No.
“Brandon, don’t!” I keep stumbling forward, but I’ve lost my bearings completely in the mayhem. Everything’s shifted. The coffee table is somewhere else. So’s the couch. Nothing is where it should be and every second I waste searching is a second he’s getting closer to her.
“But not with another man’s baby,” he continues, his voice moving away from me, toward Yasmin. “Never that.”
“Please.” Yasmin’s voice breaks. “Brandon, please, I’ll do anything…”
“STOP!” I scream, throwing myself again toward the sound of him, but I’m exhausted and bleeding and he sidesteps me like I’m nothing. I crash into the wall instead.
Behind me, Yasmin starts to cry.
The sound that comes next will live inside me forever.
A dull, meatythwack. Fist meeting flesh, the soft swell of Yasmin’s belly. Her scream dies in her throat, decaying into a choked gasp that’s somehow worse than any shriek.
“No!” I throw myself toward them once again. My hands find Brandon’s back and I climb him like an animal, clawing at his face, his eyes, sinking my teeth into the meat of his shoulder and ripping out chunks of flesh.
He roars and throws me off like I’m weightless.
I hit the floor on my side, hard enough that all the air evacuates my lungs in one violent rush. Glass bites deeper into my palms. I can’t breathe. Can’t move.
I can only lie there and listen as the life I thought we’d live is torn from us, one piece at a time.
58
BASTIAN
yield /yeld/: verb
1: the amount of usable product from raw ingredients.
2: what’s left of you after they’ve taken everything.
I exist in a haze of pain. Everything else has ceased to have meaning.
Somewhere between the third session with the pliers and the cattle prod’s crackling kiss against my ribs, the buzzing tubes overhead transmuted into a burning ball of light and gas, a sun in this subterranean hell. Blood and sweat becomes pancake and syrup. My screams are my daughter’s laughs and my daughter’s laughs are my screams.
I hang from the hook in the darkness as my little girl’s voice echoes in my head.
Daddy, watch me jump!
Watch me jump!
Watch me…
Then, suddenly, on some silent cue, the men set down their tools, their bloodied scalpels and pliers and blowtorches, and leave.
I sag against my restraints. Every inch of my body throbs with its own distinct flavor of agony. I try to inventory the damage—broken fingers, cracked ribs, oozing burns and sawtoothed cuts I don’t want to think about—but the list grows too long and my brain keeps sliding away from it.
There’s no point in hoping, anyway. They’ll be back. They always come back.
But when the door opens again, it’s not the masked men who enter.
It’s Aleksei.
He doesn’t say anything as he steps inside and closes the door behind him. There is only the soft clomp of his footsteps as he does slow circuits around me, surveying the wreckage his men have inflicted on my body.
Plink,says my blood as it meets the floor.
