They’re stupid. They’re amateurs. That’s a good thing, right?
But there are so many of them, and we have no weapons.
Then one of the men barks “Sit!” and points at a row of folding chairs that face a blank wall. The blonde woman sits at the end of the row, I sit next to her, then Yakov, and Simon.
I glance at Yakov, and I see tears glittering in his eyes. He’s engaged to be married. She’s expecting.
He manages a woeful smile. “It’s all right,” he whispers miserably, but it isn’t, and we both know it.
As we settle in, I scan the room. Oil-stained concrete floor. A space-heater humming in the corner. A bunch of equipment that I don’t recognize at the back of the room.
Every second thunders by, jabbing at me. Our time is running out.
I’m in as little pain as I’m ever going to be in, from now until the end of my life.
That thought makes me furious. And it snaps me back to reality. I have to stop wallowing in hopelessness. I can’t focus on what might or might not happen to me in the future; I have no control over it. All I can do is look for opportunities. To escape, or to die quickly.
The blonde mutters something, and I lean in to hear what she said.
“That isn’t the real Cataha.”
“How do you know?” I whisper.
“Because I met him, before he started wearing his mask. This guy has a different body shape. And he smells different.”
I look at her in astonishment. “You met him and lived?”
“Barely.” Her voice is a bleak wasteland of despair. Because she was incredibly lucky to survive an encounter with him, and now her luck has run out.
I reach out and take her hand. “What’s your name?” I murmur.
“Darya.”
I roll the cyanide pill into her palm. “I’m Natasha,” I say, giving her the name on my fake papers. “Cyanide. Wait until the last second,” I whisper to her. “When you’re sure there’s no hope. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.”
She nods dully. “I’ll want to. You kept one for yourself?”
“Yes.”
I’m lying. But I am the one who failed to save this girl. I gave her hope, I promised her we’d be all right, and we still ended up here in the middle of a nightmare. I can’t free her, I can’t give her a future, a husband, children, freedom from terror. The only gift I can give her is to die on her own terms. It’s a horrible gift, a heartbreaking gift, but it’s better than letting the traffickers determine her fate.
I’ve got my little blades and a good working knowledge of human anatomy, and I hope I can puncture an artery and bleed out before the men start in on me.
I hear them moving around the back of the room, behind us. Why are they drawing this out?
I’m sick of feeling helpless.
I look at the fake Cataha and stretch my lips into a broad, deliberate smile. Nothing pisses off men like him more than seeing women who aren’t afraid. I should know; I was raised by exactly this kind of man.
He walks over and raps my head with the barrel of his gun. Not too hard; he must be saving the real pain for later.
“You think this is funny, bitch?” he snaps at me.
“We’ve got a friend who’s going to report us missing to the police. She’ll already have called.”
“Which police department? The Pevlovagrad police?” he sneers. He turns to the doorway behind us and calls, “Send him in!”
I twist around to see…and the Pevlovagrad police chief, Jakob Ivanov, walks through the doorway. The shock hits me like a tidal wave of ice-cold water. Rage at his betrayal chokes me.
Akim has always told us he is one of the good ones.
I glare at him in disgust, then return my attention to the fake Cataha. “There’s more than one police chief. More than one department.”
“And this is the woman you think will call the police for you?” He yells out again. “Send her in.”
I can’t keep the dismay and fear from my face.
No.
But yes.
Akim-Ludmilla walks through the door, her slate-gray eyes as cold as ice as she flicks me an indifferent glance, and my throat closes in horror. A pretty woman of about thirty years old, she has dark auburn hair, high cheekbones, and lines on her forehead. Her hair has a streak of gray. I’ve been told that happened after her sister was abducted years ago.
Yakov and Simon jerk in shock when they recognize her, their chairs squeaking. They flash me panicked looks.
Why would she do this to us? Why? Was Ludmilla bribed? Threatened?
She looks calm and unruffled.
I cannot believe this.
I had utter and complete faith in her. That’s why I sought her out when we started going on our rescue missions. She knows the contact information of most of our volunteers; she’s done anonymous interviews with them that were featured in Reforma. And now they’ll be hunted down and killed.
“Enjoy the show,” the fake Cataha barks. Suddenly I realize what’s bothering me about his voice – it’s completely normal. I’d heard that Cataha’s voice was raspy from the attack.
Darya’s right, he is a fake.
Then the movie starts playing, projected on the wall in front of us, and I go stiff with rage and disgust. The video shows a nude woman with a noose around her neck, in a brightly lit white room that’s devoid of furniture or decoration. Her hands are tied behind her back. There’s a beam running across the ceiling, and the rope is strung over it. Cataha is standing next to her, holding the end of the rope.
Darya stiffens with fear and looks at the screen. “I think that’s the real one,” she whispers to me.
On the screen, Cataha starts pulling the rope, grunting with effort, and horror floods through me.
The naked woman is lifted off the ground, and her legs kick frantically, then she’s lowered again seconds later. Cataha loosens the noose with his fingers.
She gasps and wheezes and makes inarticulate noises, her eyes enormous pools of despair. Cataha pulls the end of the rope again, and she’s hauled back into the air. Her legs thrash, and Cataha throws his head back and barks out a hideous laugh.
Yakov is sobbing, his shoulders shaking. Simon vomits on the floor. Tears stream down Darya’s face, but she doesn’t make a sound.
This is what they do to people who cross them.
I try to look away, and one of the men raps the gun against my head and snarls, “Watch!”
The hell with this. I’ve been taking self-defense classes continuously for almost a year now, and while I’m no match for these men in hand-to-hand combat, I have one thing to my advantage: the element of surprise. Nobody looks at skinny, nondescript me and thinks I have any fight in me. So while they’re busy underestimating me, I’m good for a quick, disabling strike, although after that I’m a dead girl walking.
I spring to my feet and kick him in the crotch before he has time to react, and yank the gun out of his hand. I will go down shooting. We all will.
I aim the gun at his throat and squeeze the trigger – and am shocked to see that it’s firing darts, not bullets.
Do all their guns have tranquilizer darts instead of bullets? Why? The only thing my panicked brain can come up with is that they are determined to keep us alive for the interrogation. It still feels off, but I don’t have time to ponder that right now.
The room explodes into chaos. Darya falls to the ground and crawls away on her hands and knees. Simon launches himself at one of our captors, and they crash to the ground in a tangle of limbs. I shoot Ludmilla in the chest, the dart quivering right above her left breast. The other men are shouting, rushing towards me.
I feel a strange crackling in the air, a nervous anticipation. There’s only one person who makes me feel that way.
Then the door flies open, and a man barrels through and bellows, “Enough!” And my heart stops in my chest.
Because the man is Sergei.
Chapter Three
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I feel bloodless, weightless, as I stare at him. More men are pouring past him. The gun drops from my fingers and I hear it clatter on the concrete.
Sergei. I haven’t seen him in so long. Eight long months. I almost stopped believing he was real. He was an idea, a concept, a dream and a nightmare.
Now he’s flesh again.
He looms big in the doorway. He’s wearing a black leather coat lined with shearling, and the air around him crackles with rage and power. That face – those cruel, sensual lips, those broad Slavic cheekbones, the scar slashing through his eyebrow…oh, how I’ve missed that beautiful face.
I thought I’d never see him again. I even did my best to make sure of it. I had the GPS tracker that he’d implanted on me removed after he left me. I was trying to find him here, sure, but only so I could find out if he really was married and a pimp, not so I could see him in person.
What would be the point, after he crumpled me up like trash and threw me away?
As he storms towards me, my body responds to him the same way it always does, singing with lust, betraying me. I accept that, and I violently shove it aside. After what Sergei did to me, I grew stronger. I can separate my mind from the needs of my body.
And I will never love a trafficker.
Crave him, yes. Love him? No.
Darya scrambles to her feet, looking from him to me and back, in confusion.
“You motherfucker,” I spit at him. “You sick bastard! Come to gloat?”
“You know him?” Darya stares at me in shock.
I swallow a bitter taste. “I knew him. No, scratch that – I never knew him at all. Let’s just say he and I have met.”
She nods, looking sad and sympathetic. “Ah, I see. You fell for him and he betrayed you into trafficking.”
She thinks she understands, but she’s not even close.
She has no idea how complicated this is. How sick, evil and heart-breaking.
How beautifully and perfectly Sergei played me, without ever appearing to. How he tortured and teased my body until I couldn’t tell where pain ended and pleasure began.
How he mocked me when I told him that I loved him. The only man I’ve ever said those words to. And now those words will never leave my lips again.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” Sergei roars at me, towering over me, and the air crackles with electricity and rage.
“Playing at?” I choke out the words, and I am horrified to realize I’m sobbing. I can’t help myself; tears pour down my cheeks. I held back the tears when I thought that Simon and Yakov were dead, but now my body is shaking with sobs. What’s wrong with me? Why am I such a horrible person? “I’m not playing at a damn thing! Just because everything is a game to you – you’re not even human!” I leap to my feet and launch myself at him with a strangled cry, and two of his men lunge forward and haul me away.
The room is filling up with his men, a small army of them, and they hustle us back out onto the street. We don’t have our coats anymore, it’s the middle of the night, and it’s freezing. We are separated from Simon and Yakov. I can hear them shouting as they’re forced into the back of a truck, and I feel sick with rage and fear.
We all told ourselves that we were prepared for something like this, but how can you be? Prepared for the threat of torture, of rape, of an agonizing death? Prepared for seeing your friends flayed alive or eviscerated?
I can’t see Sergei anymore. He’s left me again. That’s what he does best, isn’t it? I hate him so much right now.
I want him so much right now.
I want to travel back in time to when he lay in my bed with me and held me in his strong arms and made me feel safe and loved. That love was a lie, but it was such a beautiful lie that I wanted to wrap it around me and live inside it forever. Oh, how I’ve missed his body, his fierce strength, his feather-soft kisses. The smell of him, musky and masculine. His muscles bunching as he gathered me close and pressed me up against him. How I’ve missed thinking that I was so special to him, that I’d penetrated that thick armor around his heart when nobody else could.
How I’ve missed the rage that radiated from him when anyone threatened to hurt me.
But now he’s the one doing the hurting.
I’m jerked back to the present, shivering violently in the bitterly cold night as Darya and I are handcuffed.
I imagine myself with superhuman strength, lifting Sergei over my head and hurling him into a live volcano. Watching him sink into the molten lava.
The image only makes me sad and panicked. I ask myself for the millionth time – what the hell is wrong with me? Why am I like this?
One of the men opens the back of a truck and gestures at it. We climb in awkwardly, with the men boosting us, our knees banging on the floor.
The door clangs shut and the truck starts driving. At least there’s some heat back here. And most importantly, we’re alone.
I finally feel a spark of optimism.
Ha. Handcuffs? Locked door?
I’ve only practiced for this for close to a year now, from every possible position.
We’re rattling over potholed streets again, the truck bouncing and jerking.
“Darya, I have a handcuff key hidden in my hair extensions.” My voice bounces off the walls, in our cold, vile echo chamber. “I’m going to lie down on the floor so you can reach it,” I say. If I had to, I could kick my boots off and get the key myself with my toes, but it will be faster if she helps me. As I lie there with my cheek pressed against cold metal, she fumbles around, and I direct her until she finds it. She drops it into my open hands.
“Stay there,” I instruct her. I maneuver the key into the tiny hole on her handcuffs, and I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear the click.
She sheds the cuffs as if they’re a venomous snake wrapped around her wrists, and then frees me.
I crawl over to the door, pull a lock pick out of my hair extensions, and begin working on it.
“Nice trick. I’ll have to remember that,” Darya says.
“I’ve almost got it…” I look at her. We’re not dressed for the weather. I’m wearing a sweater and wool pants and boots, and she’s wearing a sweater and jeans with leg-warmers, but it’s damn cold outside. “We have no coats. I don’t know where we are. We may freeze to death out there.”
“Better than the alternative.” She says it without hesitation. She’s brave, she’s smart…she deserves so much better than what life has handed her.
I won’t let her down a second time.
I go back to working on the lock, trying to manipulate the pick with fingers that are stiff with cold.
Darya speaks. “He was your lover?”
“Something like that. I couldn’t really explain what he was.”
“If he catches us, will he kill us? Or sell us?”
I wish I could offer her reassurances. I shake my head bleakly. “I have no idea what he’d do. It’s safer to assume the worst. I thought I knew him, and I could not have been more wrong. I can’t understand him any better than I could understand an alien.”
I’ve got the door lock open. I can hear traffic around us, which means the truck is driving towards the city. Then the truck slows down.
Now is the time.
I kick the door open, and we jump out into the slushy snow. We land hard. Darya grunts in pain, and I stifle a whimper. My whole body hurts.
We’re in luck. The truck drives away; apparently the driver has not noticed our escape. I breathe a silent thanks to whoever is watching over us tonight. Thank God we were kidnapped by idiots. Thank you, God, thank you, thank you.
“You did it,” Darya gasps. “We’re free. We did it. I thought we were going to die.”
The wind whips my hair into my face. It’s well past midnight, I know. We’re in a downtown area, but I don’t see any signs of life.
“Me too. We’ve got to get moving before we freeze solid.”
We run past apartment buildings and c
losed shops with metal gates over their windows. Finally, thank heavens, we come to an open tea shop.
We run inside, our teeth chattering like clacking castanets. The warm air is a breath from heaven. My ears start burning as they start to thaw. There are a dozen or so people in there, and they glance at us and then go right back to their tea and conversation. Darya and I, gasping for breath, running through the door without coats in the middle of the night…we look like trouble.
We head over to the counter to order. A short, heavy-set woman in a shapeless brown sweater and a dun-colored skirt that reaches her ankles bustles over. And then it hits me.
“Crud,” I groan, patting my pants pockets. “They took my wallet. I have no money. Do you?”
Despair washes over her face. “No, they took my wallet too.”
I bite my lip. “We don’t have our cell phones. I don’t know what to do.”
The woman behind the counter shakes her head sympathetically. “If you girls want some nice hot tea, it’s on me. Let me take you into the back room, farther away from the door. You’ll be warmer there.”
Tears fill my eyes at her kindness. After the horror we’ve been through tonight, I’m grateful for the reminder that some human beings are decent.
She ushers us into a small room in the back.
“I’ll be right back with the tea, you poor things.” And she hurries back into the main room, shutting the door behind her.
The warmth is heaven and hell; my ears, fingers and nose are throbbing as they thaw. Darya and I sit there in silence, flexing our fingers to get the circulation back, our breathing slowly returning to normal.
A few minutes later, she brings us tea and cookies.
She even lets me borrow her cell phone, and I quickly send a coded text message to one of the volunteers. The text tells him that we’re all burned, and to warn everybody else.
Everybody who’s still alive.
“They still have your friends,” Darya points out. “What can we do about that? The police chief is in on it. Who can we even call?”
I like her a lot. She’s just escaped from a nightmare, and she’s still thinking about other people. I’m thinking the same thing, turning it over in my mind. Who can I call in time to save them?
Thirty Days of Hate Page 2
