Cataha gestures at the man with the whip, and the man lowers his arm. They lower Darya to the ground, so she’s sagging on the chain, her feet on the floor, her head hanging down.
Cataha pulls his mask off and steps closer to me. He’s bathed in the harsh white lights. His face is strangely, horribly familiar.
The hair is different than I remember. Clipped close and bleached a pale blonde. He has facial hair – a goatee. The nose is a different shape. His cheekbones are wider and higher, his jaw broader. He has brown eyes, which must be contact lenses.
I know this. I know his eyes are really blue. I know his hair used to be black and curly. Because despite all the plastic surgery, the distorted face, the scars…this is Vasily Toporov.
This is my adoptive father. The man who died, right next to my mother, when I was seventeen years old, when their small private plane fell from the sky. He’s come back from Hell, to drag me down with him.
The look of hatred that’s twisting his face is terrifying.
His head jerks to the side. He screams at someone I can’t see. “It’s her! Shut up, shut up, shut up! I brought her back!”
Who the hell is he talking to? I can’t see anyone, although my eyes haven’t fully adjusted to the light in this room. Maybe there’s a one-way mirror I can’t see, or a hidden video camera.
“I’m the one you want,” I plead. “Not Darya. Please let her go, and I’ll do anything you want. If you hurt her, I’ll make you kill me.”
He lunges at me, hands closing around my throat, squeezing hard.
“Let her go, you fucking pig!” Darya howls. So brave. So foolish.
One of the men slashes her with the whip again, and she screams so hard I think my eardrums will split.
My vision is turning black, and I’m frantic for air. I claw at his hands, my lungs burning.
“You treacherous bitch,” Vasily rasps. “You backstabbing little traitor whore. You’re the reason that your mother’s dead. And I’m going to make you pay for it.”
Chapter Nineteen
Day fifteen…
SERGEI
I’m back at my house in Russia, ready to explode out of my own skin.
The rage that boils inside is killing me, burning me from the inside out. I haven’t slept all night, but I’m not tired. I’m filled with maddening energy, frantic, desperate to slash and maim and kill.
My Willow is gone. She was snatched from the bridal shop in Sweden yesterday morning, and I have no idea where on the planet she might be, or what’s being done to her.
I thought I’d taken sufficient precautions to keep her safe. I’d stationed two of my best men behind the shop. Honestly, at the time I was more worried that she’d try to make a run for it, that she’d leave me.
I didn’t anticipate Ludmilla’s betrayal. I still don’t know why she did it, but I will find out and I will make her pay in blood and screams before she dies at my hand.
It makes no sense; I know she resented Willow because of who her family was, but how could she have hated her enough to make a deal with the actual devil? How could she have thought she’d survive my wrath? All the money in the world won’t protect her from me when I find her.
I’m turning the events of yesterday over in my mind again and again, a horror movie I can’t stop watching.
When the men I had stationed in the alley failed to check in on their radios, we rushed into the shop. It was too late. She’d been taken.
While my men and I scoured the streets, I had my security team hack into the city’s system of public safety cameras. Ludmilla and two men dragged Willow out of the back alley and stuffed her into the back of a dark van. The van was last seen heading to a small private airport.
At first I thought we’d find her easily. We followed the GPS transmitter, and flew to Russia in my private plane. As we flew, I was assembling my troops.
I called in every man I could get, and by late that afternoon, we were headed to a remote warehouse on the outskirts of a tiny abandoned village. It made sense that he’d take her there. I wanted to believe it so badly.
There were at least thirty men outside the warehouse, patrolling, wearing body armor. I had a hundred and twenty. We were better armed, and we came at them from all directions.
We stormed them with everything we had. Snipers, grenade launchers, Vityaz-SN submachine guns, stun grenades.
We didn’t bother with trying the doors. We identified the location of the GPS tracker in the building and blasted open a wall on the opposite side, then we filled the interior of the building with tear-gas. My men went rolling in, wearing masks, clearing rooms.
I was on the outside with the snipers, armed with a Lobaev TSLV-8 rifle, taking out a few remaining men who were shooting at us from camouflaged positions in the woods. We eliminated them quickly, and their screams were swallowed by the wind that whipped through the trees.
With the last of them dead, we hurried towards the building, pushing through ankle-deep snow in our heavy ceramic plate body armor. Hope flared inside me, but just as quickly died as I glanced around me. Something was wrong.
“This is too easy,” I muttered to Slavik. Slavik shouldn’t have come; he still wasn’t sufficiently recovered, but he’d insisted.
“You call this easy?” He gestured around us. The air stank of blood and gunpowder. Some of our men were being carried away on stretchers; a few of them were in body bags. Their families would be richly rewarded.
“For Cataha? Yes.”
Slavik and eight other men moved with me.
I’ve always been capable of waiting. I’ve always been good at strategy, at thinking ahead. Not today. I wanted to scream with impatience, to rush in full speed, but outside the building, the faint scent of teargas stung our eyes. We quickly clapped on our masks and headed in. We stepped over rubble and bodies, moving to the back of the building where we’d picked up the signal.
Andrei called out to us, and his words chilled my blood. “Not picking up any heat signatures inside. Nothing alive here,” he yelled. He and his men were equipped with thermal imaging cameras.
I stormed towards his voice, nearly mad with rage and terror. The GPS sensor had led us there, and if there was no heat signature…Willow must be dead.
I moved into another world, a world of ice and hate.
At the back of the warehouse, I smashed the lock on a door with the butt of my gun and kicked the door open. My men were shouting at me, Alexei screaming, “Wait, wait, let me clear the room!” His voice was muffled by his teargas mask. I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. My body, my brain, were screaming, Willow, Willow, Willow!
I barreled into the room like a tank, with my men on my heels.
And we found not one but three women, sprawled on the ground. Their blood stained the concrete floor in Rorschach splatters of horror. Not only had their faces been mutilated beyond recognition, but they’d all been gutted.
The winds of the steppes howled in my ears as I stormed towards their bodies. Time stopped and sound faded.
I’d gone sociopathic, with no access to my feelings.
I knew what to look for, to tell if one of these tortured creatures was my Willow.
I looked at the women, picturing their last moments on Earth when they knew all hope was gone and prayed for death as a release, and I staggered back.
“Sir…” Slavik’s voice was a million miles away. “Sir…is it…”
“None of them are Willow.” I dragged myself back to Earth. “He planted the GPS here. He’s doing this to fuck with us.” I looked at him, with blazing eyes. I grabbed his arm in a crushing grip. “We. Have. To. Find. Her.”
* * *
WILLOW
“Leave me alone! Shut up, you bitch, shut up!” Vasily drops his hands and staggers backwards, and I gasp for air, drawing it in in heaving gulps. He has his hands over his ears. Who is he talking to?
Then he gestures at one of his men, who produces a water bottle. The man shoves it agains
t my lips, and I take several gulps before he pulls it away.
“Please give some to her?” I beg.
He glances at Vasily, who screams, “Fine. Fine!”
But Vasily’s not talking to his guard; he’s staring into space as he yells. I swear it looks as if he’s talking to a ghost that only he can see. The man looks worried as he walks over and lets Darya have several sips of water.
Vasily is alive.
I’m struggling for words. I want to scream, threaten, insult. But I’m in a room full of armed men and I don’t want him to murder me and Darya.
“Father.” I make myself say that lie out loud. “Please. Why are you doing this to me?”
“You have betrayed me. You’ve been sleeping with the enemy.”
I glare at him. You’re the enemy, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. Darya’s life depends on it. “Your brother sold me to him.”
He nods, his eyes snapping with rage. “Yes. That weakling piece of shit. I should have killed him when we were in kindergarten.”
Well, isn’t that special?
“Please let Darya go.” I try to keep my voice gentle.
He slaps me across the face so hard that I cry out, almost falling off the chair.
I’m sick with fear. He’s acting like a crazy man. He was always an angry control freak, but he was never like this before. The wild mood swings, the bizarre screaming at…nothing?
“Do you know what you’ve done to me?” he howls.
Tears are running down my cheeks. “I haven’t done anything to you! I didn’t even know you were alive! I haven’t seen you in six years!”
“You turned your mother against me! She was going to betray me – for you!”
Fear clutches at my throat. Yes, she was. How much does he know?
He begins pacing. His eyes are mad.
“She was the perfect woman. She was everything a wife should be. She lived her life for me; she lived only to please me.”
Yes, because you were a horrifying sociopath and she had no other choice.
“I didn’t even want a child to ruin our perfect paradise. But she did, so I got you.” He whirls to face me, his lips twisting in a malicious leer. “You’re not mine, did you know that? I bought you. You came cheap, too. You’re the daughter of a cocksucking whore.”
“Yes. I know. Sergei told me.” Then I feel a stab of fear. Should I even have said Sergei’s name?
But for the moment, Vasily has resumed his crazy pacing, and he’s not looking at me. He stares at the floor. “Your mother loved you. That’s the only reason you’re not dead right now.”
How is he even here? “You…you were on the plane with my mother. And the plane went down. What happened?”
His mad eyes bulge. “My enemies were closing in on all sides. I had been planning to disappear for years.” He’s ranting at the wall. “I was going to take you and your mother with me, and we’d hide out and let the world forget about us. Start over. Live on our own for a few years. Marry you to a man who’d give us a dowry fit for a queen, a man who’d teach you respect. Build our empire anew. But that whore betrayed me. She chose you over me, you little bitch! She was going to take you and run. She was going to leave me!”
My blood turns to ice.
I always believed that our family’s enemies blew up the small private plane that he and my mother were on. Now I know.
Vasily murdered my mother – my sweet, lovely mother – out of jealousy. He must have put someone else on the plane to take his place. The bodies were burned beyond recognition. They identified my mother by some of her melted jewelry.
Rage flares up inside me like a flash fire. It burns all rational thought from my mind.
I don’t care that I’m a prisoner. I don’t care about myself or Darya or the armed men pacing the floor, or the fact that there’s no way for me to escape from this place.
He killed my mother. Because of me. Because she tried to protect me.
She died in a fireball of agony and fear, murdered by her husband.
I rush towards him, screaming with rage. The world turns red. I claw at his face with my acrylic nails – the last weapon I have left.
Someone zaps me with a cattle prod, and my body convulses. I fall to the ground, crying out, legs thrashing. I bang my head on the concrete when I fall, and blackness descends. I’m hit with the cattle prod again, and my whole body is on fire. I’m kicking and flailing; I’ve lost all control of my body.
My father’s voice has gone high pitched, shrieking at me. The words ride over my body in waves of agony.
Bitch, whore...betrayer…
My head explodes and I’m gone, gone, gone…
Chapter Twenty
Day fifteen…
I don’t want to be awake.
I don’t want to be in this world.
Darya and I spend the night in our cages, burning with thirst and sick with hunger and fear. We lie there curled up with our blankets pulled around us, not speaking. We don’t have the energy to talk. I’m so exhausted that sometimes I drift off, but then I wake up with a jerk and the nightmare reality washes over me, threatening to drown me in terror.
I have to squat over the bucket to pee, and I’m so dizzy I almost fall over. Then I crawl back to my mattress and pull the blanket over myself.
I want to think about better times, about sunshine and Sergei and my family, but it’s hard to think about anything except how thirsty and terrified I am. My head still aches from where Vasily hit me, my leg throbs where the GPS tracker was removed and it was inexpertly stitched back up.
When things are pleasurable, when life is going well, time rushes by at the speed of a freight train. I never stopped to appreciate the good times. Now I’ll never feel pleasure or warmth again, and every miserable second feels like a century. I can’t believe how long this horrible night has lasted.
When I’m ready to sink into despair, I force myself to remember the girls I’ve saved. The girls and the children Sergei has saved. I hurt Vasily, at least a little.
I wish I could have saved Darya.
When the sun rises, shining through the tiny window in our room, a guard throws open the door and we both flinch when he approaches.
Is this the end?
But we are given hunks of bread and one bottle of water each, shoved through the bars of our cages. He leaves without a backward glance, because we’re beneath his notice, like livestock. We gnaw the bread like animals and gulp the water down. It might be our last meal.
Just as we’re finishing, two guards come for us and open our cages. Darya and I are both hunched in on ourselves, staring down at the floor as we’re hustled down a hallway and into a room that’s the pit of the damned.
The chemical stink is stronger here. There’s a blinding light overhead, illuminating this hellscape. Two more guards are there, standing by the doors. There are naked women chained down to tables. I count six. Legs spread so wide it’s painful just to look at them. They’re mostly silent, a couple of them sobbing quietly. There’s a hopeless, broken quality to their sobs that chills my blood. There are two empty tables.
One of the men orders Darya to strip, and she glares at him but obeys. Fighting would just turn him on.
He pushes her over to an empty table and makes her lie down on it, face up. She lies perfectly still as he spreads her legs and fixes each ankle to a corner of the table, then does the same to her wrists. Most of the fight’s gone out of her. And me too. I’m too exhausted and weak to fight right now. I’m sure that’s why they have us half-starved and exhausted – to make us easier to manage.
And because that’s the kind of thing that turns these men on.
Other than the tables, the room is mostly bare, with some metal cabinets and a sink against one wall. A few chains dangle from the ceiling overhead, which apparently is standard torture equipment here.
“Willow. Willow. Can you help me?” a familiar voice husks from one of the tables, and when I walk over, I’m shoc
ked to see that it’s Ludmilla. Her face is bruised and puffy, her lips cracked and bleeding.
“What the hell happened to you?” I ask bitterly. “And no, I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself.”
She stares at me in misery. “Your father. He’s Cataha. And he’s the man who took my sister. I didn’t know.” She hiccups a sob. “When I made the deal with him…I didn’t know who he was. Everyone thought your father was dead. But he’s alive. He’s the devil come back to life.”
“Yes.” I intone the word without emotion.
“My sister…Sabina…she’s worse than dead. I wish she was dead. She’s became the mistress of a wealthy sadist named Mogens. She helps him train slaves.” Ludmilla’s eyes are vacant with shock. “Cataha, your father, he brought her in here and she spit in my face. She’s gone mad. She’s the same as they are now. He did that just to hurt me! It’s worse than them killing her.”
She twists her head to look at me with haunted eyes. “We used to play dress-up. We used to walk to school together holding hands. She was my shadow; she followed me everywhere, copied everything I did. And now she doesn’t care that I’m going to be raped and murdered. How did this happen?”
I narrow my eyes, refusing to offer her any comfort. “I wish I could say I’m sorry, but you betrayed me, and Darya, and everything you stood for. You could have helped Sergei catch my father, and instead you stabbed us in the back.”
One of the women twists her head to look at me. There’s a bruise on her cheekbone. Her ebony hair is plastered to her forehead with sweat. The look in her eyes makes me want to weep. She’s abandoned all hope. She’s muttering something to herself over and over. “I’m a stupid whore. I’m a stupid whore.”
Despair wells up in me. I want to rip those chains off her. I want to rush her to a hospital. I want to tell her that she’s all right, that she’s safe, that nobody will ever hurt her again…but that’s not what’s going to happen.
She’s going to die, just like I am.
I walk away. The guards are watching me, eyes burning with contempt and cruelty, fingering their weapons.
Thirty Days of Hate Page 15
