The lower level is quiet, stone-walled, and temperature controlled.
I’ve brought men down here.
I’ve left men down here until they were ready to answer questions they’d come in swearing they’d never answer.
I stop outside the cell door.
I still remember the way she didn’t look scared of me at all when we nabbed her.
When she saw me, she looked shocked for a moment.
That was fucking all.
She looked at my wrist and her face went through something I couldn’t fully read.
The shock first, then a stillness, and then it cracked open into something that wasn’t fear.
She was not what I was expecting at all.
Not like I know what I was expecting.
Zayka.
She’d been frozen solid then she went feral.
The contradiction had been more interesting than anything that happened in the six hours before it.
I open the door.
She’s in the chair where I had her placed, wrists zip-tied to the arms, ankles secured.
She’s been there for hours and she looks it.
Hair loose and tangled, dark circles under her eyes deep enough to be bruises, a red mark across her left cheekbone from the struggle in Vienna that I find I don’t like looking at.
Her jacket is torn at the shoulder.
She was asleep when the door opened.
She isn’t now.
The second she sees me her entire face changes.
Her chin comes up. Her teeth show, not a smile, nothing close to a smile, the expression of something that has decided it would rather bite than flinch.
She strains forward against the zip-ties so hard the chair legs lift slightly off the floor.
“You.” The word is pure venom. “Untie me. Untie me right now and face me like?—”
“Good morning,” I say.
“I will kill you.” She’s pulling at the ties, the chair scraping. “I will kill you, I will find a way, I swear to God, you murdered him, you stood there and you?—”
She thinks I did it personally.It has to be the tattoo. She saw the tattoo and she drew the line straight to me.
She doesn’t know that every male born to direct Volkov blood carries the same mark.
My father had it.
