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.
