress.
It was emerald dress. One of my favorites.
"Milo." His name tore out of me before I could stop it, raw and cracked and desperate. "Milo, please. Tell me why. Please."
From across the room, Viktor made a sound. Low. Impatient.
The answering silence from Milo was so loud I could feel it pressing against my skin.
Then his hands were on me again. One fisted in the hair at the back of my head, wrenching my neck back. The other gripped my jaw, fingers digging into the hinges hard enough that a strangled cry escaped my throat.
"Give me a name," he said. Close. His breath on my face. "One name. That's all this has to be."
I was shaking. Full-body tremors I couldn't control, my muscles seizing against the cold and the fear and the annihilating wrongness of his hands on me like this.
The same hands that had traced my collarbones like they were something sacred.
The same fingers that had tangled with mine in the dark while he whispered I've got you, little bird.
Those hands were now instruments of something I couldn't reconcile with the man I knew.
"There is no name," I whispered. "There's nothing to give you."
His fist tightened in my hair. My scalp screamed.
"Don't make me keep asking."
"Then stop asking!" The words ripped out of me, hot and ragged. "Because the answer doesn't change. It doesn't matter how many times you hit me or how hard you pull or what you do to me in this room—the answer is the same. I. Don't. Have. A. Contact."
From the wall, Viktor's chair creaked. He shifted his weight forward.
"She's stubborn," Viktor said. "Or stupid. I can't decide."
Milo released my hair and I sagged forward, my chin dropping to my chest, blood from my split cheek dripping in a slow, warm line down my throat.
Then his fist hit my stomach, driving into the soft tissue below my ribs with a force that expelled every molecule of air from my lungs.
I folded.
My body fell off the chair and I hit the concrete floor on my knees and one hand, the other arm wrapped around my middle, trying to hold myself together while my diaphragm spasmed and my lungs forgot how to work.
I opened my mouth and nothing came in. Just a thin, whistling sound that wasn't breathing.
My chest convulsed. Again. And again. And finally—finally—air rushed in, and with it came a sob so guttural it didn't sound human.
The floor was cold and gritty against my knees. My dress had ridden up, the concrete biting into my bare skin.
Above me, Milo's breathing was controlled. Even. Professional.
The breathing of a man at work.
I tried to crawl away. I didn't know where.
There was no map for this place, no memorized steps between the chair and the wall, no furniture I could anchor to.
The warehouse was a void. Featureless and enormous and filled with nothing but empty air and the smell of rust and old concrete and Viktor's cigarette smoke and the copper tang of my own blood.
Milo's hand caught my ankle and dragged me back.
"Get up."
I couldn't. My arms shook too hard. My stomach was clenched around the memory of his fist, the muscles locked in a continuous spasm that made drawing a full breath impossible.
He pulled me up by the arm. Set me back in the chair. I slumped, unable to sit straight, my body curling in on itself like it could make itself small enough to disappear.
"Who is your contact?"
Again. The same question, delivered in that dead, mechanical voice.
I started to laugh.
It surprised me as much as it surprised the room. A broken, wet sound that bubbled up through the blood in my mouth and came out wrong—too high, too wild, edged with something that was either hysteria or defiance or both.
"You're going to kill me," I said. The words came out slurred through swollen lips. "Whether I answer or not. So why would I make it easy?"
I was a fool.
He'd been working with them this entire time.
Then Viktor spoke. Quietly, and in Russian.
A few words I couldn't translate, though I'd picked up enough in two years to catch the tone.
He was giving an instruction. And the instruction ended with a sound I recognized as impatience.
A sharp exhale through his nose, followed by the tap of his finger against the arm of his chair.
Hurry up.
What followed became nothing but a blur.
Pain lost its specificity and became a geography.
A map of my body drawn in blood and bruises, each one a landmark I'd carry out of this room if I carried anything at all.
The left side of my ribs where his knee pinned me.
The inside of my wrist where his grip twisted until something popped.
The back of my head where it bounced off the concrete when I fell again.
I stopped trying to get up.
The floor became my world. Cool concrete against my swollen cheek. Blood pooling in the hollow of my collarbone. My own breathing, ragged and wet, the only sound I could track anymore. The ringing in my ears had drowned out everything else.
Everything except Milo.
I could still hear him perfectly. His footsteps. His breathing. The particular sound his knuckles made when he flexed them between rounds—a series of soft cracks that I would never forget.
Because it meant he was preparing to hit me again.
"I hate you," I said. The words scraped out of my throat like broken glass. "I hate you. You're a fucking monster. You were always a monster. I can't believe I was so stupid to believe you were anything else."
I meant it.
And I didn't.
And I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
He didn't respond. But something in his breathing changed. A single hitch, so small that Viktor couldn't have caught it from across the room. A fracture in the rhythm, barely there. Like something inside him had cracked and the sound had leaked out through his lungs before he could seal it shut.
Or maybe I imagined it. Maybe I needed to imagine it. Maybe the woman bleeding on the floor needed to believe that the man standing over her was dying too, just in a way that didn't leave marks.
The ringing in my ears was getting louder. From far away, I heard Milo's voice. Not aimed at me.
Aimed at Viktor.
Words I couldn't separate through the static in my skull. Viktor's voice came back sharp and demanding. They were arguing.
And I lay on the floor and listened to two men argue over how I was going to die.
Through all of it—the pain whiting out my thoughts, the fear that had long since crossed from sharp to numb, the certainty that I was going to die in this warehouse on this floor—one thing stayed locked in a vault so deep that even now, even here, even with my body broken and my mind fracturing and the taste of my own blood thick on my tongue, I would not touch it.
The truth.
It sat in the deepest chamber of my mind like a stone at the bottom of a well, and no amount of pain or terror or heartbreak was going to bring it to the surface. Not for Viktor. Not for the camera. Especially not for Milo.
I would die on this floor and take it with me, because it was the only thing I had left that was mine.
Footsteps approached. Milo's. The argument was over.
He knelt beside me. I felt the displacement of air, the warmth of his body, the familiar geography of his presence descending to my level.
Then I felt something I didn't expect.
His hand touching my face.
The first gentle thing I'd felt from him since this began.
His fingers brushed the swollen ridge of my cheekbone, barely touching me. His thumb tracked the line of my jaw the way it had a thousand times. A touch so careful it felt like an apology spoken in a language that didn't have words.
I flinched. And then I didn't.
Because even now—even after this, even with his knuckles still warm from the bruises he'd put on my body—his hands were the only things that had ever made the darkness feel safe.
And I hated myself for leaning into it.
Something cold pressed against the inside of my elbow. Thin and sharp.
A needle.
"Milo." His name came out broken. The voice of a woman who had already stopped fighting and was making a final accounting of the things she'd carry into whatever came next.
His breathing was ragged now. Shattered. The mask slipping, too late, in the final seconds before whatever this was—mercy or murder—took me under.
The needle slid in.
Cold flooded my vein. A chemical chill that spread from the crook of my elbow up through my shoulder and into my chest, slowing everything it touched.
My heartbeat stumbled. My lungs forgot their rhythm.
And the pain—the burning, screaming, all-consuming landscape of pain—went quiet.
Like someone had pressed a pillow over the world.
His hand stayed on my face as I went under. I could feel it. His fingers against my skin, his palm cradling my jaw, and beneath his touch, the faintest tremor. He was shaking.
The man who'd just beaten me bloody was shaking.
I tried to say something. His name, maybe. Or the word I'd been circling for weeks, the one I couldn't say then and couldn't say now and might never get to say at all—
But my mouth wouldn't work.
The darkness deepened. Not the dark I was familiar with. No. This was different. This was the darkness beneath the darkness. The one that had no floor, no walls, no ceiling. The one that erased sound and sensation and time and swallowed everything whole.
His quiet sob was the last thing I heard.
Then that went, too.
And there was nothing.