Birds of Paradise

by Anne Malcom

  I raised my brow. “Would that have changed anything?” I asked, picking at his excuses like his excuses were picking at the flesh that remained on my bones.

  He gritted his teeth. “No,” he admitted.

  I nodded but didn’t speak.

  This forced him to carry on, because it was becoming apparent he wasn’t content in the silence that came after heartbreak.

  “My family are much like yours, Elizabeth. My father was a direct descendant of the men who started my hometown with their blood and pain and misery. Blood and pain and misery was in our blood. It hardened, over the generations, became something different. My father made it into something different. He had businesses, friends, connections, everywhere somehow. Don’t ask me how because still, to this day, with all the resources at my disposal, I can’t pinpoint how he did it.”

  He watched me, waited. Again, I gave him nothing.

  “But it isn’t the how that’s important,” he continued. “Never. It is what it is. We Russians do live by that. We live by a lot of things. ‘Live like wolves, howl like a wolf.’ It’s a popular Russian idiom. I mean it to say my family are predators, carnivores. But still pack animals. Even I am somehow pulled to them, despite my desire for solitude.”

  He was watching for reaction.

  I gave him none.

  “So my father assigned tasks for each of us in order to reach the goal. Power, the ultimate goal. Escape from the motherland, of course. The land made us what we were, but Father despised it. My task was to come here first, woo and marry a pre-chosen woman.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “A woman with connections my father could exploit.” Lukyan’s voice softened slightly, as if he noticed the change in my heartbeat.

  But it didn’t make a difference to the impact of his following words.

  “I did so. It wasn’t a hardship. She was an attractive and dangerous woman. Death followed her. There is nothing more to say than I was a loyal pack animal.” He paused. “And I served my purpose. The connection, her family in particular, had connections to the right people in your American government. We gained citizenship, and then we were promptly erased. From anything official, anyway. I served my purpose. My father had eyes on my wife. I had finally seen her for what she was, so I gave her willingly, gladly. Of course, I had to stay married, as was part of the plan. And my father too, stayed with my mother, at least in title. It matters not to me.”

  I itched to ask the why of it. Of a lot of it. Why his mother, seemingly without debate or fight, just accepted this life that had been forced upon her.

  Did it break her? Her husband so easily throwing her aside but making her stand there, at the side, not setting her free? Or was she already broken? Did she not care? Did she, like the son she raised, have an ice-cold heart, if she had a heart at all?

  But then again, it didn’t really matter.

  Coldhearted women and heartbroken women were much the same creatures. They lived with pain, endured it, because they had to, because it was part of them. Because there was no other choice.

  “I removed myself from the plan, from the pack. But of course, he still had sway. She had sway. She’d given him instruments in order to play me. And I have no morals, no real qualms about who held the power. So I helped. I was presented with my father’s problem, and I offered a solution.”

  I’d never heard him say so much in my life.

  I’d never wanted to cut out his tongue more in my existence.

  “You, or more accurately, your death was the solution. It was a rather simple plan. No complications. Until everything changed. Until you changed everything.”

  I listened to the entire story without a reaction. Not a single intake of breath, not a muttered curse, or a scream.

  Nothing.

  I waited until he’d spoken those last words, and then I waited until a long time after that. Until they’d settled, ripped at my insides, tearing at the flesh to find a place to reside inside my bones.

  “So what now?” I asked blankly.

  He flinched. Actually flinched at my dead and empty tone. It was the voice of a corpse. If dead things could speak. But they couldn’t. So I guessed I wasn’t.

  “What now?” he repeated, obviously shaken by my response, or lack thereof.

  I nodded. “Yes, what follows this?” I asked. “Do you finally complete your contract now that you’ve successfully deceived me? Now that you’ve cut me open, found out how I work, ripped me apart to figure out how I stand, played with me and every single one of my broken pieces. Now do you finally kill me? I will say it’s a long game, even for you. Effective, surely. I guess I wouldn’t expect anything less. You’re nothing if not dedicated to your work.”

  “You’re n-not—” he stuttered, tripped over his words in a way that was so unlike Lukyan.

  But I didn’t know him. I knew what he wanted me to see.

  “You stopped being work the minute you leaned over and turned on your lamp instead of screaming when I stood inside your bedroom. When you invited death in with your eyes. That’s when you stopped being work and started being life. My life.”

  “Spare me,” I hissed, anger hiding the way my voice shook. “I don’t need empty words now. You’ve made sure I know how hollow everything’s been. Mission accomplished. Is it going to be a bullet to the head?” I asked conversationally. “Or will you slit my throat, watch me bleed out like a stuck pig? Then again, you’ve been watching me bleed out since the moment you stepped into my home all those months ago. So maybe you’ll go the strangulation route. You do like to toy with that. Maybe you won’t stop this time. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  I paced the room, itching to fling all the frames from their perches, destroy him like he destroyed me.

  “Poetic too,” I mused. “Yes, if those are going to be the choices, then it’ll be the latter.” I gave him a questioning glance. “If I’m entitled to a request, which I think I am. You’ll give me that, no? But I guess it won’t matter, in the end. Because I’ll be dead, and it doesn’t really matter how I got there, because dead is dead, right?”

  He gaped at me, openly gaped. It wasn’t a slack-jawed, unattractive expression like other people wore it. His mouth barely opened, eyes barely widened, but his whole aura radiated with something, something so human—helplessness.

  He opened his mouth, as if to argue his own words, as if to argue nature. Then he closed it again. “Dead is dead,” he said finally, voice little more than a rasp.

  It hung in the air, the echo of the words ringing in my ears as they sank back down into the deadness between us.

  “Was this just another risk?” I asked, sounding calmer than I felt.

  “Everything with you is a risk,” Lukyan said, and I found that I sounded calmer than he did.

  There was no victory in this, not at that moment. There would be no victories in all the moments after, either.

  “No, you showing me, letting me see that you were the one responsible for the hit in the first place, that was another experiment to get me… well, yes?” I asked. Or maybe pleaded. “To get me mad enough that I forget the overarching shadow over my life for the past year and a half and just storm outside like some petulant teenager. That it’d cure me, your betrayal?”

  “No,” he answered immediately, not measuring his words, not testing the perfect response. “I admit that it came to mind when I realized what the truth would do.” He paused. “But no, it wasn’t a plan to get you to leave. If I was certain that that would be the case, maybe I never would’ve told you. I simply didn’t think that far into it.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, right. The man who analyzes every aspect of his life and everyone he comes in contact with—down to his gardener and drycleaner—just failed to think of that,” I hissed. “I may have been a fool this entire time, trusting you, but I’m not an idiot.”

  “You’re neither a fool nor an idiot,” he replied. “Yet I am both.”

  His words rang true, as d
id the guilt that saturated them.

  “If you want sympathy, you’re looking in the wrong direction,” I told him honestly.

  His gaze was locked with mine. “I want nothing but you.”

  I laughed again. “And isn’t that funny. That’s one thing you can’t have.”

  That was a lie.

  But I walked away on it anyway.

  17

  My fury was so all-consuming, so visceral, I scared myself with it. I’d stomped to the foyer with a red film covering my eyes, the cool handle of the doorknob on my palm not enough to wake me up to what I was doing. I was half surprised it didn’t melt in my grip.

  It was only when the biting midnight breeze whipped through the fabric of my clothes, the hollowness of my bones, that fury gave way to comprehension.

  I glanced down at my bare foot and the surface it was pressed to. The stone. Outside the door.

  I wanted to move it. Wrench it from the dangerous deadly spot and bring it back to safety. But as more unease and panic snaked up my ankle, I realized that there was no safety inside for me, or any of my limbs.

  Only deception.

  Lies.

  Death?

  He’d lied about everything, so maybe now that the truth had been unleashed, that clock, the one counting down my heartbeats, maybe that had stopped.

  There was something I didn’t tell Lukyan about my life before. About my life after I broke, well and truly. When Christopher considered my barren womb and shredded soul as a job well done and cast me off to live with it. To wither away and die with it.

  Lukyan knew what happened after.

  He knew I changed everything about my identity, buried the woman—if that’s really what I was—from before and sequestered myself in a rickety farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He believed that all happened when I was shown that the world of freedom was just as suffocating as a cage.

  I created my own cage.

  He knew this.

  But what he didn’t know, what I didn’t educate him on, was the fact I didn’t run immediately. Didn’t grasp onto my newfound and bloodstained illusion of freedom and leave it all behind.

  No, I went right back to where it all started.

  I had to ring the bell. I didn’t have a key.

  I didn’t have anything, actually. Just the clothes on my back and the duffel full of money that one of Christopher’s goons had thrust at me while Christopher sat behind his desk, watching me with self-satisfaction bordered with boredom.

  “Consider it a severance,” he said, tapping on his keyboard, only half paying attention to his wife.

  The mother of the child he’d murdered.

  I eyed the letter opener on his desk, a few inches away from his wrist. Sharp. Always sharp. Everything in this house was kept that way. Made to make sure it could cut, wound, kill on command.

  My mind wandered to the idea of darting forward—neither of them would expect it—and grasping the weapon in my hands, implanting it in his eyeball and watching the blood pour out. Hear the crushing of his flesh as he struggled.

  They’d kill me, obviously. Most likely I’d have a bullet in the back of my head before I watched him die.

  That should’ve been motivation enough, the impending death. I craved it. Yet I was too cowardly to seek it out myself.

  Just do it, a voice in my mind coaxed. Your daughter needs to be avenged. You owe her that.

  But I stayed still. Because I had no other choice. Because as much as I wanted to have Christopher’s blood on my hands, as much as I wanted the cold and satisfying relief of the grave, I didn’t want it to come from them. I wouldn’t let the people who’d controlled my life—if that’s what it was—determine my death.

  So I was silent.

  “It’s generous,” he continued, barely glancing up. He was comfortable in his position, because he knew I wasn’t a threat. He made me that way. “You could’ve gotten a coffin. Count yourself lucky.”

  Lucky.

  The word bounced around in my head, shattering pieces of my skull with the force of it.

  He glanced up, eyes filling with that detached sadistic affection he had for me and my suffering.

  “You’re smart, Elizabeth. Despite your many misgivings. So I know you won’t do anything as stupid as open that mouth. It would, in my eyes, consequently end you in the same position as when you tried to take that extended vacation.”

  My hands shook with the mere mention of it, my wrists burning with such intensity that I had to glance down at them to make sure no one had put on steel cuffs when I wasn’t looking.

  There was nothing there.

  Nothing visible, at least.

  The cuffs would always be there.

  He smiled and glanced back to his iPad, waving at the man who shoved a bag at me.

  I took it out of reflex more than anything else.

  Then I was dismissed.

  I let myself be. Walked out of the house that I had dreamed of escaping. Without one word. Without an ounce of fight.

  And then I stood in the middle of the street, clutching the bag, staring up at the ugly world around me, felt the weight of the crushing buildings falling down on me.

  And I walked.

  Thirty-six blocks.

  It took a long time. My steps were slow, hindered by the shooting pain in my abdomen, from the wounds that remained stitched but somehow still raw and bleeding at the same time.

  I fostered a grotesque hope that that pain would always be there, that I’d never heal. That I’d be given one tangible and wretched thing to show that she had been there. That I didn’t dream her up. That she was something.

  Some point during my trek, I’d stopped still, in the middle of the sidewalk. Not from pain, but from a rogue but visceral emotion that worked as the equivalent of a brick wall.

  It wasn’t sorrow finally hitting me, catching up with me as I hobbled away from the corpse of my previous self.

  It was hatred. Pure and blinding hatred for the people around me. The ones smiling into their phones, or laughing with their friends. Pushing strollers. Living.

  All of them oblivious.

  I had a sudden but real urge to scream at them, to hurt them. Do something to rip a jagged and ugly hole in their normalcy to show them reality. The ugly one. To push them into the abyss where I lived.

  I wanted them all hurt with a passion so real that if I had some sort of weapon, I might’ve spilled blood.

  But the broken pieces of my soul would only draw my blood, so I found myself walking on.

  To my childhood home.

  The doors stared at me. Always, doors seemed to stare at me. Taunt me with their ability to take people places. Lock them in. Let them out.

  The housekeeper answered.

  One I didn’t recognize.

  Of course I didn’t recognize her. I’d not set foot in the family home since my wedding day two years ago. My mother would’ve gone through at least twenty maids by that time.

  “Yes?” she asked, not an ounce of recognition on her face.

  I cleared my throat. It scratched with the motion. “I’m here to—” I cut myself off, not quite sure what to say. My voice was scratchy, raw, my throat unused to forming words.

  I hadn’t spoken since I’d left the hospital.

  Empty.

  We might’ve stood like that for a while, the maid confused, scared most likely, and me mute and useless.

  “Vivian, I asked you to clean the floors, not smother a dirty mop over them,” a sharp voice penetrated the awkwardness of the exchange.

  The maid jumped at the voice, glancing backward and then back to me.

  “Well, by all means, stand with the door open, and do nothing that you’re employed to do.” The voice was closer now, and both Vivian and I were paralyzed by it.

  The door opened wider and the maid had no choice but to scoot out of the way to reveal my mother. She hadn’t changed, of course; her plastic surgeon was paid handsomely to make sure of that.
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  But it wasn’t the Botox that stopped her face from forming any kind of expression at seeing her daughter for the first time since some party a year ago. Or maybe it was longer. Who knew. She would’ve known about me. About everything. That’s what my mother did: collected information, stored it away like ammunition, to offer to my father during wartime. And more importantly, peacetime. More blood was shed under the guise of peace than any other.

  I knew that because it was blood shed from my very own veins. My mother knew this. She would’ve designed it to be so, for some reason or another. Some slight increase in their standing.

  She’d literally stand on my corpse just to get a little higher on the totem pole.

  She already had.

  “Elizabeth,” she said, nodding as if I was the wife of someone she didn’t rightly like but had to be polite to nonetheless. I guessed that was what I was. “What are you doing here?” She looked me up and down. “And looking so… disheveled.” Her tone reeked with distaste.

  I hadn’t even glanced in a mirror, or any form of reflective surface since I’d left the hospital. I’d barely realized what clothes I’d thrown on that morning. They wouldn’t have matched, because I barely knew how to dress myself. I hadn’t chosen what went on my body—what went inside my body—in two years.

  My mother was the cruelest and most definitive mirror known to man. But I’d looked at her enough to know I didn’t live up to standard.

  “Disheveled?” I repeated on a whisper that was little more than a croak.

  She nodded, folding her arms. “It’s not seemly. Not beholden of your image, or ours, for that matter.” Her gaze went behind me, most likely looking for security detail, or guard detail. On the extremely rare occasions I did leave the house without Christopher, I had them following me.

  There was no one now. And I felt naked. Raw.

  “You’re alone?” She froze. “You didn’t…” That was the first time I’d heard my mother fail to complete a sentence.

  I realized with her shock that she hadn’t heard. She almost certainly knew about my baby. She’d known I was pregnant. Even sent a card.

  Best Wishes.