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Stepan grabs the fabric above my breast then, using the knife to cut down through the material, splitting it apart as he saws down through the satin. With a jerk of his hand, he rips it sideways as he keeps cutting, down to my navel where he pauses, pushing the point of the knife into my belly again.
“I could gut you like an animal,” he growls, twisting the knife until I feel it break the skin ever so slightly, and I bite down on my lower lip, refusing to make a sound. If he does much more, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep quiet, but I’ll hold out as long as I can.
“Stepan—” Andrei’s warning voice comes from behind me, but Stepan just grins, twisting the knife a little harder. I feel something warm and liquid running down my stomach, and I feel the nausea rise up again as I realize that it must be my own blood.
Is this it? Is this where they decide they’re done toying with me?
“There’s a lot of parts you could probably live without,” Stepan says conversationally, as the point of the knife leaves the spot where he dug it in and carries on slicing my dress open. He yanks the fabric again, tearing it open down the middle so that it suddenly hangs on either side of me, leaving my breasts bare. Only the thin black seamless panties I’d worn beneath it clinging to my hips.
“Cut those straps off,” he continues, glancing towards Andrei, and there’s theclickof what sounds like a smaller knife. I feel the quick pressure of a blade and the sensation of it cutting through the straps at my shoulders. Then the dress falls in a puddle of ruined fabric to the cabin floor, leaving me with almost nothing left to cover me at all.
I can’t even try to use my hands because they’re still cuffed behind my back.
I want to let myself start to shake. I want to cry. I want to crumble and fall apart, but I can’t. These two men are stripping everything from me—my dignity, my clothing, and soon I’m sure, my life. I won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me tremble and cower and sob. I’ll hold out as long as I can before I give them even another single whimper.
“What do you think?’ Stepan asks, leering at me. “Does she have some answers for us?” He holds up the knife, and I feel another jolt of nausea as I see my own blood gleaming wetly on the tip.
“She might,” Andrei says, shrugging from behind me. “She might know a lot. Or a little. Or nothing.”
What am I supposed to know?A new frisson of fear runs down my spine because I don’t know much ofanythingthat could be worthwhile to men like them. And I’m not entirely sure that they’ll believe that.
“Sit her down.” Stepan pokes my nipple with the point of the knife, pushing inwards until I have to bite back a scream of fear. I remember him sayingno permanent damageearlier, but what if that’s changed? What if that only lasts until they realize I have nothing for them?
I feel so sick, weak, shivery, and nauseated, either from hunger or fear, or both. I’m struggling to stay upright, and I’m almost relieved when Andrei pushes a chair forward and yanks me down by my shoulders down into it, even when I feel him grab my cuffs and thread something through them, fastening my wrists to the back of the chair so that I can’t get out of the chair even if my legs didn’t feel like they were made of jelly.
“Now,” Stepan says, dragging the tip of the knife across my chest, over to my other nipple. “We have some questions about your husband’s business, Mrs. Andreyva.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” I say softly, looking up at him. I hate the sight of him, hate looking into his pale, watery blue eyes, but all I can do is hope that he’ll see that I’m telling the truth. “I only found out what my husband’s business evenisa few days ago. I don’t have any information for you.”
“And if I think you’re lying?” Stepan smiles cruelly. “I can make you suffer, Catarina. I can make you wish you’d never married theUssuri.”
Trust me, I don’t need you to make me wish that.I’d do anything right now to undo that particular decision, as if I’d ever really had any way out of it. I wonder what Luca would think if he knew where I was right now, that his agreement with Viktor had led to this.
I wonder if he’d still think it was worth it.
I don’t know if I still do.
“I’m not lying,” I tell him firmly. “I don’t know anything about any of it. All I know is that my husband traffics women. And I think it’s disgusting,” I add for good measure, curling my lip as I look up at him. “So I didn’twantto know anything about it, even if he’d wanted to tell me. Which he didn’t.”
Stepan pulls the knife back, tapping it against the fingers of his other hand as he considers. “I’m disappointed,” he says finally. “It’s not much fun if you really don’t know anything.” He frowns. “Maybe you’ll come up with something.”
And that’s when it really begins.
That’s when it becomes clear that maybe Stepan and Andrei have been tasked with getting any information I might have out of me. Neither of them really care all that much about it themselves; they want the opportunity to hurt me, and the information is just an excuse to do that.
And now he’s just going to make up an excuse.
Franco was always your garden-variety abusive husband. He wasn’t one to come up with creative ways to cause me pain. A slap, a punch, a fist in the hair. A night where I had to please his every whim, regardless of how I felt about it. But he didn’t have the imagination or the inclination to be more intentional about it than that.
Stepan is something else. A sociopath, definitely. A sadist, certainly. And someone who clearly enjoys torture simply for the sake of it.
By the time he’s halfway done with me, I’ve stopped being able to think. My body was already a mass of pain, but now it’s one of bruises and shallow cuts too. Stepan’s knife is drawing on my flesh as he asks me questions about Viktor’s business, about money and ledgers and girls that I couldn’t possibly answer even if I wanted to. I don’t have the presence of mind to come up with lies, either. So I keep murmuring the same thing miserably over and over, wishing more than anything that this could simply come to an end. Whatever that means.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.I don’t know.”
After a while, it seems like Stepan has stopped caring about whether I know anything or not. And a little bit after that, I stop being able to respond at all.
I’m lucky, I guess, that I have all my teeth and all my nails still. Whether it’ll stay that way, I don’t know. But for tonight, I’m safe at least, because before either of them can resort to those types of tried-and-true torture methods, I’m finally untied from the chair and lifted unceremoniously onto the mattress, where I’m left to lie there curled up on my side.
