“Polly! Are you okay? What’s going on?”
She blinks and a tear falls. One lone tear that somehow feels so much worse than if she were bawling.
“I… I can speak Russian, Alyssa. I understood everything he just said.”
My heart drops. She understood their conversation and that’s her reaction? It can’t be good news.
She turns to me, pale and trembling. “They’ve got an auction set up. They’re going to sell me to the highest bidder.”
2
URI
I shove the mudak down the stairs.
He falls cartoonishly, cracking his head half a dozen times before he eats the step at the bottom of the staircase. I follow him down, snatch him up again by the scruff of his collar, and hoist him back onto his feet.
His eyes wheel wildly in their sockets. He’s almost certainly concussed, damn near delirious with pain and terror. A nicer man would give him a moment of mercy.
I’m not a nicer man.
Instead, I push him roughly towards the shed in the far corner of the lawn behind the greenhouse. To a passing observer, it looks like any other shed in any other neighborhood in the world. You’d expect to open it and find rakes, lawn mowers, fertilizer. And if you stepped inside, that’s exactly what you’d find.
But you’d also find a trapdoor. And beneath that trapdoor, you’d find a staircase. At the bottom of that staircase, you’d find a room sealed with concrete thick enough to keep screams from leaking out.
And in that room, you’d see terrible things happening.
I kick the motherfucker into the shed, down the stairs, and into the concrete room. He’s shivering at the sudden drop in temperature. It doesn’t take him long to realize that there are no windows and no doors other than the one I just hurled him through.
Unfortunately for him, I’m standing between him and it.
I lean against the door frame and cross my hands over my chest. “I suggest you make the decision to answer me truthfully now. It’ll save you a world of pain later.”
The man’s eyes bulge as he scrambles on all fours to the far corner of the concrete cell. He’s scrawny, badly bearded, pale, and shifty-looking. His voice, when he speaks, matches his appearance perfectly. “Where am I?”
“You want answers? You’ll have to answer mine first. Let’s start with an easy one: what’s your name?”
His throat bobs. “Alan.”
Generic, useless, and entirely forgettable. Hm. I ask my next question in Russian, but I’m not even halfway through it before I can tell by his frown that he has no idea what the fuck I’m saying.
That one throws me for a loop. Sobakin wouldn’t hire just anyone for something of this magnitude. He’d want an insider. Someone who knows our world.
“I asked how long you’ve worked for Boris Sobakin.”
His throat bobs again, but this time, there’s an odd hitch in it. A tell, I think. “Who?”
I uncross my arms and take a slow step towards him. “I thought I warned you about lying to me.”
As soon as I move closer, Alan plasters himself to the wall like he thinks he can teleport right through it. “N-no! Please! Don’t.”
“Okay, I won’t,” I agree amicably.
He drops his hands, mostly in shock, so I take the opportunity to punch him in the gut as hard as I can. He coughs up blood, spluttering desperately as he sucks in big breaths. I retreat so he doesn’t vomit all over my shoes.
“If you’re going to lie,” I growl, “then I am, too.”
He’s still keeled over when he looks up at me warily. “F-fine,” he stammers. He sucks in another dramatic breath and spits out a little more blood before he straightens. “I know Boris.”
“I’m aware. My question was, how long have you worked for him?”
He shakes his head in pained confusion. “Not long. Few weeks, maybe. That’s it.”
“What did I just say about lying?”
“Listen, man, he stumbled across me, okay? I was just running my operation, doing small-time jobs, enough to pay my men and myself. I’m not a big-timer.”
I snort. Clearly. “But you caught Sobakin’s notice.”
“Because my men and I happened to be in there already when he showed up.”
“In where already?”
He gulps, his eyes fixed worriedly on my face. “Th-the girl’s house. The one next to yours.”
“What were you doing in there?”
Another gulp. “I was just… just looking through the place. Everyone’s gotta eat, ya know?”