Page 39 of Bratva Sacrifice

She jabs a finger at me in accusation. “You don’t tell me how to feel,” she says, and her voice is tight with that hope that will ruin her in the end. “You don’t know my family!”

I know them better than she has ever been allowed to do. “You do not know them,” I say, gently. “I have Nicola’s phone. He was a very stupid man; careless, lazy. He kept his passwords saved, not even encrypted. For fuck’s sake, he used his birthday as his lock code.” I scoff. “So yes, koshechka, I know better than you. I know the things he said of you, the things your papa said of you. When I tell you that you should not waste your grief on him, there is reason for it.”

Her eyes glitter. Her chest hitches. She says, as she dashes the back of her hand over her eyes, “I don’t believe you.”

“For what reason should I lie? I do not have to lie to you now, Katya.” Because she is already mine. There is no longer any need for such deceptions.

Her chin firms, notching up in challenge. “Show me, then. Show me, if you’re not lying.”

Fuck. “Koshechka, I will never show you this.” It would kill her, I think. Kill that fragile part of her that still hopes. Hurt her in a way one can only be hurt by someone who is loved. And she does love them, the father and brother who have never deserved this, despite their callous disregard. It is best she knows only the least part of it, so she spends no time agonizing over this. So she wastes no more of her heart upon them.

“Then you’re a liar,” she says, and she dismisses me without another word, storming past me in the full grip of her fury once more, leaving only a trail of pool water in her wake.

∞∞∞

For three days, I see her only on the security feed. She wakes before I do in the morning, and she is asleep before I return. If I allowed such a thing, she would sleep on a couch, since no other bedroom has been made available to her. But she knows I will only carry her back, and the fight isn’t worth the inevitable loss. She swathes herself in her blue jeans, in her thick sweaters, and she buries herself beneath the covers on the opposite side of the bed.

Still she searches for vulnerabilities in my security. Sometimes she tries to engage the staff in conversation, as if by endearing herself to them she might find someone willing to risk their life to set her free. She hunts for loose bars in my fence, for places where the razor wire might be not so thick. She searches rooms for forgotten items, for misplaced things that might aid her escape.

She devotes half of her day to these tasks, like it is a routine she observes. And the rest of the day—

She swims. She wears the bathing suits I had placed in the drawers for her. She eats the meals that are brought to her and scoffs at her plastic silverware, her meat cut up already into bite-sized pieces. She makes herself fruity cocktails. Then she comes inside, still dripping, and finds some new room to wreck. Sometimes she thumbs through books in the library, folding down the corners of pages and handling expensive volumes carelessly in her wet hands. Sometimes she watches TV, turning up the volume so loud she annoys anyone who gets within thirty feet. Sometimes she peppers the staff with questions until they flee from her presence.

She makes a menace of herself like this will induce me to release her. Like this will make me decide she is not worth the trouble she causes. Instead, I watch her antics on the security feed like a glutton. Like I am starved for the sight of her. This is easiest from the security room, when I can easily follow her progress from one camera to the next upon the array of monitors. But sometimes, when I am otherwise engaged in business, I find myself pulling up the feed on my phone, scanning the cameras for her.

Until the day comes that I cannot find her at all. It comes during a fraught online meeting with one of my brigadiers at home in Moscow, who has an enforcer in need of discipline. He has become too proud and too loose with his words, which could easily fall into the wrong ears. This is something I let Anatoli handle on my behalf while I lend only my presence and authority.

While Anatoli doles out a suitable punishment, I search for Katya on the cameras. But there is nothing. She has found some blind spot in them to secret herself away, which is no real problem. I have only to go back through the footage to find her, roll back the timestamps until I can find her last location.

So I cast the footage back and scroll through the cameras, and—there. I see her walking down the hall toward my office. It is usually locked against her, but today it is open because it is being cleaned. She peeks her head inside and ducks in.

Hurriedly, I switch cameras again to the interior of my office. And there she is again, harassing the maid who has come to clean, peppering her with questions, probably, or pleading for help. This camera has no audio—my conversations within my office are private, not to be overheard by anyone—so I cannot hear what she is saying. Eventually, the woman does what all the staff do when Katya is so doggedly persistent. She leaves. Throwing her hands in the air in exasperation and with a beleaguered shake of her head, the woman leaves. And Katya is alone in my office. This, I think, was her plan all along. She knows, now, the staff will not help her. They will only walk away.

She tries my computer first, but she scowls as she cannot get past the login screen. Then she sets about rooting through my drawers. There is nothing much for her to find there. Correspondence in Russian that she cannot read, maybe some account statements. Most of the drawers are locked.

For a moment she wrenches on a locked drawer, pulling with all her strength as if that will allow her to open it. And then, when she is convinced it is not stuck, she pulls something from the pocket of her jeans. A pair of nail clippers?

She manipulates them in her fingers, pulls the hooked file from where it is concealed in the middle. As I watch, she jams it into the drawer’s lock, wiggles it intently. And then the drawer is open.

I sit bolt upright. “Fuck.” The word climbs up my throat before I can claw it back. And I can only watch as Katya—some hours ago, now—rifles through the once-locked drawer.

And finds Nicola’s phone.

Anatoli scowls at me as I rise from my chair, leaving the meeting without a word. I don’t know yet where she has gone, but I fast-forward the footage as I stalk out of the room, prepared to find her. I watch her punch in Nicola’s lock code—his birthday—and curse myself for having told this to her days ago. Foolishly, I thought the locked door of my office and the locked drawer of my desk would prevent her from using it.

She make several calls. Probably to the police. Again and again she dials, and stares incredulously at the phone as the call is cut short. I pay them to ignore me. I would have told her if she had asked, but probably she would not believe this.

Another call, probably to her papa. It ends within a few minutes, and Katya stares down at the phone in her hand, brows drawn. I think I see the moment she realizes she knows no other phone numbers to call. The police will not help her. Her papa will not help her. Her brother is dead.

There is no one else she knows well enough to have memorized a phone number.

She sits down in the chair behind my desk, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Her fingers scroll through the contents of Nicola’s phone. And she begins to read.

Fuck. I am walking the house aimlessly, furiously fast-forwarding through the footage that shows Katya’s swift descent into despair. She reads—and reads—and reads. Every horrible thing her brother thought of her; his conversations with their papa. And then at last the phone falls to the desk, and Katya buries her head in her hands. Her loose hair obscures her face as her shoulders shake.

Gradually she lets herself slide off of the chair altogether, as if even her spine deserts her in these heart-wrenching moments. She never left my office. She only slid out of view of the camera. Like a wounded animal, she hides from everyone, secreting herself away behind my desk.

I can hear her sniffles as I approach my office. Raw, aching. The sounds of despair. She struggles to quiet herself at the sound of my footsteps in the hall. She does not want to be discovered.