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The pain is blunt and fierce—enough, almost, to make me faint. My head smacks against the window, and I let it rest there after, dizziness flowing over me like warm honey. I lie there, batting my eyes stupidly, as the swollen, twisted world comes slowly back into focus.I can’t live like this,I think, almost nonsensically.No one could ever live like this.It’s probably the blunt trauma to my head, but the thought, just then, makes me wildly sad.
And after a groggy moment—I realize why. If I can’t live like this, then even if I survive this entire ordeal—which, let’s be honest, isn’t looking like the imminent possibility at the moment—then how the hell could I hope to have a future with Aleks?
Is that what I want?That soft voice in the back of my addled mind is my own again, hesitant but true.Do I want him, despite everything?My heart hammers, and sitting there beside my would-be killer, the rain-wet forest streaming by, I choose to believe that what I saw happen between Aleks and Marya was somehow a mistake. I know Aleks by now, don’t I? I know him better than to think he’d have anything going on with thatwoman. He may have married me to protect me…but why does he want to protect me?
Does he love me?
“You do have so much fight in you,” purrs Konstantin, drawing me through the waters of my pain and back into reality. “It makes me think…perhaps—I do not want you dead, after all, Katerina.”
What?I look at him sideways, trying in vain to focus on him, to compress three rippling images of him into one. After a moment of looking hard, I manage to do it. “What are you talking about?” My voice is slurred, but he smiles, nonetheless.
His icy eyes dance when they meet mine. “Yes, I think I would like to keep you around. I thought torturing you, tormenting you—I thought that would be hell enough for Aleks. But I see now. There is a far better torment to be had, and one that will last far longer than the one I had in mind.”
I begin to shiver. I’m not sure if I’m cold or feverish or in shock or just scared, but the onset begins at once, and I find I can’t stop.
“You see, I knew that there was something between you. Do you know how?”
I bite my lip. Trembling, I shake my head.
“He has been with many women in his time,” Konstantin continues. We take a long bend in his fine car, plunging deeper and deeper into the woods. The tall trees are pressing closer to the road with every mile, until finally they bend their heads together and knit there like steepled hands, swallowing us, almost like a tunnel, with only blisters of pale sunlight left to show between their shadowy emerald fringe. “Many,manywomen.”
I bristle, even through the haze of my pain and fear. “Yes. Get to the point.”
He chuckles, clearly amused at my jealousy. “So very many, over these short years—but what I found odd, when I delved into his past following the murder of my brother, is that he forgot about them as soon as they were gone. He never looked after them, never inquired about them or sought them online, or asked for their phone numbers or even what state they lived in. Not one of them did he return to. None…but you.”
My face heats. I’m suddenly keenly aware of the man in the backseat, and his eyes on me more than the gun he has kept level at the back of my neck. “I don’t care.”
“Oh, please. Don’t play the coy little vixen with me, I can tell just by the look on your face right now that you’re pleased. And why wouldn’t you be? He is the father of your child, after all.”
Oh, God. Please…don’t let that be where this is going. Please, Konstantin—if you do one thing, please leave my son out of this.But even thinking it feels like blowing out a candle, like casting a stone down a well. No better than a wish lost on the wind.
“He didn’t just look after you once, either,” says Konstantin. “He looked after you over and over; it’s as though he couldn’t stop. Did he tell you he didn’t? Did he tell you he didn’t care?” His eyes cut to me, full of mirth. “Did you believe him, Kat?”
Oh, yes. Of course, I did.How could a man like him, as fallible as I have found Aleks to be, give a damn about a girl like me? His college best friend’s little sister? A nobody? A one-night-stand who, when she discovered what he truly was, fled from him like a girl from a wolf?
Yet—I do believe it. More than I want to, I believe this, now.
“He had eyes on you, actually. He checked in. Not every day or even every week; but every month or so he had a trusted man look in, and see to it you were safe. That there were no clever men like me who had thought to catch your scent. Even fromacross the world, even years after your little tryst—Aleksander Lukin was protecting you.”
Tears rise in my eyes. I don’t let them fall.
“So, my new idea,” presses Konstantin after a moment, “is certainly not to kill you. What a waste that would be. No, I have a much better use for you now.” His grin is horrible. Wicked in a way that makes my stomach turn. “I will make you mine—do you see? Your little marriage to him…it tipped his hand. I see, now, what Aleks truly desires; and it is you.”
Shame twists in my belly. I can’t even let my mind begin to wander to what my life would look like as his prisoner. Look at what my life has looked like for one week as his enemy.
“You will be my wife, now,” he says, his grin widening. “I’ll keep you under lock and key, in Moscow; just there within his reach, but buried so deeply in men, in resources, in concrete, if need be, that he will have no hope of ever reaching you. And you will grow old as my wife, and maybe he will tire of wishing after a girl he can never have; but knowing now what a desperate romantic Lukin is…I doubt it.”
It’s then that the bend in the highway gives into a loose shoulder. I barely see the dirt road that awaits us there between the trees, marked by a single battered post set in the earth. Konstantin pilots the car straight into the trees, with the kind of ease that tells me he’s been here before—maybe on one of those days when Aleks and his men couldn’t find him in town. I don’t know where we are, but I know it’s north, I can tell that just by the terrain and the density of the trees. If I had to guess, I’d say we were within fifty miles of the Canadian border, and inland, away from the coast.
And the drum in my heart tells me, before my eyes or Konstantin can—just where we’re going. “No,” I whisper, and he laughs.
“Oh, yes.” He drives faster than I’d like him to, the nice car rattling hard over the shoddy gravel road, bottoming out twice, once knocking my head hard enough against the window to rattle my teeth. “You’ve guessed it, then? Where we’re going?”
To the safehouse.
“That’s right,” says Konstantin to my silence. “We are going to see your son.”
I grit my teeth, swallowing my pleas. Because I know my desperation will only make this victory for him that much sweeter. And I know it’s what he wants. And more than anything else, I know that he will not give it to me. He won’t kill me and set my son free. He won’t let my family go. This is his plan now; and in his way, he’s won. He has absolute control.
