"Viktor I’ll handle personally."
He nods once. Steps over the body on his way to the door. Starts dialing before he's cleared the threshold.
I stand alone in the study.
The blood is spreading across the floor, finding the grain of the hardwood, following it the way water follows a path of least resistance. It will stain. My father would have had the boards replaced. I'll have them replaced too, after.
After I bring her home.
I check the Makarov. Check my phone. No calls. No messages. Nothing from the clinic, the townhouse, the cameras.
She's been gone over an hour.
If they took her from the alley between the clinic and the laundromat, the van had a head start. Sixty minutes, maybe more. Seventy-mile radius. Two hundred warehouses. A thousand basements. More empty buildings than I can search in a day.
I don't need a day.
I need Viktor to make a call. A man who takes something doesn't take it to keep it. He takes it to trade it. Viktor will call me because the whole point of taking her is to make me answer, and the whole point of making me answer is to negotiate terms that put him in the chair.
My phone will ring. When it does, I will listen. I will note every word, every pause, every sound in the background that tells me where she is. I will be calm. I will be everything my father trained me to be.
And then I will go and get her back, and kill every man who touched her.
I walk out of the study and close the door behind me.
Sadie
I count the drips.
There's a pipe in the corner of the ceiling, rusted where it meets the wall, and every eleven seconds a bead of water gathers at the joint and falls to the concrete below. I've been counting long enough to know the interval. Eleven seconds. Consistent. The only reliable thing in this room.
My wrists are zip-tied behind the chair I was unceremoniously dumped in. My ankles are bound to the legs with something thicker, maybe cord. The tape over my mouth was removed an hour ago, or what I think was an hour ago, by a man who opened the door, looked at me, and pulled it off without speaking. He left a bottle of water on the table against the far wall. He didn't untie my hands so I could drink it.
The water sits there. I can see the condensation on the plastic, the small beads sliding down the side. My mouth is so dry that my tongue feels like a foreign object.
I try to flex my fingers behind the chair. The zip tie bites and my hands have gone past pins and needles into something deeper, a numbness that worries the clinical part of my brain. The part that never shuts off, even now. Especially now. Reduced circulation. If the tie is tight enough to compress the radial artery, I could lose function in my fingers within hours.
I stop testing it. Conserve energy. Think.
I breathe the way I breathe when my sugar drops. Four seconds in. Six seconds out. The rhythm is the only tool I have, and I hold onto it the way I held onto Nick's voice the last time I was on a floor with the world going dark.
Nick.
I let myself think about him for exactly ten seconds. His hand on the back of my neck in the morning. The weight of his arm across my waist at three a.m. when he shifts in his sleep and pulls me closer without waking up.
Ten seconds. That's all I give myself because anything more and the panic will find a way in, and I can't afford panic right now. Panic burns glucose. Panic is a luxury for people whose bodies don't betray them on a cellular level.
I don't know what time it is. They took my watch. My phone is in my bag, and my bag is on the asphalt outside the staff entrance at the clinic, along with my insulin pen, my meter, my glucose tabs... I’m hoping one of them will have found it by now. She knows I don't go anywhere without my kit. She'll have told Dr. Mehta, and Dr. Mehta will have called Nick, and Nick will already be doing whatever it is that Nick does when the world takes something from him.
Two weeks ago it was Jason, and I told myself Nick would come. I was right.
The difference is that last time, I didn't know how long I had. This time I do. I had my morning dose at breakfast. Toast and peanut butter and juice at the island while Nick read something on his phone and Dmitri waited in the hall. My long-acting insulin is good for roughly twenty-four hours.
I know the math the way I know my own name. I've known it since I was nine years old, sitting in Dr. Patterson's office in Millbrook while my mother held my hand and the doctorexplained, in the careful voice adults use when they're delivering permanent news to a child, that my pancreas had stopped working and was never going to work again.
My mother cried in the car afterward. I didn't. I was thinking about the numbers. I liked that there were numbers. Numbers made sense. Numbers could be managed.
Numbers are all I have right now.
