Bargains and Betrayals (3 page)

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.”

A woman stepped forward, the muted light of my room making her white uniform glow.

“Prep her for chores tomorrow. She can at least help with the laundry.”

The nurse gave me a fleeting look before returning her gaze to the doctor. “Are you—?”

“—sure?” Jones nodded. “She’s under guard. She should at least be useful while she’s here. In two days your father visits.” Her voice lowered along with her eyes. “He’s a stubborn man when it comes to his children.” Rising, she brushed her hands across her slacks. Her cell phone sounded, and, tugging it out of her pocket, she glanced at it, a smile stretching her lips. “Excellent. The thing we’ve been looking so forward to receiving is finally on its way in. I need to gather some paperwork and get ready to meet the shipper,” she informed the nurse. “Is room twenty-six prepped?”

“Yes.” The nurse waited until the door closed behind the doctor before addressing me again. “Can you stand?”

I nodded with more certainty than I felt.

“Good. Shower. Breakfast. Tomorrow: chores.”

The door clicked shut and I was alone in my room. With a groan I rose and steadied myself, holding the cold metal bed frame.
Shower
.

Bathroom.

There.

A door.

I shuffled to it and timidly bent to start the water running. Slipping out of my top and pants I stepped into the shower and let my head hang, slowly waking under the pelting sting of water.

Beneath its roar, my mind began to clear.

Was there a question I should have asked? I shook my head, water rolling down along my ears, threatening to plug them. “Ugh.” No answer—or, more appropriately, no question—came. Between the ache in my elbow and the emptiness in my skull, I realized there was no question I needed answered, no curiosity gnawing at my gut.

I dried my hair, dressed in a nondescript blue shirt and pants, and joined my guards.

“You two. You aren’t my regular guards. What are your names?” It was something I’d never figured out about their predecessors.

A moment passed as they exchanged a slow look. Their meaty skulls swung back on their tree-trunk necks and they blinked in unison. One jerked his chin toward the common room.

We trudged in that direction, down the hall lit with hissing fluorescent bulbs. Past the nurses’ station and the room with its whirring refrigerator locked and filled with chemically based support for almost any behavior deemed abnormal, all in handy vials and bottles with names so long they wrapped all the way around their labels.

I took a seat at a round white table while one guard got my food. There were only a dozen other people seated throughout the broad space, but I realized that was twice as many as had been here before my forced sedation.

Something strange was definitely going on.

The nurse rolled a cart in, the platter on its top lined with tiny crimped paper cups, black numbers on their sides. The daily meds. I stretched up as tall as I could as she stopped the cart beside my table. Most of the cups appeared to have the same selection of pills inside. The nurse glanced at the cup numbers briefly before selecting one for me.

Mine wasn’t like the others. “Umm? What’s so different about me?”

“Just consider it proof that what your parents always said was true.” Handing me the cup, she reached over and, folding my sleeve, swabbed my arm with alcohol. “You’re
special
.” She lined up a syringe and jabbed me, slowly pulling back the plunger so the shaft filled with red.

“
Ow
.” I twitched. “And drawing my blood? That’s new.”

“Get used to it,” she suggested. “Consider it our little way of seeing just how special you are.”

My stomach did a little flip. The Rusakovas knew my blood was part of the cure for the werewolves and we were pretty certain the CIA knew, too, since Officer Kent tried to kill me at the shooting range. Was it possible Dr. Jones was somehow tied in with them?

The nurse withdrew the needle, put a cotton ball and Band-aid over the spot, saying, “Press down a minute,” and went on her way.

Could they all be in cahoots? I squeezed my eyes shut. No. That’d be crazy. Opening my eyes, I sighed. Maybe crazy was to be expected in an asylum.

My guard returned, sliding a tray of food across to me, his long sleeve slipping up to briefly expose the underside of one wrist.

“Wait,” I commanded, seeing something strange. But he didn’t obey. “Fine.” I poked at the stuff daring to be defined as food and even ate some. It was like eating the love child of cardboard and Styrofoam.

While faking interest in eating I tried to get a look at the guard’s wrist. There was a mark—a tattoo?—that seemed familiar. I glanced at his other wrist. The edge of a matching something peeked out from beneath that sleeve, too.

“I’m full.” It was one of the easiest lies I’d told in the past few months. “I want to go back to my room.”

In unison they rose, one taking my tray while the other watched me with dull eyes.

“If you don’t tell me your names, I’ll just make something up.”

They didn’t react, just kept walking.

“Fine,” I announced. “Thing One”—I turned to the one on my left—“and Thing Two,” I dubbed the one on my right.

Still no reaction.

Heading back, I noticed a young woman in a straitjacket and leg irons latched to a bench, her escort standing by, warily watching the length of the hall, his arms folded, eyes only briefly pausing on her.

Or me and my guards as we approached.

The most interesting thing in the vicinity, she didn’t look much older than me. Her complexion made me think she’d been tanning recently; she definitely wasn’t the happily stuck indoors type. Her shoulder-length hair was brown, with narrow highlights of blond and red, and as we passed her I thought I saw her nostrils flare. I craned my neck, dragging down my already slow pace to watch another moment. Her gaze flicked toward me and I stumbled, catching a reflection of red in her eyes. She blinked, looking away, just another normal girl.

In an asylum
.

I regained my balance and, untangling my feet, turned back toward my room, ignoring the creeping prickle as the fine hairs on my arms rose in warning.

Dr. Jones’s voice behind me made me spin around once more. “Excellent. Here are your papers.” She leaned toward the girl, who leaned away, baring her teeth in response. “We’ve been greatly anticipating your arrival, Harmony. You’ve had quite the journey.”

The creeping prickle turned into a full-body shudder before I could turn away again. Exhaling, I wondered if Harmony was the
thing
they’d been looking forward to receiving.

Three-quarters of the way down the hall we stopped outside room 39. A white metal door with a narrow window of reinforced glass near eye level marked the entrance to my private room.

Homey.

Thing Two took a card from his shirt pocket and slipped it into the electronic lock, waiting until the light blinked green to twist the handle. Considering his size and strength I bet the door would open whether locked or not.

Stepping inside, the door shut, bolting behind me and separating me from my Goliath guards.

Spectacular in its solitude, room 39 was so silent my ears wanted to bleed just to hear the rhythmic drip of blood.

I spent the rest of the day there, seated on the edge of my bed, flopped across the middle of my bed, staring at the walls surrounding my bed. I closed my eyes briefly and imagined my mother sitting on the bed’s edge, brushing the hair off my forehead like she used to do when I was home sick from school.

A breeze tickled my face and my hair was swept back from my eyes with a soft caress. I sat up. The room
looked
empty, but considering the weird things happening around Junction, I knew seeing and believing didn’t equate. “Mom?” My bedsheets fluttered and I caught the scent of sunlit summer fields. Although the air stilled as quickly as it had stirred, flopping back down on the bed, I didn’t feel quite as alone.