I asked Dmitri if that ended it.
He looked at me with that flat, careful expression he wears when he's deciding how much truth a person can hold. Then he said, "It ended the conversation. It didn't end the problem."
The problem is sitting in the next room right now, drinking something from a glass and waiting for Nick to call back with an answer they both know he's never going to give.
My fingers are numb. I've stopped trying to flex them. The zip tie has been on long enough that the numbness has spread to my wrists, a cold absence that my brain keeps registering as wrong.
I think about Nick's hands.
I'm coming.
The metallic taste is stronger now. I swallow against it and the swallow is thick, effortful. My tongue feels swollen. My head feels heavy.
My mothers voice comes into my head,Sadie Elizabeth, your body does not forgive, and it does not forget, so you cannot afford to be casual. Ever. Do you hear me?
I hear my mother's voice the way I hear Nick's. Two anchors. One gone. One coming.
The door opens.
Viktor steps in. He's holding the phone again. He looks at me with that same assessing expression, then glances at the water bottle, then back at me.
"Your boyfriend hasn't called back," he says, tutting like this is something inside my control. His English is accented differently than Nick's. Thicker. Less polished. He speaks it the way aman speaks a language he learned out of necessity and never bothered to refine. "I expected him to be faster."
I don't respond.
Viktor pulls the second chair from against the wall and sits across from me. He crosses one leg over the other. He's wearing good shoes. Polished leather, the kind that cost more than my monthly rent at the old apartment. He's dressed like a man going to a business meeting, not a man holding a woman in a warehouse.
"You're afraid," he says. It's an observation, not a question.
"I'm a Type 1 diabetic without insulin." My voice comes out rougher than I want it to. "I'm not afraid. I know too much to be afraid."
He studies me for a moment. Something shifts in his face, a flicker that might be respect, or might just be surprise that I'm talking.
"My brother chose well for his son," he says. "You have teeth."
"Your brother didn’t choose me for his son. Nick chose me."
"Yes." He says it simply. "And he is taking over a family he is too distracted to lead. That is the reality, Sadie. I don't expect you to agree with me. I expect you to survive this, and when you do, I expect you to understand that what happened here was necessary."
"Necessary." The word tastes bitter. "You kidnapped me to steal a position from your nephew. You're withholding my medication to force his hand. If I go into DKA while you're waiting for your phone to ring, I could die in this room. Then he will kill you anyway."
"You won't die." He says it with the flat certainty of a man who has calculated the margins and decided they're acceptable. "Kolya will call. He'll agree, because the alternativeis unacceptable to him. And then you'll go home and continue playing house with my nephew, and everyone will move forward."
"You don't know him as well as you think you do."
Viktor smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes. "I've known him since the day he was born. I held him at his christening. I taught him to shoot when he was eight. I know exactly who my nephew is, and I know exactly what he'll do when the woman he loves is on a clock he can't stop."
"Then you know he's not going to give you what you want."
The smile fades. He looks at me for a long beat, then stands, picks up the water bottle, and holds it to my mouth again. I drink. Two swallows. He pulls it away.
"We'll see," he says, and walks out.
The door closes. The lock turns.
I sit in the silence and listen to my body's slow accounting. The headache is worse. The metallic taste has spread from the back of my throat to the front of my tongue. My vision isn't blurry yet, but there's a softness at the periphery that shouldn't be there, a gauze over the edges of the room that tells me my blood sugar is moving past uncomfortable and toward dangerous.
I have hours. Maybe. If I stay still, if I don't panic, if my body cooperates. I have hours before the vomiting starts and the breathing changes and the acid builds in my blood until my organs start to curdle.
