Authors: Zoya Tessi
“I know. I tried to tell them, but the captain didn’t
want to listen.” Alex’s voice came low in the darkness.
A few minutes passed while we sat in the dark,
listening the voices from the room down the hall.
“Damn it, Princess..
. I told you to stay in the car.”
“And now I know why.”
“I'm sorry this is the way you had to find out.”
“Yeah, well... I'm sorry about a lot of things
.” I raised my head and searched the darkness with my eyes “Just tell me... How long?”
“Princess...”
“Stop it!” I snapped, “Stop calling me that and answer me! How long have you been plotting against us, hey?”
“I don’t want to go into details.”
“Right now I don’t care what you do or don’t want. You owe me that much at least, Alex. But I doubt that’s your real name.”
Several more minutes passed in a silence. I felt like I was at the bottom of a deep, dark well and that I mustn’t attempt to climb out for fear of the bad things waiting up on the outside.
“Just over two years.” he answered quietly.
I shut my eyes tight and bent my head down, struggling to imagine that I could have lived with an imposter for months. I slept with him. I fell in love with him.
I fell in love with a man who doesn't even exist.
From the very beginning he’d been acting a part, a mask conjured for one purpose only - to blast my life apart again, or what remained of it.
“Say something, please.” I felt his hand touch against my arm and realized he was now sitting close to me.
I was hit by an urge to back away, but couldn’t. I wanted to scream, strike out, shout that I hated him and wished he were dead, but ins
tead I went on sitting, inert. Alex moved his hand closer and wrapped it around my own, which suddenly felt very small.
“
You don’t look like a cop. “
“Yeah, I get that a lot.”
I wondered if it might be possible to love a person and hate them at the same time. On one hand, I felt an overwhelming desire to hurt him the way he’d hurt me, but another part of me longed to turn the clocks back half an hour, take hold of the girl who’d gotten out of the car and make her get back inside.
“Was anything you said true? How is it that Nikolai never doubted you? How…” I paused to gather the strength to continue,
then whispered, “How is it that I didn’t ever suspect you?”
“Well, sweetheart... it’s my job to make sure no one ever suspects.”
As he spoke, he covered my face with his hands and leaned forward, causing me such a rush of sorrow and torment that I thought I might drown in the feeling.
“And you're good at
what you do. One of the best, Nikolai said so himself once.” I spat the words out bitterly, backed away from him and dragged myself off the floor and onto my feet.
At a slow pace, I started in what I guessed was the direction of the
front door, but Alex was faster.
“You can’t go out there now, Khalil’s people are everywhere.”
“If you try to stop me I'll scream, and I’m sure that would spoil your little ambush.” I replied coldly.
Khalil was the last person on my mind
at that moment and all I wanted was to get as far away as possible. Alex looked at me for a few moments, then shook his head once and started to remove his bulletproof vest. When he pulled it over my head, I offered nothing in the way of protest. It felt like I’d used up my last ounce of strength when I’d forced myself to move away from him.
“Wait here. I'm going to tell them that I'm leaving and taking you home.
I’m no use to them here, anyway. Don’t go out there without me. Understand?”
I nodded and stood where I was, following Alex with my eyes as he moved towards the light coming from the room. As soon as he was gone, I grabbed the door handle and turned it to step outside.
Looking left and then right, I tried to figure out which way I should turn to get back to the car, but I was apparently too distraught to think rationally. Moving off the bare front porch and down the steps, I followed the path to a gate, which hung crookedly off its hinges in the artificial amber glow of the streetlamp nearby. Having to choose, I made the decision to walk downhill.
When I’d gone a little way, I stopped next to a yard surrounded by high c
oncrete walls and looked around. I was pretty sure I hadn’t come that way, which meant I was going in the wrong direction.
Turning
around, I saw Alex running towards me, signaling something with his hand. He was only a few feet away and I wondered why he was gesturing instead of calling out, but then I caught sight of a man’s silhouette on the wall across the street. The moonlight didn’t reveal much, so it was hard to make out any of his features, but I was pretty sure he was looking at me.
All of a sudden, my line of sight was broken entirely by Alex's body, which moved swiftly in front of me just a split second before a strange hissing sound pierced the air. I found myself
shoved down to the ground with force, gasping for air with Alex’s weight on top of me. He was squeezing me hard between his arms, covering me completely with his body, his face buried in my hair. Immediately, the night air resounded with gunfire.
“You’ll never learn to do what you're told, Princess,” he murmured, his voice somehow disconnected from the scene unfolding around us.
I felt his breath on my neck and thought I heard an indistinct whisper, but in all the chaos I couldn’t tell what he was trying to say, if anything. Closing my eyes, I could only stay pinned beneath him, fear flickering behind my eyes.
Car engines soon roared into life nearby, moving off at a frightening speed, followed by several police cars with their sirens wailing. A last crack of gunfire split the night from a distance, and then it was over; the blitzkrieg had ended as abruptly as it began. Loud but indistinct shouting was all that was left, coming from somewhere up the street.
“Looks like it's over.” I whispered and opened my eyes cautiously.
The way I was
lying, with one cheek pressed against the ground, I had a sideways angle on the street and could see two cops in the distance, running towards us. I was grateful for the warmth of Alex’s body because it offered me some measure of reassurance, but it was getting harder and harder to breathe as I lay beneath his weight.
“
Alex, you are crushing me.”
Breathing heavily, h
e pushed himself up a little and I used my hands to drag myself out from under him, deeply inhaling the cool night air. I looked up through the treetops to see a sky now full of stars, how many thousand pinpricks of light I couldn’t begin to guess.
“
It’s beautiful, huh?” I sighed and, rising slowly to my feet, turned around.
Alex
stayed where he was, lying face down on the grass, motionless.
“Alex?”
Startled by the lack of any reaction, I bent down and jerked his arm towards me, hard. When I loosened my grip on his hand it slipped from my own and landed with a thud on the sidewalk.
“Quit fooling around
and get up!”
I grabbed him by the shirt and started to shake him forcefully, seeing but not registering the red marks that were already staining my fingers.
“Alex! I’m serious!”
Air was escaping
my lungs in broken gasps, which slowly turned to sobs.
“Get up! Please, get up!”
My eyes had come to rest on a patch of wetness that was slowly spreading over his T-shirt, glistening now in the starlight. More shouts and sirens came from the distance, but I went on tugging at his shirt.
“You idiot!”
I screamed, “Why did you step in front of me?”
Someone grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me away, but I managed to
get free and throw myself down next to Alex.
“Don’t
you dare! Don’t you dare do this to me!” I yelled, shaking him with all my might. “Please, please, open your eyes!”
A firm pair of hands took me by the waist and lifted me off my feet,
dragging me away. I kicked out violently, not taking my eyes off Alex and a man kneeling now next to him, my vision blurred entirely by tears.
“
Where’s that goddamn medic?” the man shouted into the transmitter, “Andreyev is shot! I think he caught a sniper bullet!
“No! No! Let go of me!”
I screamed, but the hands gripped me more painfully.
“Stop it
, now!” said the sharp voice next to me, “You can’t do anything for him.”
No! It’s not true! It can’t be true! He’s lying!
“NOOOO!” I screamed into the night and my vision blurred completely, just before a thousand stars went out.
***
I lay curled up on the bed, looking at the same narrow crack in the wall that had held my gaze for days. It began at one corner of the room and spread out like a cobweb, branching out into several thinner, less distinct lines. I heard the door screech closed at the far side of the room and footsteps approach, but paid no attention to who entered, preferring to go on staring at the wall.
“Good morning!” came the familiar, chirpy voice, “How are we today?”
The same useless phrases were repeated day after day after day, whenever one of the nurses paid me a visit. As I had every time before, I only closed my eyes in response and hoped they’d soon see fit to leave again. There seemed no reason to reply to the inane questions they rained down on me every time they did their rounds.
When I’d woken up a few days earlier to a haze of delirium, brought on by the cocktail of tranquilizers they’d pumped into me, I had no idea where I even was. Groggy and disoriented, I thought I might still be in Alex’s apartment and that all the scenes of horror I remembered might be flashbacks from an awful nightmare. My resistance to the facts didn’t last too long, because the room that came into focus
was clearly part of a hospital and the infusion wire trailing from a needle in the back of my hand sealed it. And then, it hit me. He’s dead.
I wasn’t sure what happened after that, but I remember an impression of great commotion, with people in white coats clamoring to shine lights in my eyes or check my pulse. It was probably because I started to scream.
After the first morning of wakefulness, memories of that bloody night haunted my every waking hour, never allowing me a moment’s respite or escape. Every time I woke from a drug-induced sleep, there’d be the briefest moment, just a fraction of a second before I remembered, and then everything would come crashing down, as though my mind were filling with shards of broken glass.
“Something’s
gotta change around here girl.” the nurse leaned over the bed to look at me with a worried face and sad eyes, a tray of untouched food held in her hand.
“The doctor’s signed the discharge papers, which means you’re going home today. You’ve been here for ten days already, which is nine days more than we intended.”
Ten days? Was it really that long?
I took a deep breath and focused again on the wall in front of me. It could have been ten years for all I knew at that moment, and in truth it didn’t seem to make any difference one way or the other.
The door opened again and someone else entered. More footsteps approached, and I felt the bed sink down on one side as someone sat close to my back, a warm hand settling on my own.
“
Baby girl...” was Nikolai’s hushed voice.
I pulled my hand away from his and tucked it under the pillow, staring at one of the faintest cracks, a tendril that veered off in a different direction to the others, only to disappear behind a threadbare curtain.
“I don’t know what to do with her. Maybe you’ll have better luck in bringing her to her senses.” the nurse waved a hand dismissively and shuffled out of the room clacking her wooden clogs.
Nikolai came every day and
each time he seemed to have contrived a novel tactic to bring me back to my old self. He’d already tried gentle encouragement, cold-blooded reverse psychology and offers of lavish rewards if I might just take a few steps back towards the land of the living. Inevitably, he’d end up slumped in the armchair in the corner for most of the time, waiting for visiting hours to be over, looking thoroughly deflated and dismayed. He couldn’t seem to fathom the reasons for my behavior. Maybe he really thought I’d finally lost my mind.
If Nikolai did fear for my sanity, he probably had good reason, because even I couldn’t offer a rational explanation for my current state. I knew what I was supposed to feel; sorrow, pain and rage would have been elements of a normal reaction. I should have cried, but tears hadn’t come, not since that fateful night when it seemed like I’d stopped feeling anything at all. The emptiness I felt was absolute, like the vacuum of space, and I was grateful for it. If the floodgates of emotion did open, I had no doubt that I’d be swept out to sea.
“Bethany was asking about you. You should give her a call.”