She called, she had a plan, she was already moving, then I went silent and I’ve been silent ever since.
Nadia will be out of her mind by now.
Pacing her apartment in Budapest with the plants and the terrible television, checking her phone every four minutes, making tea she won’t drink.
She’ll be trying to figure out what happened.
She’ll be terrified.
I’m so sorry, Nadia.
A sound climbs my throat and I press my mouth shut and breathe through my nose until it goes back down.
You’re not going to cry.
There’s no point in crying.
There’s no one here to see it and it won’t change anything.
If I start I don’t know if I’ll stop, and I need to be present, I need to be sharp, I need to be thinking about whether there’s any way out of this that I haven’t thought of yet.
Except every time I try to think about ways out my mind slides sideways to him.
To the cell.
To the moment he cut the ties and stepped back and I stood up and he looked at me with that raised eyebrow like he was genuinely curious what I was going to do.
And I charged him.
I put everything I had into it, every bit of hatred and grief and two sleepless days and the sound of that one shot in the apartment, everything, and he caught me like I was nothing.
Like I weighed nothing.
Like my absolute maximum effort was mildly interesting to him.
He pressed me against the wall and my body stopped working correctly.
Don’t.I shift in the chair.Don’t think about that.
But my body, apparently, has its own agenda entirely separate from my self-respect, because the memory of his arm locked around me and the weight of him behind me and the way his voice sounded when he saidzaykaright against my ear is doing something that I despise with every functioning part of my brain.
My nipples pull tight against the fabric of my shirt and I look down at my own chest with an expression of absolute betrayal.
He killed Papa.
He stood in that room and gave the order and Papa fell and I am not allowed to feel anything about his hands except hatred.
I am not allowed to feel anything about him at all.
I’m saved from having to argue further with myself by the sound of the lock.
The door opens and my heart seizes so hard I make a sound, a small desperate sound that I hate myself for, and I grip the chair arms and wait for the flat grey eyes and the serpent tattoo and the quiet voice telling me my day is up.
A different man walks in.
Not the man with the tattoo.
Not either of the other two I saw briefly when they brought me in.
