Page 7

I try the door and find a man at a table with a bottle of vodka, and another on the sofa with his boots off. The one on the sofa sees me first and opens his mouth. I shoot him before he can call out. The second man throws the table up between us, the vodka bottle shattering against the wall, and charges.

He’s big and fast, tackling me into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He gets one hand around my throat and the other is scrabbling for my gun arm. For two seconds, he’s a genuine problem.

Then I unsheathe my knife and plunge it into his throat.

He slides down the wall slowly, smearing blood, with an expression of profound surprise. He stares blank-eyed at the television while the announcer celebrates a goal with great enthusiasm.

The staircase creaks under my weight. There’s no avoiding it, but nobody comes to investigate, which confirms what I already suspected from watching the house. These men are not the brightest bullets in the chamber.

The upper floor is three doors. First is empty. Second is empty. Third is a bathroom, door half open, with a man inside who has chosen an inconvenient moment to be indisposed.

He looks up at me with an almost comical expression of surprise with his pants around his ankles.

He reaches for his gun, which is sitting on the vanity, but then changes his mind and fumbles for his pants. He reaches for one after the other, his ass rising and falling from the shitter.

I prop my shoulder against the doorjamb and watch. When he sees my mocking smile, he gives up on both and lunges for me with both hands and a snarl of anger.

I shoot him in the face and move on.

The basement door is at the end of the hallway, beneath the stairs. I’m a few steps down when the man coming up finally registers that something has gone wrong tonight.

He raises his gun and opens his mouth to shout for his dead colleagues, and I shoot him through the chest twice. He folds, and I step over him.

Below, women start screaming.

Before I can make it down to the basement, they start coming up, their faces white and eyes blind with terror.

I plant myself on the stairs, and I don’t let them move past me. I catch each one by the wrist or shoulders, turning faces toward me one by one, methodical, looking for pale hair and green eyes.

“Viktoriya? Viktoriya?”

The name means nothing to the hysterical women, and none of them are the one I’m looking for. One girl claws at my hand before I release her, and another goes limp in my grasp and crumples to her knees.

I haul her up and shake her until she opens her eyes. “Hey. Hey.”

She’s not the woman I’m looking for. I shove her up the stairs to make room for the others.

The last girl elbows me in the ribs as payback for grasping her chin and turning her face side to side, then she takes the stairs two at a time without looking back.

The screaming thins. The stairs empty.

I look down into the dark at the bottom, dread settling like a lead weight in my belly.

This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to wrap a dead girl in a blanket, lay her on the back seat of my car, and drive her back to her loved ones. Not to be reunited with them, but to be buried. It won’t be the last, either.

The smell hits me before the dark does. Unwashed bodies, human waste, and the sourness of people kept in a small space for too long. I’ve encountered it before, but it doesn’t get easier to breathe.

The basement is low-ceilinged and unfinished, its bare concrete walls sweating with damp. A single bulb hangs from the ceiling, casting more shadow than light. There’s rubbish everywhere. Food wrappers, empty water bottles, and a bucket in the corner that has been used as a toilet and not emptied recently enough. There are thin mattresses on the floor, but no pillows or blankets.

I stand in the middle of it and look around. All this squalor, and yet these were the lucky ones. They were kept for a bride auction and not the whorehouse. If it were the latter, they would have already been put to work.

In the silence of the basement, I’m nearly resigned to going back upstairs and searching the backyard for a shallow grave.

Then I see her.

She’s in the far corner where the light doesn’t quite reach. She’s pale, and there are circles under her eyes so dark that they look bruised. Her hair that was gleaming in her photos is tangled with dust and sweat. She’s wearing a sweatshirt three sizes too large and a pair of dirty jeans, and she’s holding an unconscious girl in her lap.

She looks wrecked, and nothing like her bold, defiant selfies.