Perfect Prey

by Laura Salters

  But I’m already in more pain than I’ve ever been in, physically and emotionally. I might as well feel it all. It might be the last time I do.

  The fragments of my workaholic father left in my mind are dusty with neglect. Dark shards, like his absence as he worked seven days a week, and the sound of my mum wailing when the second heart attack took him. But shards of light, too—­fairy stories in bed, all four of us, when we were young, him performing all the funny voices even though he was delirious with exhaustion.

  The deterioration was rapid. Business was booming, but his health paid the price. Not enough sleep, not enough rest, not enough food. Too much booze, too much work, too much caffeine. Even the first heart attack, which had him hospitalized for a week, wasn’t enough to slow him down.

  The second one was more insistent. My mum came for Jake and me at morning break, took us to the hospital to say goodbye to a man clinging to life support. He was already dead, really, but we needed that goodbye.

  Holding his cold hand as he slipped away was the defining moment of my adolescence. I grew up, in those sixty seconds. I came to understand that the world is deeply painful, deeply unfair, deeply devastating, and yet you’re expected to continue on regardless.

  Because the world kept spinning, and I couldn’t cope with that. I needed it to stand still, stand still just for a few weeks, a few months, a few years, until somehow the heartache subsided. But the world didn’t stop, and my heart never repaired. The funeral came and went. My period started, my boobs grew, my body changed in every way, but all I wanted was for time to freeze.

  That’s when my anxiety started to manifest. My body, my life, was spinning out of control, like the earth was hinged on a different axis to my mind. My mother was deep in the ground, deep in a hole of depression my father dug for her, and I was drifting away in the air, carried by the gale of grief, trying desperately to find the ground, but never succeeding. I lost myself.

  It took me a few years to realize how much less painful it is not to think of him at all, but by then the damage was done. Anxiety became as much a part of me as he ever was. I’ve lived with it for longer than I ever lived with him, and that’s equal parts comforting and terrifying. My disorder belongs to me in a way he never did.

  I still miss him like hell, though. It’s a cold stone of emptiness in my heart.

  Right now, sitting beaten and broken in a Serbian warehouse, defeated in the search for my friend, I feel a strange kind of peace. I don’t believe in the afterlife, and I don’t believe I’ll ever see my father again. But I won’t have to live in a world without him. And the absence of pain isn’t all that different from happiness. At least not in my experience.

  So, for the first time in my life, I breathe into it. I stop fighting the palpitations, the elastic band around my chest, the rushing thoughts in my mind and the prickling of my skin. I stop trying to beat the sparks of adrenaline and surges of fear. I simply succumb.

  And just like that, it all melts away.

  I’m left with a beautiful stillness, a simple clarity. It hurts now, but soon it won’t.

  It’s going to be okay, even if it isn’t.

  My limbs fill with lead and helium; I’m both heavy with weariness and light with relief. The knot of pressure in my head that’s been building for over a decade loosens, leaving only the physical symptoms of a broken nose and chronic dehydration.

  I breathe.

  I CAN’T TELL how much time has passed by the time I hear footsteps clanking back up the metal staircase and across the mezzanine. All I know is that, this time, there’s more than one set.

  I press my eyes closed. I just want it to be over, either way. I want to be released or killed. I’m tired of the in between.

  That doesn’t stop my gut from clenching, though.

  Key turning in the lock. Muffled male voices on the other side of the door.

  I know who’s with Borko before I even see him.

  Andrijo.

  I blink against the light suddenly drenching the storeroom. When I finally adjust, I look up into his eyes—­hard, black lumps of coal in a perfect face—­and expect to see a number of things: anger, hatred, bloodthirst.

  Instead I see fear.

  I almost misread it for something else, at first. Shock, maybe, or mania. But it’s unmistakably raw fear. And I don’t know what to do with it.

  It’s surreal, seeing him up close after fixating on him for what’s felt like a year but has actually only been a few weeks. A tight black T-­shirt, gray jeans, beat-­up Converse. Thick stubble, dark hair, a strong jaw. That indisputable intensity—­rough, organic.

  He’s a wanted man. The police are searching his home, tracking him down, for whatever he did, or lied about doing. And here he is, right in front of me.

  And I’m not afraid of him.

  “Andrijo.” My voice is small, but not scared. I’m proud of that.

  He shakes his head slowly. “Why, Carina? Why did you come here?”

  “Your friend knocked me unconscious, piled me in the back of a van and drove me here. I didn’t have much say in the matter.”

  A tanned hand drags through his hair. “I mean to Zrenjanin. Serbia. Why did you come back? To the clinic?”

  I keep my words measured. “I came with Karen. She had to come. For Erin.” I put extra weight on her name, gauging his reaction. Something in his face twinges, but I can’t read it. Guilt? Sadness? Regret? “The police are at your apartment.”

  “Yes.” His face is frozen after his brief flash of emotion. Borko watches the exchange from just beyond the doorway, arms folded.

  “Are you going to run forever?” I ask, genuinely curious. “What’s your plan? Never return to your own life? You have to face what you did eventually, Andrijo.”

  Why am I not full of hatred? Why am I not convulsing with fury at the sight of him?

  But I know why. It’s that look in his eye. That fear I cannot place. More than any shred of evidence ever could, it makes me sure there’s more to the story. It makes me sure I’ve missed something—­misjudged him, the situation, the villain.

  Right from the start, my gut told me he was involved. Now, that same gut is telling me it’s not what I think.

  “What do you think I did?” he asks, face still expressionless, eyes still betraying him.

  I swallow. “The world thinks she was raped, left for dead in a ditch.” I feel cruel when I add, “And now your apartment is being searched.”

  His Adam’s apple bobs violently, his fist curls and uncurls. “What do you think I did?” he repeats.

  Pause. Genuine. “I don’t know. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  He turns to Borko, one hand resting on the doorframe, shakes his head and turns back. Brow furrowed, staring at the ground. “You shouldn’t have come here, Carina. You should’ve stayed away, stayed safe. You have no idea . . . no idea what you’ve got yourself involved in. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Nobody . . .” He thumps the doorframe with a balled-­up fist. “Just like nobody was supposed to find out.”

  Borko steps forward now, touches Andrijo’s arm. Gently pushes him to one side as he enters the room beside him. Andrijo looks scared, like a bull approaching the slaughterhouse.

  “We don’t want to hurt you, Carina. But you know so much. We can’t just . . .” He grits his teeth. “We can’t just let you walk away. And we know the police aren’t coming for you.” He holds up my phone. It’s switched off. “Not now.” He doesn’t look happy about it. He’s not enjoying this, not enjoying the power trip like he was before.

  I’m torn between wanting to throw myself at his feet, insist I know nothing, and begging him to let me live . . . or seeing how this pans out. Because the truth is . . . I don’t know anything. Not really. But I want to. I so desperately need to understand what lion I’ve been hunting since the thirteenth of July.
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br />   “So you’re going to kill me, just in case I know anything?” I tilt my chin upward to try and show some kind of defiance, but I know with a broken nose and blood crusted all over my face I look a mess. And honestly? I don’t fucking care.

  Progress.

  Andrijo rubs both eyes furiously with his hands, pressing his fingertips hard against his eyelids. He mutters something to Borko in Serbian. Borko responds in rapid-­fire, but Andrijo bites back, blinking against the spots he just created on his vision.

  Borko shrugs, turning back to me. “It’s not that we want to hurt you. Last thing we want is another missing foreigner drawing attention to the situation.”

  What situation? I want to scream, but I stay composed. “So what are you going to do?”

  “We want you to tell us exactly how much you know,” Borko says. “Then we can decide.”

  Self-­preservation kicks in now. “I know nothing, I swear. Nothing.”

  “Why were you really at the clinic? We know you weren’t really assaulted.”

  I tense my jaw. “How do you know that?”

  “We know.” He stares meaningfully at me. Is that where he’s been all this time? Somehow checking where I really was on the first night at JUMP? Because I came back to the hotel early, dogged with exhaustion and social anxiety from the sheer weight of my fellow festival-­goers. Could he somehow have found that out? Caught me in a lie?

  I gulp. If he does know the truth, he knows I know more than I should about the clinic. How else can I explain my being there?

  Maybe I don’t have to explain. What’s he going to do?

  “I’ve told you why I was there. I can’t make you believe me.” I make sure to hold eye contact, maintain steady body language from my crumpled position on the floor. I won’t give him any more reason to doubt me.

  He growls like a rabid wolf. “You’re lying. If you don’t start cooperating . . .”

  “What? What are you going to do? I’m already your prisoner. You’ve already beaten me. Broken my nose. You’re already considering killing me.” The words taste like pure alcohol—­sharp and painful and disorientating. Is this really happening? “Don’t you think if I had something to hide, I’d have told you by now?”

  More Serbian words are spat at Andrijo. His eyes widen, and he shakes his head, but not nearly defiantly enough. What did Borko just ask him to do? What’s he afraid of doing to me? Borko snarls, steps toward me.

  “Do you know you don’t have a lock on your phone’s photos? Everything else, yes. But anyone can access your pictures by swiping up the camera.”

  My blood runs cold, and now I realize exactly how he knows I’m lying.

  The screenshots I sent myself.

  The article and image linking Kasun and Tim to the clinic opening. He saw them saved to my camera.

  He knows he’s got me. Just a few inches from me now, he bends over and snatches my chin in his hand, gripping painfully tight. He forces me to look into his gray, too close together eyes, which betray nothing like the fear in Andrijo’s. His breath is hot, sour. His hands rough against my face.

  Don’t whimper. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

  “I’ll give you one more chance to answer me honestly before this starts to hurt. What do you know?”

  There’s nowhere to hide. He knows I already made the connection. Will he believe that’s all I know? That I never filled in the bigger picture?

  “I know there was a case eight years ago. Brodie Breckenridge. She was on a press trip with Tim when she vanished. He was clean, but I was suspicious. Then I found an empty pregnancy test packet in Erin’s jacket back home. So when I found out a guy called Kasun opened a sexual assault and abortion clinic out here, and Tim was photographed next to him . . . I put two and two together. And came to see it for myself.”

  There’s so much I left out. The idea of a stalker, my knowledge of Bastixair and Aubin’s, the bruise on her arm, her imprisoned father. But he’s not searching my face for that. Something I said has resonated on a level I wasn’t expecting; his mouth drops open.

  He drops my jaw like a hot coal, grabs his hand away. “Erin’s pregnant?”

  I swallow hard. “Maybe.”

  Both he and Andrijo stare at me in horror.

  “Something worrying you, Andrijo?” I say, unable to resist the snipe. “Don’t worry. Not yours. Timing doesn’t work.”

  “I didn’t rape her,” he whispers, expression haunted. “I swear.” He looks like he genuinely cares that I believe him.

  I grit my teeth. The hard ridge of the metal shelf is pressing painfully into my back. “But you had a part in it. Whatever it is. Or the police wouldn’t be at your apartment right now. Searching for . . . what? Evidence your alibi is bull crap? Her DNA on your clothes? Her blood on your shoes?”

  He steps forward, ink-­black eyes bottomless pits of conflicted emotions, but Borko throws his arm out to keep him from reaching me. As he twists to face Andrijo, I see the gun sticking out of his waistband and my blood turns to ice. “Ne, Andrijo.” His accent makes the name sound like an insult. “Ne.”

  Biting fear is settling in again—­I’ve never seen a gun up close before—­but I don’t fight it, just try to breathe through it. “What secret is so damning it’s worth killing for?” I utter.

  Borko’s head snaps back to me, arm still outstretched. “What?”

  “Well, you’re so obsessed with figuring out how much I know that you’re considering murdering me based on the answer. So I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say you’re hiding something. Is what happened to my best friend the secret in itself, or did she die for uncovering it, too? Did Brodie? Who else has lost their lives over whatever you’re hiding?” Andrijo’s face is tortured now, and I know I’m hitting the mark. “Was it worth it? The first time? The second?”

  He roars in frustration or something similar, half clenches his fists and swivels on his heel, walking slowly out the door. I hit a nerve. Hell, I hit a whole cluster of them. His footsteps pick up speed until I can hear him practically sprinting down the stairs.

  Borko’s face is beet-­purple. He says nothing, just stares at me for a few more seconds, glances between me and the door and follows his partner out. The door slams shut behind him. The key clicks in the lock.

  But not before I use the last of the light to pick out the exact location of the air vent.

  Chapter Twenty-­Two

  August 4, Serbia

  WAITING SEVERAL MINUTES after they’ve left to make my decision, I know what I have to do. The strip of night sky visible through the narrow horizontal window is dark navy with wisps of charcoal cloud; it must be nearing midnight, though I have no idea how long I’ve been unconscious for at various stages of the night.

  I’m torn between putting it off until I know they’re far enough away, and going for it right now in case they decide my fate and hurry back to find two legs hanging out of an air vent.

  I choose the latter.

  This could be my one chance at survival. I don’t think of what happens if the vent leads nowhere.

  Scaling the shelves is a nightmare with my hands tied, but I silently thank the universe that Borko didn’t bind them behind me. I use the vertical railings joining the shelving together to hoist myself up, and after a ­couple of attempts I make it to the top shelf.

  The air vent is small, a few feet wide and a few feet long, and as soon as I’m up close I realize I have no idea how to remove the grate. It doesn’t really budge when I jiggle it around, nor when I pull down or shove upward. If it wasn’t a matter of life or death, the lazy part of me would slump to the ground in a huff and give up, or descend into a tempest of anxious thoughts centric on the fact I am shit at everything in the world.

  But I persevere.

  I wriggle a few fingers around inside the edges where the grate meets the ceiling. M
y forefinger meets some kind of catch, which takes me a few seconds to maneuver, but eventually I unlatch the grate and push upward. After another logistical struggle, I’m up in the vent and closing the hatch behind me.

  One victory down, seven thousand more to go.

  It’s a tight squeeze inside air vents. Nobody in the movies tells you that. It’s dusty and claustrophobic and feels plain wrong, and also like you are likely to die in some kind of crushing incident. Every sound I make is amplified like I’m in the mouth of a tuba; my bangle clanks off the metal ground, my toes kick and thud as I shuffle along, and I’m fairly sure any Serbian with ears can hear what I’m currently trying to achieve.

  Which is . . . I’m not sure. Find some sort of exit route, I guess? Do air vents even open out to the outside world, or just circle around the inside of the building? Why do I know so little about air vents?

  After a few minutes of hapless shuffling, propelled by adrenaline and sheer bloody-­mindedness, I reach another grate. I peer into the room below. It’s an office—­there’s no light on inside, but a small square window in the door lets in enough that I can make out what’s inside. Generic office fodder: a desk, desk chair, computer, filing cabinet, an old glass jar full of pens and pencils and a ruler. And . . .

  A letter opener. A metal one, with one of those sharp ends.

  A . . . weapon?

  I flick the latch and lift the grate up. I have to be quick.

  My sandals hit the top of the filing cabinet with an alarmingly loud clamor, and it wobbles under my weight. It can’t be very full. I climb down to the ground as gracefully as I can manage with my hands bound, run to the desk and grab the letter opener. I use it to slice through the rope around my wrists, then shove it into my back pocket. There’s a pocket USB drive in there, too, which I also grab for no real reason other than a one-­in-­a-­million chance there’s something on it. I pause and survey the room. Work out all the possible sources of damning evidence: the computer, the filing cabinet, the desk drawers.