The cops string me up to one of them, looping the chain of the cuffs over the hook. My shoulders scream as my weight settles, high enough that my feet barely graze the concrete. Then they leave without a word. The door clangs shut.
I hang there in the gloom, counting seconds and cataloging pains. The gunshot wound Aleksei gave me throbs its displeasure at this new arrangement. The rest of me isn’t much happier with it.
After a while, the door opens again.
Three men enter wearing black ski masks and surgical gloves, all skin covered so I can’t see tattoos or anything identifiable. They could be anyone. They set a canvas bag on a steel table in the corner and begin unpacking their tools.
“Where’s my brother?” I ask.
No response.
“What does Aleksei want?”
Nothing.
“At least tell me what this is about, you cowardly pieces of fucking shit. Have the balls to answer a goddamn question.”
The first man approaches with a pair of pliers. He still doesn’t speak. He simply grips my left hand, isolates my pinky finger, and gets to work.
I hold out for about four seconds before the screaming starts.
One pain fuses into the next. Scalpers, pliers, cattle prods—they’ve brought it all and they’re very, very good at what they do. I’m in writhing agony from head to toe. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, a center or a limit. It’s just a great, unbroken wall of red, screaming horror.
But it can’t touch the heart of me.
Because the heart of me is somewhere else.
I’m in a kitchen.Ourkitchen. Sunlight cascades through windows that don’t yet exist, warming hardwood floors that have not yet been dreamed up. The smell of coffee mingles with pancakes and syrup and cut grass wafting in through the screen door that leads to the backyard.
A child’s laughter rings out from somewhere I can’t see.
The sound is so happy, so bright, that it takes me a moment to realize the wetness on my face isn’t sweat or blood.
It’s tears I didn’t know I was crying.
CRKCKK.
I gasp back into the basement. One of the masked men is wiping something sticky and red off his gloves.
“Still with us, Mr. Hale?” he asks. First words any of them have spoken.
I don’t dignify it with a response. I close my eyes and go back.
The kitchen again. Eliana stands at the stove, her back to me, apron tied around her waist, humming something I recognize after a beat—that Russian lullaby my mother used to sing. Her hair is longer now, a chestnut waterfall down her back, laced with the faintest threads of silver.
We’ve grown old in this dream. We’ve hadtime.
“Daddy!”
A blur of motion barrels into my legs. I look down and see?—
I seeour child.
She has reddened hair like Eliana’s and blue eyes like mine. Her grin is pure mischief, pure joy, pure everything I never thought I deserved.
“Hey there, trouble,” I hear myself say. “What’s the damage report?”
“I found a frog!”
