Cigarette smoke, vanilla and mint. The specific blend that had been embedded in Viktor's clothes for as long as I could remember.
The fear finally hit me then, and my blood turned to ice.
Viktor was here.
Viktor was sitting in a chair in this place in the middle of nowhere and Milo had brought me to him and?—
The hand on my arm shoved me forward. I stumbled, caught myself, and then my knees hit something hard. Another chair. Metal and cold.
"Sit," Milo said.
I sat. Not because I chose to. Because my legs had stopped working.
My hands gripped the edges of the seat, and I shivered, the velvet material of my dress not nearly thick enough to keep me warm. The metal was freezing and slightly rusted, the texture rough under my palms. I focused on the dimensions of the chair. About eighteen inches wide, flat seat, no armrests. The geometry of a thing I could understand in a world that had just become incomprehensible.
Milo's footsteps moved away from me, then stopped. Eight feet, maybe ten. I heard him exhale, low and controlled, and then?—
A click. Something small and electronic.
A camera. He'd turned on a camera.
Oh god.
Video. Audio. Her voice on the recording, screaming. Begging.
I didn't know those words. Couldn't have known them. But something in the click of that device, the deliberate positioning, the way the room had been arranged—chair in the center, witness against the wall, camera rolling—told my body what my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
This was a stage.
And I was the performance.
"Raven Oakley." Viktor's voice came from somewhere in front of me to the righ of the camera. Calm. Conversational. The same measured tone he used when discussing wine shipments or reassigning shifts. "Do you know why you're here?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Swallowed against the thickness in my throat.
"No," I said. And hated how small it sounded.
"You've been listening to things that don't involve you," Viktor said. "For a long time, I think. Maybe since the beginning. Sitting at that piano, playing your music, but listening. You know what we really do at that restaurant, yes? And you've been telling someone else."
"I don't?—"
"The question," Viktor continued, as if I hadn't spoken, "is who. Who do you give it to? Who is your contact?"
The air changed and shifted. Milo was moving toward me.
His hand closed around the back of my neck and tilted my face up. I could feel his breath on my face, warm and even, and for a fractured second I searched it for something—a tremor, a hesitation, some whisper of the man who'd held me last night and told me he loved me.
But there was nothing.
"You heard him."
His voice…I didn't know who this man was.
"Who's your contact?"
"I don't have a contact." My voice came out steady. It had no right to, given that my heart was hammering so hard I could hear my own pulse in my ears, a frantic drumbeat drowning out the subtler sounds I needed. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I tried to get up, and his hand tightened on my neck.
