I missed something. We must have been followed, when we left Konstantin’s mansion. Or word had gotten out about a half-naked woman showing up at the hotel. I should never have let Gabriella talk me into this place; we shouldn’t have stayed there so long….
This is all my fault. I was meant to be protecting her but I’d lost my edge. I’d gotten lost in a dream where I could have some sort of life with her. And now I’d lost her, probably forever.
I stood there in numb shock, ignoring the chef and the hotel manager who were yelling for an explanation. If I’d been able to see past them and out into the lobby, I’d have seen the final elevator arrive. I’d have seen a room service waiter push his trolley, its plates sticky with maple syrup and strawberries, out through a side door to the parking lot and into a waiting van.
Gabriella
I was standing...no, I was dangling. Slumped over, my knees slack and my head lolling down. Why hadn’t I fallen over? It would feel so good...a split-second of pain as my head hit the floor and then blessed sleep. Concrete would feel like a feather mattress, I was so tired—
Water hit me in the face and I woke up fast, spluttering and coughing. I discovered that I hadn’t fallen over because my hands were tied above my head, my arms already aching from bearing my weight. I managed to get my feet under me and straighten my legs. Where was I? Back in Konstantin’s dungeon? I remembered the manacles hanging from the ceiling. I blinked the water out of my eyes and looked down to see if I was naked. No, fully dressed. And this wasn’t Konstantin’s dungeon.
This was much, much worse.
It seemed to be a sawmill, but one that had closed many years before. There was still a faint tang of sawdust in the air and some lengths of lumber, but all of the tools hanging from the ceiling alongside me were brown with rust. It didn’t make them look any less dangerous, though. There were hand saws with tarnished metal blades and circular saws as big as my head with huge, jagged teeth. There were drills, some as slender as a pencil and some thicker than my finger. There were chisels and awls, tools for slicing and chopping and—
I looked away, trying not to go into full-on panic mode. But the Dread was back, creeping up inside me. I was alone with a strange man, I had no idea where I was...and no one was coming to save me. Alexei would have no way to find me.
Seventeen stepped forward, screwing the cap back onto a bottle of water. It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at him. He was a year or two younger than Alexei and a little smaller—still heavily muscled but in a less balanced, more pumped-up way. And he didn’t have Alexei’s presence, that way of holding himself that told other men he feared nothing. Konstantin had had that, too, but Seventeen didn’t.
He made up for it by being simply, utterly terrifying.
There are some things that are just wrong. Disturbing. You can’t explain why they are, they just are. If someone asks you why you don’t like spiders, you can talk about them having too many legs or the way they scuttle too fast or the thought of them running across your face in the night, but you can’t really define it. You just get a sick fear when you see one. It’s a survival instinct, a primal urge to run.
That’s what it was like with Seventeen. He didn’t have scary tattoos or horrible scars. He wasn’t holding a gun or even a knife. He even smiled. But I’ve never, ever felt such an overwhelming desire to flee.
“You’re Gabriella,” he said. “I am Slava.”
The voice was wrong. Subtly, yet hugely wrong. The intonation was too flat. It was as if he’d read a book on how to talk to people, but hadn’t understood it...or didn’t care.
He had sandy-blond hair, but he’d either started to go bald very young or something had happened to him to make him lose it because his hairline went way, way back. What hair was left was cropped very short, little more than blond, patchy fuzz. His eyes were a faded blue, like a copy of a copy of a real person’s.
I knew the question I was meant to ask was, what do you want with me? But I was terrified of hearing the answer. I glanced around me at the tools designed to cut and shred and I prayed I was wrong about why he’d brought me there, but I knew deep down that I wasn’t.
“I don’t know anything,” I croaked.
Seventeen nodded understandingly. And then he lifted down a rusty circular saw blade the size of a dinner plate and I began to scream.
Alexei
I stood in the center of our hotel suite and stared. Somewhere, somewhere, there must be a clue.
I’d come back upstairs on instinct—my first thought had been to grab my guns. But now that I had them, I realized how useless they were. This wasn’t a problem I could solve with violence. She was gone and I had to use my head if I wanted to get her back.
Think! There has to be some clue!
Except there didn’t have to be. Whoever had taken her—and my guess was Seventeen, given how slick the whole thing had been—knew better than to leave clues. What was I expecting, a fucking matchbook with an address on it? I wouldn’t make a mistake like that and neither would he.
Gabriella could be anywhere in a thirty mile radius, by now, and that circle was expanding with every second.
Think! What did I see? What didn’t I see?
Her purse. Her purse was gone. And her phone, that thin lozenge of metal she was so proud of—
Wait. Her phone. I can track it down, if it’s stolen, she’d said.
And her laptop was right there.
I clawed open the screen and watched as it lit up. Immediately, I groaned. She had about fifty different windows open—web browsers and conversations and pages of what I assumed were computer code. I might as well have been trying to operate a nuclear reactor.
She’s going to die. She’s going to die unless I can figure this out.
I took a deep breath and put my finger on the touchpad. The thing felt like a child’s toy under my big, cumbersome hands. I started to search through menus and icons, looking for anything to do with phones. Eventually, I got the idea to just Google for it and laboriously typed in Find my phone.
And there it was, a dot on a map of New York. She was less than five miles away.
I grabbed the laptop and ran for the door.
Gabriella
Seventeen brought the saw blade right up to my face and my screams died abruptly. I could feel one of the blade’s teeth pushing against the soft skin of my cheek, indenting it but not breaking the surface....yet. If I so much as exhaled, it was going to cut me.
Seventeen brushed my hair back from my forehead. His touch made me want to vomit—clammy and cold, utterly alien.
“He must really like you,” said Seventeen. “For him to betray the Bratva.”
He glanced down at my body and I tensed, waiting for some question about whether I was good in bed, some stinging, sexist jibe. But there was nothing. I realized something was missing: that unspoken edge of male lust. It had been ugly and brutal with Petrov, aboard the ship. With Konstantin it had been subtle and refined. It had even been there with Vadim, in the steam bath, despite his age. But with Seventeen, there was nothing, no hint that he thought of me in that way at all. The total absence of it was almost more disturbing. It was as if we were different species.
Seventeen looked into my eyes again and pressed the saw blade inwards, rolling it as he did so. The teeth pressed harder and harder, threatening to break my skin, and I went rigid, not daring to shy away from him, taking tiny breaths through my nose. The blade slid between my lips and clacked against my teeth, pushing and rolling. I had to open my mouth or it would have started to scratch away at them. It slipped into position between my jaws, just as he’d intended, with its teeth pricking at the corners of my mouth...and stopped.
I took slow, shuddering breaths, tasting steel and feeling the rough texture of rust against my tongue. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move at all or I’d slice myself open.
“Close your teeth,” said Seventeen.
I gingerly closed my teeth on the blade. It was heavy and, when
he let go, the weight of it made it tip alarmingly, but I managed to hold it by tipping my head very slightly back. I tried not to think of what would happen if it slid any further in.
“Now,” said Seventeen. “Nikolai wants me to ask you some questions. You will answer by nodding or shaking your head. And if I think you’re lying, even once...I will use this.”
He picked up a hammer...and mimed knocking the saw blade into my mouth as hard as he possibly could.
I had to stop myself throwing up from fear. With the blade in my mouth I didn’t dare even do that. Instead, silent tears started to trickle down my cheeks. I wanted to be strong, like Alexei had taught me, but all I felt was tiny and insignificant. The Dread had me now, as powerful as it had ever been. I was all alone in this place, and no one was ever going to find me.
“Now,” said Seventeen again. “Who—”
His phone rang. Without anger or frustration, he laid the hammer neatly down on a table and pulled the phone from his back pocket. I could only hear his side of the conversation that followed. I knew it might be important and I fought my fear and tried to listen, but it was all in Russian. The only part I got was a name: Lizaveta. He said the phrase twice, as if confirming an order: “Dazhe Lizaveta.”
Then he pocketed the phone and turned back to me. He gave me a smile and even that was wrong: plastic and cold, as if he’d copied it from a picture. That whole side of his personality, the part that tells us how to deal with people...it wasn’t just broken, it was missing.
Jesus Christ, I was so scared.
“Who else knows about Nikolai and me?” he asked. “Have you told any hacker friends?”
No way was I leading him to Lilywhite and Yolanda. Very slowly and carefully, I shook my head. I was crying so hard that I could only see him as a hazy shadow through the tears.
He tilted his head to the side. “I think, perhaps, you’re lying.”
And he picked up the hammer.
Gabriella
The end wall of the sawmill exploded into blinding daylight and shards of glass and metal as a car crashed through it. I glimpsed Alexei hunched over the wheel, grimly determined.
Seventeen drew his gun and got off a single shot before he had to dodge and roll out of the way. I saw him scramble towards a back room as the car slewed to a halt just in front of me.
Alexei climbed out, his face like thunder. He looked towards the doorway Seventeen had disappeared through, then looked at me. I wanted to tell him to go after Seventeen, that I’d be okay for a moment. I didn’t want him to risk turning his back on that door. But I was going to go insane if I had that saw blade in my mouth another second.
Alexei must have been able to see it in my eyes because he reached gently in, grasped the blade between thumb and forefingers and eased it all the way out, then tossed it aside. I kept my lips as wide apart as possible as he did it, shaking the whole time. Then it was out and I wanted to weep in relief.
He glanced up at what was holding my arms, checked the door again and then grabbed a chisel and used it on something between my wrists. I heard plastic snap and then I was falling into his arms, burying my face in his chest. He eased me down to the floor, sitting me with my back against the leg of the table, and silently pressed my shoulders to tell me that I should stay there. Then he ran towards the back room. He hadn’t even reached the outer door, though, when we heard a car start up. Seconds later, we saw it blast past the windows. Alexei swore and kicked the wall.
He walked back to me and lifted me up, hugging me close. “What did that bastard do to you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing. Just this.” I touched my mouth. There was pain at the corners, but not too bad. I wondered what I looked like.
Alexei put his arms around me and squeezed me again, then led me to the car. Luckily the sawmill was only built from cheap corrugated iron sheets and panes of glass, so going through the wall hadn’t totaled it. There was a gunshot hole in the windshield, though—we’d have to change cars as soon as possible.
Alexei backed us out of the sawmill with a grind and scream of tortured metal and we got out of there before someone called the cops. A few streets away, he pulled into an alley. I flipped down the sunshade so that I could have a look at myself in the mirror.
I looked like a different person. Mascara rivers ran all the way down both cheeks below red, swollen eyes. The corners of my mouth had been cut by the sawblade’s teeth—not so deeply that I’d need stitches, but there were trickles of blood going down to my chin. I wiped them angrily away and they immediately reformed. I wiped them again. Again—
Alexei grabbed my hand. “Stop,” he said urgently.
I’d thought that I was okay, but I wasn’t. Seeing myself had made the whole thing real. I realized I was shaking...and I couldn’t stop.
“I’ll take you somewhere safe,” said Alexei.
“Where?” I hugged my arms around myself but I couldn’t seem to get warm.
“Somewhere I’ve never taken anyone.”
Gabriella
He drove watching the rear view mirror, turning down side street after side street to check we weren’t being followed. When we were still a block away, he left the car entirely and led me on foot, cutting through back alleys. We eventually came to an aging apartment block and he led me inside and up the stairs. A safe house? But wouldn’t the rest of the Bratva know about it? A friend? But then why hadn’t we come here from the start?
On the fourth floor, Alexei knocked on a green-painted door. A moment later, the door was swung wide.
The woman was no more than half his height and must have been at least eighty. Her skin was the same shade as Alexei’s, but transformed by wrinkles into a million tanned peaks and valleys. When she saw him and ran forward to embrace him, her eyes crinkled up so much they almost disappeared. “Alexei!” she gasped.
Alexei hugged her back, flushing. “My grandmother,” he said.
***
We sat down and there was a long conversation between Alexei and his grandmother, entirely in Russian. There was lots of nodding and smiling in my direction. I hoped that was positive. I took the opportunity to look around the room. There were faded photos of people who I guessed were Alexei’s other relatives. A radio played Russian folk songs and I could smell vegetables cooking. The couch I was sitting on was old and a little threadbare, but it was also really comfortable, in that way that only furniture that’s been worn in for decades can be.
“Sorry,” said Alexei, when they’d finished. “She doesn’t speak any English. She’s only been over here a few years. I brought her over when my parents died.” He winced. “I have to keep her a secret.”
I nodded, dumbfounded. “No one knows she’s here?”
He shook his head. “Someone could use her against me.” He hesitated, glancing at her. “She likes you.”
The old lady nodded at me approvingly and said something in Russian.
“What was that?” I asked.
He flushed. “Nothing.”
His grandmother bustled off into the kitchen and I heard water splash into a kettle. Alexei took my hand. “How are you feeling?”
I realized I was slowly calming down. I’d stopped shaking and I was starting to warm up. His tactic of bringing me here had worked. It was something about the normality of it, the permanence. Motels and even luxury hotels can be comfortable but they’re not comforting. This place was. I let out a long breath, starting to feel better.
There was another aspect to me coming here. It meant that Alexei trusted me more than anyone else he knew...and he was introducing me to his family. That was huge.
Alexei leaned towards me. “She has no idea what I do,” he said.
I nodded quickly. “I won’t tell her.”
His grandmother returned with cups of tea and strange Russian pastries, with the promise of soup as soon as it was cooked. Then she gave Alexei a string of instructions in Russian, pointing at the kitchen.
“Sorry,” he
said. “She wants me to unblock the sink.”
As soon as he’d left us alone, Alexei’s grandmother leaned forward and put her hand on mine. Despite her age, her grip was warm and strong.
“You are good for him,” she said quietly. “Russian girls too moody.”
I blinked at her in astonishment. “You speak English,” I said stupidly.
She shrugged. “I don’t tell him. Makes him feel needed. Otherwise he never visit.”
I grinned and squeezed her hand.
She leaned even closer. “You have to get him away from Bratva. Away from killing.”
I blinked at her again. She knew. She stared right back at me. Eighty years old but she was still sharp as a knife. I wasn’t alone in my quest to save Alexei, and that strengthened my resolve.
“I’ll try,” I told her.
My shakiness faded the longer we stayed there. When Alexei came back and sat beside me on the couch, I felt even better and by the time Alexei’s grandmother had fed us soup and bread, it had gone almost completely. I finally felt strong enough to go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror—the very thing that had started me off in the first place. The blood at the corners of my mouth had finally dried. I looked a mess but, this time, it didn’t start a panic. I washed my face and then clung onto the edge of the sink. I was realizing I had a decision to make.
I’d heard something, while I was with Seventeen. Something potentially important. I could tell Alexei....
...or I could just keep it to myself. Without any more clues to follow, we could just quietly disappear. I could get him out of the Bratva for good, just like I wanted.
But that would mean lying to him.
I stood in the bathroom for a long time before I walked back to Alexei. I nodded towards the hallway. “We need to talk,” I told him.
Gabriella
Kissing My Killer Page 22
