It’s irony. I’m getting kidnapped away from my own kidnapper. Despite that, I wish I was with Alek instead of Rocko. It doesn’t make sense but it’s what I feel.
Rocko drags me along –my head is pounding and my legs move on autopilot – until he reaches a cellar door in the ground on the outside of the house. He rips the doors open and pushes me inside.
I stumble down the stairs until I land on hard cement. That’s when Rocko shuts the doors above me, encasing me in darkness.
The only good thing is that he didn’t bother coming down with me.
Looking around the room, I see that it’s a bomb shelter. Probably from back in World War II. A tiny bed is in one corner. A shelf full of canned food in another.
The room is tiny. It’s exactly like my old room back home, just much more grungy and dirty. But it has anything a person couldneed, just like my room. A bed to sleep, food to eat, and a place to use the restroom.
In a strange sort of fate, I have returned home.
I crawl onto the bed and curl into a ball, squeezing my eyes shut, and willing myself to be all right. I have to be all right or I might die inside.
Slowly, the comfort of the small room overtakes me and I know within minutes, that I don’t want to leave.
Alek
I manage to follow Rocko in my car through the streets of Paris. A few times, I almost lose him before finding his car again. He takes me straight to a rundown, shitty house.
His car is parked out front but I don’t see any sign of him or Katya.
I pull out my gun – I always keep one on me in case of emergencies – and slowly walk up to the front door, where I pound on it. “Rocko! Open up. Your car is out here. What game are you fucking playing?”
“The one where you deserve to face your crimes,” he responds through a cracked window off to the side of the house.
“You know I’m going to kill you, right?”
“Then you’ll never get your wife back. I hid her somewhere and you’ll never find her.”
A heavy weight settles itself in my stomach. Never see Katya again? I don’t like the sound of that. Not just because losing her would ruin my plans with Dimitri but also because I just… don’t want to lose her. I like her in the short amount of time I’ve spent with her. In fact, I’m quickly becoming obsessed with her. She has wiggled herself into my brain in a way I never saw coming and I’m not mad at it.
“I didn’t have plans to start another war when I saw you at the opera house,” I say. “I wasn’t going to come for you. I have bigger fish to fry.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“You could have talked to me instead of stealing my wife away? Because now, Rocko, I am going to have to kill you and you know it. This ends today. I am not losing the woman I stole to some asshole I haven’t thought about in years.”
“You deserve to suffer for trying to kill me.”
“Funny,” I say. “I feel the same way about Dimitri Ivanov. It’s why I stole his sister in the first place. And now you deserve to suffer for stealing her from me.” I kick the front door down and storm inside the house.
Rocko is waiting for me. He fires his gun and it just barely misses me. I dive back outside and take cover on the side of the house. When Rocko doesn’t make a move to follow, I run back inside and fire off my gun.
My bullet lands right on target. Straight into Rocko’s stomach.
He slumps to the floor and falls over, breathing ragged. I shoot his hand to force him to let go of his gun. His scream of pain is a satisfying one.
I walk over to him and kick him so he’s lying on his back. “Where did you put my wife?”
His smile is bloody. “You’re not going to find her.”
“I am. You made a stupid decision doing this. No one fucks with me. And no one fucks with my woman.” I shoot him in the head because I know he’s not going to give me answers.
And then I look for Katya.
She’s nowhere inside the house. I search for hidden rooms but there’s nothing. That’s when I turn to the outside and find a pair of cellar doors in the earth. There’s a lock in them but I shoot it and the doors open right up.
