Casual.
Almost like he’s checking the time.
Black ink.
Heavy lines.
Two serpent heads on one coiled body.
The world goes very, very still.
That’s the tattoo.
Not like it.
Not similar.
The exact same mark.
The same configuration, the same weight of line, the same two heads facing opposite directions on a coiled body.
He killed my father.
The grief and the terror and the two days of running and the vomiting and the nightmares and my father’s hands closing my fingers around the drive all collide into a single white-hot point and the thing that comes out of me is not fear.
“You.” The word tears itself out of my chest. “You?—”
He stops walking. Looks at me.
“You killed him.” I am shaking so hard the man holding me probably feels it, but I cannot stop, I can’t stop any of this. “You killed my father, you killed him, he never did anything to you, he was just a?—”
“Take her to the car.”
“I will kill you!” It rips out of me at a volume I didn’t know I had. “Do you hear me? I will kill you, I swear it, I swear on his grave I will?—”
The man holding me starts moving and I fight him every step, screaming, twisting, and the man with the serpent tattoo watches all of it with an expression that doesn’t change by even a fraction.
He doesn’t look angry.
He doesn’t look impressed.
He just looks at me and that frightens the hell out of me, but I don’t think.
All I can feel is rage.
That is somehow the most terrifying thing that has happened today.
The car is dark and large and I’m dumped in the back between two of his men, and he gets in the front, and the door closes, and Vienna moves past the windows, and the drive back to Moscow begins in a silence so loaded it has actual weight.
The gun is at my back.
I stare at the serpent tattoo where it sits above his collar and I don’t look away and I don’t stop planning.
I will kill him.
4
RAZVAN
