Page 18 of Marked By the Devil

That didn’t encourage any positivity.

I also couldn’t act on anything while I was trapped and locked in this small, bare room.

Waiting was the only course of action that was provided to me, and I had never been good with that.

Waiting was a form of torture I couldn’t endure.

When I was sixteen, I waited for an entire night and all through the next school day for my mom to come home after her shift. At the end of that wait, I had been informed that she was killed in the line of duty.

Then a couple of years ago, I waited for a week to know if I had been assigned to a fieldwork position. At the end of that wait, I was smacked with the disappointment that someone else—a superior’s nephew—had been chosen for the job I wanted.

Other things had built up over the course of my life, even little things like waiting on something in the mail that never came or stressing over the delay for exam scores to be released, contributing to a lousy sense of patience.

I wasn’t the best at waiting, and the longer that I had to be in this room with zero access to the rest of the world, the more convinced I became that Viktor was doing this on purpose. A form of psychological warfare.

The warfare was over, though, because the next time that door opened, it wasn’t Lurch. It was the tall, muscled form of Viktor Volkov himself.

He entered without a word, teased me by leaving the door open, and leaned against the doorframe. His face was still unreadable with all those rough-hewn lines and angles. But when he crossed his arms and settled in to rest his back against the doorframe, it looked like he was interested in keeping me company again. Like he was determined to get some different answers out of me.

He would be shit out of luck there.

Lying to someone like him could be the difference between survival and death. It was a fine balance that I had to dance around, but I seriously didn’t have anything else to tell him.

I didn’t know who wanted to kill his brother. Any number of criminal morons could claim that goal.

I hadn’t been informed of an assassination attempt. Smithson had barely told me anything since I’d started.

And I had no idea why I could’ve been shot at as well. Well, I had a theory, but nothing to back it up yet.

“Feeling refreshed?” he asked blandly.

I furrowed my brow. Refreshed after sweating nervously and anxiously in this small room while my mind could race—prohibited from deodorant or a single hint that I would live to see the next day?

No, I wasn’t fucking refreshed.

I felt trapped and cornered.

I couldn’t remember the last time my BO had gotten this bad from not having standard hygiene products.

And I wasn’t sure that knowing I’d taken 7,934 steps back and forth in this room mattered, but it was the only scrap of sanity that I could hang on to, not forgetting that number.

I let my deadpanned stare be my answer.

But when he didn’t budge, I fought the hysterical urge to laugh.

Feeling refreshed?

What the fuck kind of question was that?

He couldn’t care.

He could smell how nervous I was, like some monster that was lured to the scent of fear.

Realizing that his stupid sense of sarcasm and snark relaxed me was hilarious, though.

He’s a killer, a criminal. Not some joke.

He let out a breath, watching me so closely with a weird intensity in his eyes that had me feeling like I was too exposed. Naked, even. Before I could blink, he stepped back and grabbed a chair from the hallway.