Year of the Scorpio: Part Two

by Stacy Gail

  There was so much in his pronouncement that I had trouble figuring out what to say first. “I don’t have an eating disorder. I’ve always had a healthy body image.”

  “You’re thinking of anorexia nervosa, which is a horse of a different color. You’ve got the much more common anorexia going on, brought about by a sudden, external trauma that sent your whole system into maximum-level shutdown. Much easier to fix, if you know what you’re doing. Which I do.”

  I didn’t have the strength to stifle a little sneer. “Oh, really. So you’re a doctor now?”

  “Yeah, but not just now—I’ve been one for years. I’ve got a medical degree and a degree in psychiatry,” he expanded with a careless shrug, folding himself into the chair opposite me while I tried not to faint from shock. “And while my specialty is forensic profiling the most disturbed criminal element, I can still spot what’s going on with you. Any doc could. The soup’s chicken and rice, though really it’s mostly broth,” Luke added, nodding at the container in front of me while I just stared at him. “In a day or two we’ll go for more solid food, but for right now this’ll do. Eat up.”

  I tried covering the greasy roll of my stomach by turning a hard stare on Rudy, who watched impassively near the door. “I knew I didn’t need a second bodyguard. You brought this guy on board to get into my head.”

  Rudy, a massive mountain of muscles and military-style correctness, shrugged. “I brought Luke in because it’s my duty to protect you from any and all threats to your safety. That includes you.”

  “Good call,” Shona announced from her desk across the way, though her eyes were still about as huge as mine felt. “Eat the damn soup, Dash, and let’s get things back on track.”

  “Uh-huh. Back on track.” Right. Because soup possessed the power to do that.

  Sure.

  “I never said it would cure everything, Dash,” Luke drawled, and that was so close to answering my thoughts it had me sitting back in my seat, amazed and more than a little alarmed. Not too long ago I was a champion poker player. I was the one who read people. I didn’t get read, damn it. “But eating that soup is a baby step in the right direction. Don’t you think it’s about time you took one? Doing what you’ve been doing hasn’t helped any, so why not try something new? See what happens.”

  With my eyes never leaving his, I ignored the soup and reached for the smoothie instead. Call me contrary, but I had never cared for being told what to do. “You ever play poker, Doc?”

  His watchful eyes, a shocking, vivid blue, lit up. “A little.”

  I’d just bet. “We should play some time. I think it’d be interesting.”

  A slow smile began to grow. “You’d find that interesting, eh? I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say that.”

  “Dare I ask why?”

  “Because until this moment, you haven’t shown interest in anything. Not even in being alive.”

  I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that no one could read me that easily. But the words wouldn’t come, so I went back to concentrating on my paperwork while silently downing my peanut butter and banana smoothie.

  Chapter Two

  At two in the morning, my dream chased me out of the apartment.

  Some nights were better than others. Every now and again, I was able to grab a few uninterrupted hours of sleep, and that was my life’s version of winning the lottery. When I woke from those miraculous nights, I’d have a few moments where I felt almost human. Then, inevitably, reality would rush in to hit me like a rock between the eyes and I’d remember that I now lived in a world that didn’t have Polo in it.

  But still, those nights weren’t bad.

  Then there were nights like tonight.

  Sleep had come surprisingly quickly, and I attributed that to keeping the smoothie and soup down, unlike so many other times I’d tried to keep myself fed. My last conscious thought had been about whether or not I admitted to Rudy and Luke that they might have been right to interfere, and trying to figure out how to thank them without giving them carte blanche to do it again.

  Then…

  The dream.

  No, that wasn’t quite right.

  The nightmare.

  It always started out the same. I was in the elevator leading up to Polo’s beautiful apartment in the building he’d owned, Paradis Nouveau. But instead of the penthouse I was familiar with, this place was empty of all furniture, all life. It was also cavernous, with far more rooms than it had in reality. The dream always had a searching theme going on, and as I’d run through every room looking for Polo, I would eventually realize I was in my childhood home, the Vitaliev estate outside the city in Barrington Hills.

  No matter how hard I looked for Polo, I could never find him. Lights would begin to flicker and change color, and an oppressive atmosphere would close in on me like a fist. Everything got darker, and in the distance I heard…

  A scream.

  Spine-shivering and tortured.

  A sound of purest agony.

  I knew that scream. It was the one that had torn from me when Polo had been shot.

  It was the panic that always made the dream so much worse. It usually started off as a low drumbeat that grew to a maddening, heart-pounding roar, suffocating all rationale. But the more urgently I searched for Polo, the slower I moved as my feet began to sink into the floor. Too late, I would come to the realization that while all my focus had been on making sure Polo was all right, I had neglected to look after my own safety. This lapse caused me to wander into quicksand, and I was sinking, sinking.

  Sinking.

  Helpless, I called out to Polo as the quicksand rose to my hips, then up to my stomach. Invariably some kind of movement would bring my hopes up, only to find Polo shuffling toward me.

  This was where the heart of the nightmare truly began.

  In my dreams, Polo looked…dead. Zombie-dead. His dark eyes were sunken and covered in milky, marbled cataracts, instead of the clear chocolate brown I loved so much. The almost-black hair that he’d kept pulled into a neat, short ponytail at the nape of his neck was all messed up, as if he’d been dragged a mile through the desert. Spurts of dark red blood pulsed out of a chest wound, painting his white tuxedo shirt a garish red. More blood splattered along the floor and left a trail that flowed like a stream behind him. Blood also poured from his mouth and down his chin, as dark as tar against his death-pale face.

  That was horrific enough, but as I sank up to my chest, he always mouthed words I couldn’t hear. All I’d hear at first was an agonized gurgle as more blood spewed from him.

  “What?” I struggled, trying to get free, to reach for him, but my arms were trapped. I was trapped. “Polo, please help me. I’m sinking, I’m dying. Please help me—”

  “Dasha.”

  The quicksand was inexorable, rising up to my jaw, and the enveloping weight of it pressed the air from my lungs. As I gasped, suffocating by agonizing inches, I could at last make out what he was saying.

  “P-Polo…help…”

  “I told you not to go anywhere with your brother, Dash. Why didn’t you listen to me? Why did you let me die?”

  As the quicksand closed over my head and his words drilled into whatever was left of my heart, I always woke up screaming.

  Tonight was no different.

  There had been a time when I was tormented by that dream every time I closed my eyes. I still suffered through it on a fairly regular basis. Tonight, however, the panic, horror, despair and guilt were worse than ever. Running from that toxic mix might have been impossible, but I still tried. I wound up at Chicago’s Future at two in the morning, knowing I wouldn’t see sleep for another twenty-plus hours, and resigned to my miserable fate.

  “No rest for the wicked,” I told myself wearily, after locking the charity’s door behind me. For a second I enjoyed the uniqueness of being alone in that space and not having to put on the “I’m fine” act. Then I remembered the damn cameras that watched my every move, remin
ding me that no matter what I did, I was never truly alone.

  Crap.

  The security system had been installed by Private Security International, Or PSI, and was top of the line. That meant the cameras sprinkled all over the property came to life once motion was detected, alerting whoever happened to be manning the graveyard shift at PSI that I was there. With nothing left to do, I waved and gave a thumbs-up, hoping that would keep whoever was on the other side of that live feed from calling Rudy or Luke at this ungodly hour. Why should they suffer just because I was stupid enough to be out of bed at two in the morning?

  Why did you let me die?

  “Shit.” I put a hand to my mouth, whether to stop myself from cussing more or throwing up, I didn’t know. The only thing I did know was that doing paperwork was suddenly beyond me. With a burst of frenetic energy I moved from the front office through a newly installed door that led to what would be the daycare. I hit the wall switch, making fluorescent tubes flicker their harsh light over boxes of tile piled neatly in the center of the room. In addition to the boxes, there was also a ladder, painting paraphernalia, a box fan and several cans of paint.

  Since I had no clue how to lay tile, I made a beeline for the painting supplies, and within minutes was down on my hands and knees, running blue painter’s tape along the baseboard. Over the past couple of months, I’d had plenty of opportunity to discover that if I exhausted myself with physical work—scrubbing a bathroom until it sparkled, rearranging a closet, cleaning out the refrigerator—I could distract myself from the pain that sat like an anvil on my chest.

  But not even working myself into a stupor could erase Polo’s nightmare-face.

  Why did you let me die?

  I shook my head like a dog to dispel the phantom voice. It was just a dream, I chanted to myself like I always did. It was just a dream.

  The chanting never helped. Probably because I knew it was just a dream, and it gutted me anyway.

  Or, maybe it was because deep down, I knew there was a wealth of truth behind it.

  Polo had asked me to stay away from my brother minutes before he was killed, because he’d known the mafiya life Knives had chosen to live was too dangerous for me to be around. I’d tried to avoid Knives, but obviously I hadn’t tried hard enough.

  As a result, Polo had been killed.

  Being left alone was my punishment. Polo no longer suffered the cruelties of this world, and there was no doubt in my mind that he would have indeed suffered if I had been the one who’d died, rather than him. He’d loved me. That was the one thing in this world I believed without any doubt. To be without me would have destroyed Polo.

  Just as it was destroying me to be without him.

  I wasn’t aware of how long I worked. Long enough to tape over the baseboards and get a good portion of the room painted in sun-bright yellow, and certainly long enough to work up a sweat. I stood in front of the box fan blowing in fresh air from the open door leading to the office, trying to cool off as I scrubbed at the tiny yellow paint freckles my hands and arms had gotten from the paint roller. Clearly, my mafiya princess days were long gone.

  Thank God.

  A headache started behind my eyes, so I turned off the fan for a little healing silence before moving to search my desk for some acetaminophen. I had just curled my fingers around the bottle when I heard…something.

  The faintest squeak, coming from the pantry in the back.

  I froze.

  I knew that squeak.

  That squeak belonged to the back door by the delivery bay.

  But that couldn’t be. I’d locked that door before I left work earlier, I was sure of it. If there had been a break-in, it would have sounded the alarm…

  The alarm I’d turned off when I’d come in, and thanks to my chronically sleep-deprived brain, had forgotten to turn back on.

  Damn it.

  If my father had still been alive, he would have yelled his head off at me for being so careless. And he would’ve been right. A Vitaliev couldn’t afford to be careless.

  Maybe it was my imagination, I tried to tell myself while the wild thud of my heart began to drum in my ears. Maybe I hadn’t actually heard—

  The sudden, blaring ring of my desk phone made me jump.

  Ringing?

  It shouldn’t be ringing. No one rang a business at two in the morning.

  Unless it was a warning.

  Fuck.

  I snatched up the noisy instrument even as I kept my eyes zeroed in on the black hole of the pantry’s open doorway.

  “Get out of there,” came a harsh male voice before I could say anything. “Get out now, there’s someone there with you.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  I dropped the phone, not even bothering to put it back in its cradle, ran around the desk and lost a precious second unlocking the front glass door before blasting through it. Only then did I realize that I’d left my car keys in my purse like an idiot, which I’d stuffed in the bottom desk drawer out of habit.

  Damn it.

  I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t even look back. The one and only thing I had to do was run. I’d worry about the details later.

  I had flung the glass door open so hard it banged against the wall, but while a part of me cringed at the noise, I didn’t look back. After the sound of the phone ringing and me answering it, the whole idea of going into ninja stealth mode was kind of pointless now. And who knew? Maybe sound was just what the doctor ordered. It was possible this was an ordinary break-in, in a part of town that suffered half a dozen break-ins and various other crimes every night. It didn’t have to be a sinister, Vitaliev-oriented plot. This was probably just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill crime. Scary but not personal.

  Except…

  It made no sense for someone to break into a place where food and clothes were given away for free.

  Fuck!

  I poured as much power as I could into my legs as I ran along the strip mall’s concrete walk toward the side parking lot. Beyond that was a deserted side street, and after that a straggly line of bushes that stood as the only obstacle to my ultimate goal—a twenty-four hour Tiger gas station filled with lights and people and lots and lots of safety.

  Less than a hundred feet away.

  I could make it.

  I could make it.

  I flew off the end of the strip mall’s walkway and nearly broke my neck when I landed in a pothole I hadn’t seen in the dark.

  Ow.

  Fucking tight-fisted property owner not replacing burned-out bulbs in their security light posts, I thought furiously, ignoring the sharp twang in my ankle as I pushed myself forward into the darkness. I would change the freaking bulbs myself once I got the hell out of this jam, whatever it was. I may have wanted to roll over and die right after Polo was shot, but I hadn’t. I’d fought with all the strength I had to get through that yearning-to-die hell. I had no intention of wasting months of hard work by allowing myself to be someone’s helpless victim.

  Helpless. Like I was in my dream.

  Why did you let me die?

  “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.” Running as fast as my injured ankle would allow, I lurched off the curb and into the empty street, eyes determinedly fixed on the straggly hedge in front of me.

  Come on, move.

  I could make it.

  If I could just ignore the pain, I could make it.

  That was when I heard it—footsteps, coming hard and fast behind me.

  No.

  Feverishly I increased my speed, a surge of panic smothering the pain in my ankle even as it slammed adrenaline through my system. More than anything I wished those footsteps were only a figment of my imagination, but wishes were for suckers and my papa hadn’t raised a sucker.

  Gasping for breath, I chanced a look back, praying to heaven there would be no one there.

  I caught just a glimpse of a black silhouette of a man in a dark hoodie a nanosecond before he launched at me.

  I didn’t e
ven have time to scream.

  The impact of the man’s much larger body against mine was so violent it jarred my eyes in their sockets. The nearly instantaneous impact of me being slammed onto the road jarred everything else. Pain exploded in several places all at once—my knees, my elbows, my breastbone. I was almost deafened by a sharp crack as the side of my face bounced against the pavement, and for a critical moment the only thing I saw was a white burst of stars.

  That was all the time my attacker needed to right himself, get a knee into my spine and a hand in my hair to yank my head back so hard my neck popped. But I forgot about the pain when I heard the distinct zing of a knife leaving its sheath.

  No!

  “I’m going to enjoy this, bitch,” came a breathy, unfamiliar voice, sexless and without accent. “I get you, I get the recognition I deserve—without having to grab my fucking ankles.”

  “Fuck you!” The words raged out of me, and with despairing horror I realized those might be the last words I ever uttered when I felt his free arm move to come around to the front. I knew, as surely as if I had eyes in the back of my head, that he was moving to slash my throat. I pulled against the hand holding my hair even as I brought up my right arm to fend off the attack, fully prepared to sacrifice that part of my body if it meant saving my life. Several hairs ripped from my scalp even as a sting slashed my forearm.

  Then the body on top of mine jerked with a sick, wet squelching sound, like a watermelon being dropped off a roof. And then—

  Nothing.

  The hand in my hair went slack, allowing me to yank my head down to protect my vulnerable neck. The knee in my back also vanished. The moment it did, I twisted ferociously, bucking my attacker’s weight away, my terrified gasps seethed from between my clenched teeth like breathless screams as I fought to get out from under him.