Thief (Boston Underworld #5)(14)
It occurs to me that I should beg. I should plead. Keep fighting. But between those thoughts, there are other, darker thoughts. What is there to fight for? My ankle is ruined. My losses and agonies have been greater than any contentment I’ve ever known. I would be a fool to withhold hope that I can control my destiny. I am bone-tired of facing each new day and the challenges it brings. And when blackness creeps into the edges of my vision, the decision is made for me. My body doesn’t have the strength to fight, even if I wanted to. All that I’m capable of now is watching the dying embers fade from the monster’s eyes before me.
Fragments of reality pull me back into the world at a sluggish pace, stealing any hope I held for a peaceful death. My mouth is dry as cotton, and my head is thick with fog. Light flickers in and out of my vision, and when I see the blue of my monster, acidic tears burn the back of my eyelids. How could I ever believe in heaven when I am stuck in hell with him?
I’m uncertain how much time has passed since everything grew dim, but Nikolai is still here. Only this time, he is beside my bed, wearing a tortured expression on his face.
“Zvezda, I—”
What sounds vaguely like the makings of an apology tapers off to nothing. Just as I suspected, he is a coward. I don’t want his wasted words. I want nothing further to do with him, and I find a bitter satisfaction in the claw marks left on his brutishly striking face.
I meet his gaze and hold it. “You may burn my clothes, Mr. Kozlov, and I will still dance naked. You may beat me or touch me in ways you have no right, and still, you won’t break me. I’m telling you this now, so if it is your intent, then go on and do your worst to me.”
Nikolai shows no visible reaction to my statement, and if he weren’t looking directly at my face, I might not even be certain he heard me. I wish he would just leave so I could get back to my work. But he doesn’t. He lingers wordlessly, his eyes moving over my tender throat with painstaking precision.
It’s only when I attempt to sit up that the muddled situation becomes clear. He has no need to argue. When I struggle with the imprisonments on my limbs, I feel as though I’m being strangled all over again. He has bound me from moving at all. I jerk against the restraints in vain, and Nikolai flinches.
“You can’t do this!”
But he can, and he has. He won’t look at me. Why won’t he look at me anymore?
He issues a subdued request in Russian, and a woman in a white lab coat wheels in an IV stand.
“What are you doing?” I thrash against the restraints. “You can’t do this!”
Nikolai speaks to the woman in Russian, and it doesn’t take me long to understand that she is a Vory doctor. He issues his orders, and she obeys.
When her eyes fall on me, I shake my head and plead for any scrap of mercy she might possess. “Please, you can’t.”
She purses her lips and reaches for a medical bag. “Is for your own good. You will see.”
A high-pitched sound vibrates off the bedroom walls, and the shock on Nikolai’s face is the only indication I have that it’s originating from me. I’m screaming. Crying and begging and kicking, desperate to break free.
This time, it’s the doctor who issues a command to Nikolai. Across the room, his eyes move to mine, and for a few fleeting seconds, he spares a glimpse of his humanity. He is hesitant. It’s fast, only a flash in time, and if I blinked, I would have missed it, but I didn’t. I saw his moment of weakness, and I’m desperate to nurture it.
“Please,” I beg.
I become nonexistent to him again when he falls into order and holds my arm firmly in place as the doctor establishes the IV. I stop thrashing, but only because I’m afraid of the needle.
“What are you giving me?”
They both choose to ignore me, but their responses aren’t necessary. The effects of the sedative make themselves known around the time the doctor begins making her preparations and understanding dawns on me slowly. It isn’t just a sedative I’m getting today.
It’s a feeding tube.
In the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, my Audi R8 idles just down the cramped street from the address written in my file. Standard and unassuming, the apartment building on Essex is about what I would expect.
My fingers drum a solo over the steering wheel as I contemplate turning around. There are other ways. I could send Tanaka and her emotional baggage back home to her father. Torturing him for answers would be just as effective and less of a headache than dealing with her obvious mental issues. It would save me from the constant frustration I have felt since she entered my life.
But it would not be justice served. Manuel can’t comprehend suffering until he experiences it for himself. This is the whole point of vengeance. Since I was a boy, I have vowed the day would come when I would discover the truth about my mother. If she was a liar and a whore who abandoned us, then so be it. But if she wasn’t, then I would avenge her and know for certain the true nature of my father.
If Sergei knew my intentions, he would laugh in my face. He would say that I have never forgiven her for leaving and I am only clinging to the hope that she loved me when she never truly did. Like my father, he raised me to believe that he would always be honest with me, even if it hurt.
His words didn’t inspire warm feelings, but as a boy, I accepted the only reasonable explanation for my mother’s abrupt departure from my life. I admired my father for his strength. For his ability to carry on without her when inside I felt as though something had shattered and it would never be put back together again. But with age came perception. Over time, I came to understand that Sergei was not exactly the hero I had always painted him to be.