An image of my mom bending over me, smiling with tears in her eyes, flashes through my mind. I blink at the pain that accompanies that image. The two—the visual and the emotion—are inseparable. The hurt is so visceral that I feel it like a serrated blade in my chest.
Oh, Tatiana. He played you.
The pain is excruciating. I place a palm over my heart where an invisible hand drives the jagged knife deeper.
What’s happening to me?
Another picture stabs into my mind, a car turned onto its roof, swallowed by flames. And another. A hospital room. Jazz sitting white-faced next to the bed. A stuffed dinosaur propped up in a chair.
Get your slut of a daughter out of my sight before I kill her.
I see myself knocking on my father’s study door, cupping my stomach where my secret is growing. I see my mom as she takes the necklace from around her neck and pushes it into my palm, her sad eyes filled with love as she closes my fingers around it.
Flames.
Cars.
My back.
The whip in my father’s hand.
What is his name?
Leander pinning me down.
His fucking name, or I’ll beat it out of you.
I slam my hands over my ears, the cross pressed against my temple, trying to block out the images. But they keep on hitting like a hailstorm, filling my brain with broken shards of damaged pieces. Sharp and piercing, they cut where they land, maiming and drawing blood. Yet slowly but surely the pieces snap together like the shattering of a window played in reverse, its dirty, cracked glass reflecting a horrible story.
And then I remember.
Chapter
Forty
Tatiana
* * *
I’m back in the warehouse where the masked men held me prisoner. Oxo has just helped me to get cleaned up and dressed. She opens a back door that leads from the bathroom. Hulk pushes me into a courtyard with a concrete floor fenced in by barbed wire. A lonely tree stands in a circle of soil in the middle, the branches bare. Judging by the warehouses in the distance, we’re in an industrial area outside the city. Overhead, the blue sky is cloudless and cheery.
Another man waits next to an SUV. Like Hulk, he’s dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt. He’s not wearing a ski mask, but something about him is familiar. It’s the smell of his cheap cologne, I realize when we get closer. It’s the man I christened Cheap.
I’m bundled into the back between the two men. Another one, who I baptized Smiley for his missing front tooth, drives. They all carry guns, which they leave in the car when we stop outside the bank, probably because we’ll have to go through scanners and a body search.
Hulk steps out of the vehicle and offers me a hand while scouting the surroundings. He’s not being polite. After starving me for days, not to mention the drug Oxo injected me with, he’s just making sure I don’t fall in case my legs give out. Cheap follows, giving me a handbag that matches my shoes.
Hulk turns me to face him. “One wrong move, Tatiana, and it’s you and that trunk until you rot inside it. No one will ever find you. Understand?”
Swallowing, I nod.
He escorts me across the road. Cheap acts as a bodyguard.
I tilt my face up at the building. The name is written across the front in golden cutout letters. The shadows those letters throw on the wall lean toward eleven o’clock. The black building with its golden fixtures is impressive. It sparks a sudden recollection in which I see myself walking down the sidewalk to the big smoked-glass doors, wearing a pair of jeans with sneakers and my hair tucked under a baseball cap.
“Focus, Tatiana.” Hulk flicks his fingers in front of my face. “I’m your fiancé.” He throws a thumb over his shoulder. “And this is your personal bodyguard. Don’t worry about names. I’ll introduce us when it’s necessary. All you have to say is that you want to give both of us access to your safe deposit box. It holds your passport, among other things, which I may want to fetch when we’ll travel overseas on our honeymoon.” He grins. “Plus, you never know what may happen. In the unlikely event that both of us are killed in a plane crash, you want your bodyguard to have access to your birth certificate and personal documents. Did you get all that?”
“Yes,” I say, doing my best to concentrate and remember what he said.
