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Heather
I got control of myself. I persuaded my body that I wasn’t actually in mortal danger, but I needed to move as if I were.
“Wh-what are you going to do, Master?” I asked in what I thought was a convincingly tremulous voice.
“Say goodbye, slut,” Ivan said in a voice like death.
“No… please… Master…” I begged. I told myself I sounded so terrified for the benefit of Anatoly but in reality the actual stomach-churning fear of a moment before lay very close to the surface. My reason kept telling me that Ivan had no intention of killing me, but his voice and his face said otherwise much too convincingly.
Then his body did too, because he used his purchase on my hair to twist me painfully around to look through the glass partition at Anatoly. The chauffeur’s expression said very clearly that he had bought Ivan’s little scene completely: it took a great deal to horrify a member of Ivan’s staff, but Anatoly was visibly struggling with his emotions—trying to look impassive in the face of his warlord’s evident intention to murder an innocent girl for biting his cock.
“Master… I didn’t!” I wailed. “I didn’t… I didn’t bite you… I’d ne—”
Ivan pulled me forward and pushed my face against the glass, so hard I thought he might break my nose.
“Say. Goodbye. Whore,” he commanded.
The role that didn’t feel like a role took me over. I tried to shake my head but the pressure of my master’s hand kept my face from moving over the hard, transparent surface more than a millimeter or two.
Ivan pressed harder.
“Goodbye,” I sobbed, my voice nearly rendered mute by my difficulty in moving my mouth.
Then before I could really notice what was happening, Ivan had yanked me away and drawn me through the door of the limo, naked in the cold night air.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Please!”
My master didn’t wait. He slammed the limo door shut and pulled me further, toward an enormous statue of a general or a king on a rearing horse.
All I could think was that one way or another the jig was truly up. I started to speak to Ivan in quiet, rapid Russian.
“Gospodin, Belkonov was going to kidnap me. Your men think you’re giving me to him to show him that you don’t care about me. I heard Misha and Grisha talking about it.”
Ivan broke his stride very slightly, as if he had started to make hurried calculations in his head: what did it mean that I actually could speak fluent Russian? Was I lying about what I had overheard Misha and Grisha saying?
Then he kept going, drawing me even further. My extremities began to go numb, and I hoped desperately that someone—Ivan or whoever awaited us—had made plans to cover me up, so that I didn’t make all of this moot by dying of exposure. At the same time, I found myself admiring just how convincing that part would make the little scene for Anatoly and any other observer via a bug in the limo’s passenger compartment.
Antonov took his whore, whipped and naked, to the river in the freezing cold and just dumped her right into the water.
I shivered violently: if Ivan had intended to get rid of me, he wouldn’t even need a gun. A few minutes in the water at the bottom of the embankment, completely unable to climb up because of the steepness of the bank, and I would be another naked corpse in a city that sometimes seemed full of them.
We reached the corner of the statue’s pedestal. I saw someone there, wearing a heavy coat and holding another open and ready. Despite everything I had seen and experienced in the last few months, and the love and joy I had unexpectedly and—I couldn’t help thinking—perversely found in Ivan’s masterful touch and careful mind, that coat seemed like the most wonderful thing I had ever felt against my skin, as the unknown man wrapped it around me. Lined with fur, it banished the chill almost immediately.
“Get her out of here,” Ivan said to him. “Wait until the limo is gone.”
“Gospodin,” I begged, “wait.” I turned to the dark-haired, bearded man who had just wrapped me in the coat. I wondered suddenly if he were the same man who had activated me at Devushkin’s palace, just the night before—before everything had gone, it seemed, terribly wrong. My heart seemed literally to rise into my throat.
“Seven alpha six,” I said to him. “You have to help me.”
I had a moment of sheer terror as I waited to learn whether the man who had wrapped me in the lovely coat had the slightest idea what I meant. He frowned at me severely, an expression that I thought could have meant either utter confusion or furious calculation.
“What?” Ivan said from behind me in English, demonstrating in a way I found distractingly endearing that his mind hadn’t quite kept up. “Heather, what’s going on? Do I have to use the wand to make you go with him?”
