She grinned and took one hard step forward, her shoe slapping the floor.
An alarm sounded.
Behind me the door burst open and a nurse rushed in, flanked by my mountainous guards.
The nurse paused, eyed me—judged and weighed me and pulled a hypodermic needle from behind her back. She nudged the syringe’s thumb rest slightly so a brief trickle of amber liquid dribbled down the needle’s sharp tip before slipping onto the syringe’s transparent shaft.
“No!” I dodged to avoid the guards’ grip, but their fingers hooked into my arms like icy sausages. “Just tell me,” I begged, throat tightening, tears fuzzing my vision as they burned free of my eyes. “Tell me if Pietr’s alive!”
But the needle was in, the plunger was down, and everything wobbled in my sight like heat waves hovering above blacktop.
“Tell me.” My tongue slow, the words were thick, as blurred as my vision. I fought to focus, desperate for an answer …
“What does it matter? You’ll never see him again.”
And the darkness chewing at the edge of my failing vision finally stole my senses away.
Alexi
In the foyer, Pietr readied to again sneak off into the night, to hope for still winds and calm air and a few precious minutes to press his face to the thick glass that separated him from the girl he adored. To stare at her a mere moment before the dogs caught his scent. “What good comes of this? Does she want to see you—like this? Knowing the danger you put yourself in? Does she even know you visit?”
He turned away, unmoved by my question except for the telltale rise of a single vein near his temple. “I know I’m there. Jess needs me.”
“Jessie, even locked away in an insane asylum—did you not say she’s been sedated? She makes more sense than you,” I stated. “She would not want you there if it meant you risked your safety.”
His hand was already on the door, his mind made up. “Maybe I’m not doing this just for her,” he said, his eyes a cool blue though I knew he seethed within, “maybe I’m doing this for me.”
“Then you’ve finally succeeded in combining stupidity with selfishness,” I congratulated him. “You know pining over her does nothing for any of us. It is a distraction—not a solution.”
“Why don’t you focus on the solution, then, brother,” he snarled, whipping around, “rather than your multitude of distractions?” He grabbed the pocket of my shirt and, with a quick squeeze of his fingers, crushed the box of cigarettes resting there.
The front door slammed shut behind him.
I dragged the crumpled box out and examined its bent and broken contents.
Little brothers were so difficult.
Sliding the paper from its normal place between the cigarettes and my heart, I unfolded it carefully so as to not drop the small photograph nestled within. In my grasp the letter quivered, the flowing Cyrillic script of Nadezhda’s uncompromising hand wobbling until it became nearly impossible to decipher. But I knew the words by heart.
Part Pushkin’s “Night” and part her own words of love, the letter was a perfect example of the superiority of longhand correspondence to the stale vanilla of e-mail and text.
She and I had been apart too long, because I did what Pietr never would. I broke a promise. A promise to the daughter of one of the most dangerous men in Russia—head of one of the largest districts of the Russian Mafia. A promise to take her away from the danger, the drug lords, the whores and violent criminals, to settle with her in a modest dacha all our own.
To wipe clean the slate of our violent and destructive pasts and build a future—our own happily ever after.
Together.
What if the happily ever after we both wanted only existed in fairy tale stories? Or what if the choices that set one on the path to becoming a deserving hero had already passed me by? Perhaps I deserved nothing better than what I had.
Just one of my “multitude of distractions.”
Pietr had no idea.
Jessie
My body ached. My eyes, sticky with sleep, peeled open with a sound like masking tape being pulled from the roll. Vision hazy, I struggled to get a handle on my location. Something creaked beneath my hip as I rolled up into a seated position. A mattress. I concentrated on keeping whatever contents my stomach still held where they belonged.
“Nice of you to join us, Jessica.”
I squinted at the woman in the chair before me, searching the cottony mess of my brain for a name. “Dr. Jones?”
“Very good. How are you feeling today?”
“Groggy.”
“That happens when we have to sedate a patient so frequently.”
“Sedate?” My arm stung. I looked at it, seeing tiny puncture marks marring the tender skin of the crook of my elbow.
“Yes. You kept getting yourself so worked up.…” Dr. Jones shook her head. “You were dangerous to the staff. And to yourself.”
My eyes slammed shut and I wondered what could have upset me that much. Me? Dangerous? I rubbed my eyes. My head hummed, but nothing stepped out of the shadowy recesses of my brain with an answer. “Really?” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay, Jessica.” She glanced at the two tall men flanking her. They wore the same long-sleeved uniform my guards had, but …
Tilting my head to view them from a different angle was a big mistake. I clutched at the bed and waited for my vision to stop swimming. Slowly I raised my eyes from the concrete floor to the stalwart men.
They looked like my guards but weren’t my guards.
Dr. Jones’s mouth moved and I struggled to understand the words coming out of it. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me about?”
I felt like I was back in Latin level one. I ran my tongue along my teeth. My mouth seemed as fuzzy as my vision.
“Go ahead. Ask me anything. Do you have any questions?” She peered at me. “Any questions at all?”
Although it sounded distinctly like a challenge, there was nothing I had to know—no question pounding inside my skull. I shrugged. “No.”
“Excellent.” She stood and looked at the two giants. “I believe we can finally take Jessica off restriction. Give her a few minutes and let her shower and change. Then take her to the common room to join the others.”
Mute, they nodded.
Dr. Jones turned to the shadows behind the guards. “Nurse.”