Marina was a muscular, horse-faced woman with close-set ice blue eyes. Her bleached hair was chopped off in jagged layers, and hung dry and motionless as dead straw. She was hard and cold, but Sveti vastly preferred to deal with her rather than Yuri. Marina kept Yuri in check.
“It’s Rachel,” Sveti said, struggling to pitch her voice loud enough to be heard over the blaring TV. “She’s got an ear infection again. Do you have any more drops? She’s been crying for hours.”
She swayed on her feet, caught herself. She herself hadn’t actually slept in the six or seven days since they’d been moved from the stuffy cabins of that boat. They had rocked and swayed in a hellish infinity of nausea, vomit, whimpering misery, for weeks, maybe. Time had no meaning on the boat. Time had no meaning here in the concrete dungeon, either. But at least it did not plunge and heave.
“That whining brat is always crying about something,” Yuri sneered. “I’ll come down and give her something real to cry about, ey?”
Sveti kept her eyes fixed on Marina’s pale blue ones. “She’s hot,” she said. “It’s a bad fever. She could die.” She paused. “Like Aleksandra.”
A blinding flash of pain as Yuri smacked her with his knuckles. She hit the cluttered table, but when she looked up, Marina was on her feet, rummaging through her stash of boxes, muttering.
Sveti sighed in relief. Bringing up Aleksandra was a risk. She’d overheard arguments. Someone had been angry about Aleksandra. Someone the guards were afraid of.
So, then. It was not in the guards’ interests to let the children die. It left her baffled, but it was something.
Marina pulled out a glass bottle and sent it sailing through the air. Too high. Sveti leaped, scrambling to catch it. It bounced off the tips of her fingers and thudded and bounced on the ground, landing on a patch of gray, synthetic industrial carpet. It did not break, thank God.
Sveti dove to the floor to retrieve it, trying not to cry. If she cried, it would be worse. She forced her stinging eyes to focus on the bottle. Amoxicillin. Yes. That would help. She started scrambling to her feet, and was forced down by a heavy boot pressing against the small of her back. She twisted, looked up into Yuri’s bloodshot eyes.
“Don’t say that name again,” he said. “We don’t want to hear that name again. Or else you’ll disappear too. Then you’ll know exactly what happened to her. You want to know, Snow Princess? You want?”
She was too frightened to move. He stared down at her, smiling, liking it. Something ugly and horrible flexing inside him, growing big and strong. Reaching out to her, like sticky tentacles that made her dirty and ashamed. Inside, where she was most vulnerable.
She tightened her fingers around the smooth glass of the bottle, and twisted till she could see Marina again. “I have to go to Rachel,” she burst out, her voice high. “I have to give her the medicine. Please.”
Marina tamped out the cigarette. “Let her go, pig.”
Yuri’s laugh was ugly. “You like having the Snow Princess do all the work for you, ey? They picked a cunt for this job because you were supposed to be maternal. Marina, tucking the little angels into their beds, singing a lullaby. You’re no good for that. You’re no good for what other women are good for. So what are you good for? Worthless cunt.”
“Shut up, Yuri. You’re stoned.” Marina coughed out a cloud of smoke. “Let her go, before I knock out all your teeth.”
He did. Sveti fled down the corridor that led to the windowless, unventilated room where the children were penned. The din had abated. Rachel’s shrieks had dwindled to whimpers. Stephan and Mikhail had spent their energy as well. She was grateful for the relative silence.
Sasha held up his precious pen flashlight for her. Its batteries were almost dead, but it still cast a watery yellowish light as she used the bottle cap to measure out what she hoped was the right dose for a two-year-old.
Rachel choked and coughed and spat out half of the medicine on the sheets. Sveti was sobbing with frustration, fighting the desire to hit the child by the time she finally gave up. She curled herself around the little hot lump of Rachel’s shaking body, barely managing to stay on the narrow cot, to stare with wide, burning eyes into the impenetrable dark.
Mikhail was whimpering, thrashing in his sleep. He would wake up with screaming nightmares soon. He wet his cot and his clothes with such monotonous regularity, it seemed the whole world, including Sveti herself, stank of piss. Mikhail was five, as far as she could tell. So was Stephan. Dimitri was ten, and Sasha eleven.
Of the lot of them, only Sasha had been with her from the beginning, with Aleksandra, in that big, decaying apartment in Kiev. But Sasha wasn’t very good company anymore. He had stopped speaking a couple of months ago. The little ones had come later, after Aleksandra had been taken away. None could talk much. Mikhail and Dimitri seemed as if they might be retarded. It was hard to tell. She felt dulled herself, after the boat, after days in a hole with no air, no windows. Day and night were artificial; either the fluorescent lights were on, buzzing like crazed insects, or the children were left in the stifling darkness.
No sleep tonight. Never, when she had to deal with Yuri. She shuddered with dread. Dealing with him made her remember everything that Aleksandra had told her before she vanished.
Everything that Sveti had been so much happier not knowing.
Aleksandra had been taken from her parents as a reprisal, too, like Sasha and Sveti, but she had been taken months before them. She was two years older than Sveti. Worldly wise, cynical. And very ill.
She had been the one to point out what Sveti had been too inexperienced to see, after she saw how Yuri stared at the younger girl.
She’d nudged Sveti one night with her elbow before bed, flushed and shivering with the fevers she had every night. “Yuri likes you,” she whispered hoarsely, between coughing fits. “You better watch out.”
“You’re crazy!” Sveti had whispered back. “He hates me! He always hits me!”
Aleksandra let out a wheezing laugh and shook her head. “He likes you,” she repeated. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
Sveti, a sheltered twelve-year-old, had not known. So Aleksandra told her, in gruesome, exacting detail. Everything Yuri was going to do to her, with his thing. Everything he would expect her to do to him.
“It’s better to be prepared,” Aleksandra had told her sagely. “It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get to you. They always get to you.”
Sveti had been horrified, but Aleksandra had gone on to say that Sveti might as well get used to it, because probably all of them would be sold eventually. For that. That horrible thing that Yuri wanted.
“But we’re children!” she protested.
Aleksandra just stared at her, mouth hanging open, and then she started to laugh. She had laughed until she was sobbing on the bed, curled into a ball, her hair drenched with sweat. Shuddering.
Sveti had not slept for a week after that.
Soon after, doctors had come, and given them many tests. Machines. X-rays. Blood tests. No one would tell them why. It had taken days.
The next day, Aleksandra was gone. Sveti had awakened in the morning, and found the bed empty. The pillow still had the dent of her friend’s head.
Sveti cuddled Rachel tighter, till the baby wiggled in protest. She tried to breathe. The dark pressed down on her like a pitiless hand.
Chapter
6
N ick had noticed this phenomenon before. Momentous events that had been dreaded for years and had taken on colossal importance in his head—when they finally arrived, he found himself cool to them. As if he were watching an old movie that did not particularly interest or engage him. His father’s death had been like that. A series of details to attend to, a long look at the body in the coffin. The sharp-boned face so like his own, but wasted, sunken. Etched with the lines of sour disappointment that he’d worn ever since Nick’s mother had died.
The look he had then turned upon his son.
Nick had looked inside himself, searching for some emotion he could put a name to. He’d found nothing.
So it was with the arrival of Vadim Zhoglo.
The boat appeared with no warning. It was chance that he’d been monitoring the camera that watched the cove at 10:42 A.M. He’d had just enough time to scramble into some decent clothes, yank his hair back, splash his face. Then the superficial adrenaline rush had drained out of him, and he’d settled into this weird, sedated calm.
Too calm. Any man greeting Zhoglo who knew what he was capable of would be justified in losing his shit. Arkady Solokov, professional arms broker and general scumbag, should be terrified of fucking up in front of the Great Vor, and excited about advancing his criminal career.
Nothing twitched inside him as the man got out of the boat. He would have been able to pick Zhoglo out of his group of minions, even if he hadn’t seen the overly pixel’d long-distance photographs which were all that the combined police agencies on the planet had managed to glean.
The word for Zhoglo was blunt. Fingers like sausages, the heavy paunch of a gourmand. His silvering hair was buzzed short. His face was jowled, with heavy, pendulous lips. His iron-gray eyes were deepset in purplish, puffy bags. He exuded concentrated menace.
Nick studied him, figuring that his calm came from having nothing to lose. No wife, no kids. No unfinished business, other than finding Sveti. And avenging Sergei.
Sergei had still been alive when Nick had found him. Spread-eagled to the hotel bed, mouth duct-taped shut. Slit open, his guts pulled out and heaped onto his chest. Conscious.
Whoa. He usually managed to block that memory from slicing into him unawares. He averted his eyes as the men filed past. The only one he knew personally was Pavel. The man looked like shit, grayish and thin. He’d aged ten years since Nick had seen him.
Zhoglo went by. He didn’t appear to see Nick at all.
He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and fell into step behind the last man, an obedient dog who knew his place.
“Welcome, Vor,” he said, in Ukrainian. “I hope the voyage went well—”
“Shut up, cretin,” barked the last man in the line, a big, hulking blond. “You’re not here to make noise.”
Nick shut up and followed them up the walkway. The buzzer at his belt vibrated.
His stomach tightened with a chill premonition.
It could be an animal, blundering past one of the sensors. The men were ahead of him, spread out widely, almost to the house.
“The Vor’s hungry,” the last guy said over his shoulder. “Prepare a meal for him. And don’t fuck it up. Bad food makes him irritable.”
Nick froze for a second, letting the distance between them lengthen. Prepare a meal? Him? Pavel hadn’t said anything about cooking.
“What does he want to eat?” he asked.
The blond guy shot a contemptuous glance over his shoulder. “Ask him, asshole,” he said. “Your problem, not mine.”
What did he have in the kitchen, anyhow? His appetite was for shit these days. He choked down the occasional frozen dinner when the feeling of emptiness inside him became physically debilitating. He couldn’t cook worth a damn. He could barely use the microwave.
Maybe this was it. The stupid detail that would get his throat slit.
There was a chorus of rough, barking exclamations. Several guns jerked up simultaneously. Clickity-click, rounds were chambered.
“Who the fuck is she?” one of the guys snarled.
She? Oh, fuck. No, no, no. His artificial calm evaporated in an instant. He lunged through the clot of men to see…
Yes. Becca. Fuck.
Clothed this time, but she might as well have been naked, for all the diaphanous blue peasant blouse and the skintight jeans revealed.
Dead silence. The men stared at her, hungry-eyed.
She looked even prettier than last night. Her hair, dried, was a mass of brown curls. The color of the blouse made her skin look luminous. Her full, gleaming pink lips trembled. Unlike last night, she had good reason to be scared now.
Transfixed with dismay, he didn’t track the movement of the guy next to him before a hard clout to his face with the man’s pistol knocked him back. “What the fuck is she doing here?” the guy hissed.
Zhoglo turned to Nick, a smile curving his mouth. “Nice touch,” he said. “I appreciate initiative in an employee. A welcome gift? How kind.”
The bottom fell out of his gut, and tumbled down, down. He scrolled through the possible responses he could make, calculating how quickly—or, worse, how slowly, they would get her killed.
He swabbed the blood streaming out of his nose with his hand.
“Ah, actually…no,” he forced out, voice froggy.
Zhoglo’s smile froze. “No?”
Nick swallowed. Hot blood trickled down his throat. “She’s the, ah, cook.”
Becca stared at the guns. Feeling faint, she stared at the blood streaming from Mr. Big’s nose.
One of the men stepped forward. A short, fat man, in expensive clothes. He spoke, his voice low and cultured, in a language she didn’t know. Mr. Big replied in the same tongue. The fat man’s smile disappeared. He had not liked the response.