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“You played your part very well earlier, didn’t you? Pretending to want me. Pretending to have come to terms with your–circumstances. Maybe I should rethink what I promised to consider about your little friend. Since you’ve decided to be such a bad girl after all.”
“No–” I turn around sharply without thinking, my heart racing in my chest. “Mikhail, no. I’m sorry, I–”
“I didn’t tell you that you could put on clothes.” His fingers trace the edge of my neckline, his eyes heating behind the anger. “I should rip those off of you right now. But I think we have other things to talk about.”
His eyes drop down to my hand that’s holding the keys. “What, for instance, do you think you’re doing with those?”
I have no excuse that I can think of. No fathomable reason that I could be down here in the middle of the night with Mikhail’s keys that doesn’t implicate me in something that I shouldn’t be doing.I shouldn’t have come downstairs. I should have stayed in the room.
“I–” Nothing comes out, and I can see the anger darkening on his face. I know if there was ever a time I shouldn’t lie to him, it’s now. There’s too much on the line, not just for me, but for Ruby.
“You left me free,” I whisper, looking up at him with as much courage as I can muster. “Can you really blame me?”
His hand closes around my throat, pressing against the tender flesh from earlier. I can see the rage building in his eyes as he pushes me backwards, against the door I was trying to open a moment ago. His hand tightens, and I wonder in that moment if this is going to be the reason I die. All of the fighting, all of the manipulation, all of the efforts to play his game in a way that would hang him with his own rope, and it leads to this.
Strangled because I was trying to unlock a door.
“You bitch,” Mikhail whispers. “I warned you. I warned you what would happen if you tried to take what was mine. Now it won’t only be you who pays the price.”
I’m not entirely certain that he’s talking to me, and not someone else in his memory, someone else he said something similar to–or wanted to.
He leans into me, his mouth very close to mine, his hand still squeezing. I feel my air starting to be cut off, and my heart starts to pound in my chest, fear making me buck and squirm against him, trying to get free. My hand falls open, and the keys fall to the floor.
There’s a sound. Something loud, banging, too loud to be from the dropped keys. Both Mikhail and I freeze in place.
The sound comes again.
It’s unmistakably from outside the front door.
Natalia
There’s a flood of relief as Mikhail lets go of my throat, my lungs filling with air again, but there’s no time to let it sink in. I’m terrified of what Mikhail might do next and I’m terrified of what–or who–might be outside at the same time, and I’m so fucking tired of being afraid. I press myself backwards against the door, that feeling of not being able to be safe anywhere rushing back in, and it’s enough to make my knees weak.
I feel helpless, and I fucking hate that.
“Come with me.” Mikhail grabs my wrist. “If you try to make a break for it, just remember what I’ll do to Ruby.”
“What are you doing?” The words come out in something akin to a squeak that I hate, but I can’t help it. The night is taking a worse turn than I could have expected. “Shouldn’t I stay in here? Are you going out there?”
He pulls me closer, his other hand coming up to cover my mouth. “Zamolchi!” he hisses, his voice low. “No, I am not leaving you alone after the stunt you pulled tonight. If you get hurt, it will be your own fault.”
“So much for not letting another man get near me,” I snap, but it’s muffled from behind his hand. He glares at me, but it could be for any number of reasons–I’m not entirely sure which thing he’s pissed at me about.
Mikhail moves towards the front door slowly, his left hand still clamped around my arm and keeping me close to him as he slides the gun out of the waistband of his boxers with his other hand. He moves like a cat, slinking along the floor almost soundlessly as he reaches for the knob of the front door, and for the first time I really see what sort of man he’s been before this.
He’s a dangerous man, in ways that go beyond just the danger he posed to me. The kind of man my father would have employed. An enforcer or an assassin of some kind, someone who does deadly work. I’d known some of that, but it hadn’t been as clear as it is in this moment.
I fight the urge to squeeze my eyes shut as he opens the door, yanking it open and then pushing us both backwards as he raises the gun, waiting for someone to come through. I can feel myself trembling in his grasp, expecting the moment that the person who’s been stalking me comes into the house, attacking us both.
There’s nothing. And then, as we both stand there, we see the slow drip of blood running across the floor.
Mikhail lets go of my arm, turning towards me with an expression on his face that brooks absolutely no argument. “Remember what I said about running,” he says through gritted teeth. “If you want your friend safe, you will stay here with me.”
He’s still holding the gun as he circles around the door. For a moment I don’t move, frozen with fear and confusion. And then I see the expression on his face as his eyes go wide, and I move away from behind the door, needing to see what it is that, for the first time in my experience, has managed to unsettle a man like Mikhail.
For a moment, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
The door, the floor beyond it, and the porch is a disaster. A message is scrawled across the door in blood, as if painted with someone’s finger, and below it, a dead white cat is nailed to the wood.
