“Miranda.” He leans back in his chair, looking me over. “You look terrible.”
I don’t say anything.
“My boys paid you a visit last night.” His eyes settle on my face, on the bruising, on the cut above my brow. “Looks like they were thorough.” He folds the top of the paper bag over, unhurried. “Where are they, by the way? They haven’t checked in.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They left me for dead, I think.”
His eyes tighten around the corners. “Is that so?”
“I’m not here about them.” I meet his gaze. “I’m here to settle the debt. I want it finished.”
He studies me for a moment longer, and then the amusement comes back, easier than before. “You expect me to believe you have the money?”
“I don’t.”
His smile widens, and he pats his knee. “Then come and sit down. We can discuss terms.”
“I’m not sitting on your lap, Kozlov.”
“Miranda.” He says my name patiently. “You came to me. That means you’ve run out of roads. We both know what I want.”
“I know what you want,” I tell him. “The answer is still no. But I have a different offer.” I hold his gaze and say it plainly. “You can have my kidney.”
The room goes quiet.
He blinks once. The paper bag crinkles under his hand.
“What?” His voice is filled with disbelief.
“One kidney. I know you have the contacts. I know how it works. I’m a nurse, after all.” My voice stays level. Everything is level now, flat and gray and very far away, like standing at the edge of something and looking down and feeling nothing. “Sell it. That clears the debt. We’re done.”
He stares at me. “You’re serious.”
“I’ve been paying you for over a year. We both know I will never be able to pay off the debt. I have nothing left to give you except this.” The word comes up from somewhere deep and true. “I’m tired. Take the kidney. We call it even.”
He looks at me the way you look at a small animal that has, against all expectation, bitten you.
“And if I put you on that table,” he says, his voice dropping, “and I don’t stop at one?”
I smile lightly, a self-deprecatory smile. “Then that’s what happens.”
He can kill me or he can let me go, but either way, this is the offer because I am not getting on my knees for him, not for any number, not for anything. That part of me is still intact. Everything else has gone quiet, but that part is still standing, the last thing standing, and I will not move it.
Kozlov watches me for a long moment.
His finger taps once against the desk.
“A kidney from a young, healthy female.” He says it slowly, turning it over, checking it against some internal ledger. “No history of substance abuse.” He tilts his head. “That covers the principal.”
“Then we have a deal.”
The relief that moves through me is staggering. As he beams at me, I know he won’t let me walk out of here afterward. Whytake one kidney when he can take two? But they’ll put me under first. I’ll be asleep before the worst of it.
I’ll close my eyes, and it will be over, and I won’t have to keep getting up and doing it again. I won’t have to keep throwing everything I have at a life that takes and takes from me and gives nothing back.
A quiet smile crosses my face.
Kozlov reaches for his phone. “I’ll have someone prepare a room.”
