by Holly Hart
"If I leave, what?"
"You have no idea who you are, do you?" I asked incredulously. I understood it, rationally. She'd been through some kind of trauma. No one just survived a coma and walked out unscathed, and especially not someone who lived through the kind of things that she'd had to. I'd seen the scars that littered her body twice, and they weren't all because of whatever accident she'd suffered. Whatever the fuck happened to her, or perhaps I should say, whoever, had done a number on her, that was for sure.
The slim strands of self-assurance that Ellie had slowly started to assemble fell away, and suddenly she looked exactly what she was: a lost, scared little girl. Her shoulders slumped forward, as though my comment had knocked the life out of her, and when she sat down next to me, it was more like a collapse, as if all the energy had been sucked out of her legs and left her tottering.
"No," she confessed haltingly. "They were going to tell me today… Or yesterday, when?"
"It was today." I said, answering her half-asked question. "Why didn't they tell you before?"
Ellie started to talk as though her emotional floodgates had finally been unlocked, and she was just happy to have someone listen. I didn't want to say a word, lest I remind her who I was, and how she'd got into this situation. I hoped that somehow, deep down, she must still remember who I was and how we'd met, remember that I'd protected her once and that I would do so again. "Like I said, they were going to. They said they didn't want me to have to handle too much at once, that my mind was still fragile."
"You were an important person," I said softly, trying not to startle her. "You still are, you know."
"I thought," she whispered, "I thought I was a reporter."
My hands took on a life of their own and gestured wildly at an imaginary city. "In this town? I can't think of anything much more important than that, can you?"
"So what?" Ellie spat bitterly. "I wrote Internet click bait? Lists of ten things you'll never believe!"
I grabbed my black rucksack, noticing the brown manila folder that I grabbed at the hospital, but bypassing it and going straight for a bundle of newspaper clippings and Internet printouts. I hadn't wanted to show her what they were, because if you thought about it too deeply, it was kind of creepy. More than kind of creepy, I'd printed them out well before I ever got her kill order, but after I'd slept with her, like some kind of bizarre trophy. It was a type of stalking, I guessed, but of her mind, not her body. I pulled them out and thrust them into her hands. "Here, read them," I said.
She devoured the pages, reading quicker than I could think. It had taken me hours to make my way through them the first time, though I thought I pretty much had them memorized word for word by now. "I wrote these? Really?" She said it with a look of almost childlike excitement in her eyes, as though she could scarcely believe the truth of it, as though simply by reading about who she'd once been, the fire and drive of the woman who wrote those articles was being reawakened within her.
I nodded.
"I don't want you to think I'm weak." She croaked, wiping away a tear from the corner of her eye.
"Weak?" I laughed, showing a glimpse of my true emotion for the first time. "How could I think that? I don't know many people would write a takedown piece on Victor Antonov. That takes balls, lady, and I know one thing, you got 'em."
She looked at me sadly. "I'm not that person anymore. I don't even remember who she was."
"Oh," I chuckled. "I think you are. You could have run, before, but you chose to try and stab me."
"I failed, didn't I?"
"I've killed more men than I can count." I said grimly. "You're not weak, you're lucky."
She gave me a strange look. "You didn't kill me, though, did you?" She said softly. "You can't be so bad." All the fight and all the flight seemed to have drained from Ellie now, and she seemed tired and sad instead. I wasn't sure, but I felt as though she had somehow, strangely accepted my presence, and decided that I wasn't a threat. It was as though, after all the stress in her life she'd simply decided that I was the lesser evil.
You'd be surprised.
I was, too, but not by anything she said, but by something she did. She leaned over to me and put her head on my shoulder. Before long, her breathing gave way to a shallow, unhurried sigh, like the whispering of the wind through the summer grass. She felt warm against me, and right. It had been a long time since I'd felt a woman's body against mine. Women don't tend to flock to men in this line of work. Hell, Ellie was the last woman I'd touched, and now I was doing it again.
When I was sure she was asleep, I leaned forward and whispered into her ear. "Weak? No, I think you're stronger than you know."
13
Ellie
I woke up, startled, to sirens blaring in the distance and found myself cold and alone. I reached over to the other side of the couch, but Roman was gone. The living room was dark as night, illuminated only by the city's night time glow being reflected off a carpet of fluffy white clouds and through the shuttered windows. The siren disappeared into the distance and my heartbeat returned to normal. For a second, my mind considered the option of running. No matter what way you sliced it, this was a crazy situation. I should be in hospital, not shacked up with a killer. Shit, there was probably a kidnapping task force looking for me.
I sat up, and as I did a soft blanket toppled off my shoulders and pooled on my lap. I blinked, I couldn't remember having put it there, or even think where it might have come from. Roman.
I stood up, needed to get moving. I'd been a passenger all this time, in hospital, then saved by someone else, and I needed to regain some small measure of control. I found a shiny silver Apple laptop lying on the black marble breakfast bar. As I opened it up, the illuminated Apple logo lit up and the light sparkled back off a thousand white specks in the black stone. I found myself transfixed, then wondering whether I was doing the right thing.
But I had to know.
I typed in the web address for the Alexandria Herald website, my fingers clucking across the keyboard like I had made this journey a hundred times and it loaded up in a flash. I don't know what I'd expected to see, maybe a giant headline with the title: Murder at the Herald, or perhaps a picture of my face. I saw none of that. There was a story on the city elections, hell, about the anything that wasn't a story on was the proverbial cat stuck in a tree. And me. I beat my palm against the counter in frustration.
A voice echoed from the darkness. "You're awake."
I jumped, and as I did my hand accidentally knocked against the laptop, sending it clattering to the floor.
Well, it would have gone clattering to the floor, except for the fact that Roman had the reflexes of a cat. He closed the last couple of yards between us in half a second and caught the expensive device before it hit the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces.
My heart was in my mouth. "Don't you use lights?"
I felt irrationally guilty, as though he'd caught me in the midst of a heist. I wasn't doing anything wrong, but I realized why I felt the way I did – I'd been looking for some proof that he was telling me the truth about who I was and why he'd had to save me.
If he'd had to save me. I still wasn't entirely sure that this wasn't some kind of crazy, sociopathic game.
Trust, I thought to myself, but verify. It was a motto that had served me well as a reporter, or at least I assumed that's where the phrase had jumped into my head from, and I could only hope that it would save me now.
"Find what you were looking for?" He asked, sidestepping my question as he returned to the laptop in front of me, without even looking at what was on the screen. I could have been emailing the police, for all he knew, yet he didn't seem to care.
"No," I answered honestly, and slightly angrily. I didn't know who I was more upset about – him, or the corrupt town that thought it was okay to ignore a murderous break-in at the city's only hospital. "There's not a single story about what happened at the hospital, you know that? And why don't you turn
on a light, sometime?" I added, for good measure.
"Because I don't need to," he replied. "I see better at night."
"Better?" I asked skeptically.
"I'm not used to having people over." It wasn't an answer, and it was, all at once.
It irritated me. I'm not ashamed to admit it, either. "So what's the plan?"
"Plan?" He repeated, looking stupefied. "What are you talking about?"
The first tendrils of dawn began to creep into the room, and I realized I must've slept through the night. I'd slept off whatever drug had knocked me out to the hospital, I'd slept all night and I still felt dog tired. "This is it?" I asked, surprised. "Saving me and just bringing me here to do, what? Where even is here, anyway"
"We're about three blocks from the old Ford factory," he said. "In an old warehouse. I've been turning it into an apartment, but it takes time, doing it alone."
I was secretly impressed. The place was unfinished, that was clear, but where the work was complete, like the bedroom, it was finished to perfection. The marble was seated so precisely that if I had to guess I'd estimate that it was mounted at precisely ninety degrees to the wall, without even a smudge of sealant betraying where it was joined. The apartment bore the hallmarks of a craftsman, an artisan: someone who was positively obsessed with perfection. Or a control freak…
"But you must've had a plan," I repeated. "Okay, not a plan, but an idea of what was going to happen after you brought me here? I can't to stay in your apartment for the rest of my life, can I?"
He shook his head. "No."
Is that it?
14
Roman
I shouldn't have done it. I'd taken it for her, not for me, and there were no excuses, anyway. The warning was right there on the top of the folder: Medical Professionals Only. But I couldn't resist it. I felt awful, the lowest of the low as I pulled the folder out of my rucksack. It was about an inch and a half thick, and stacked with densely printed pages of white legal paper, often annotated with almost illegible medical scribbles in the margins.
Ellie's medical records.
It was hard to believe that anyone could have suffered enough injury and pain in one life to fill the entire folder, but apparently Ellie was one of those sorry people. I didn't know what made me do it, but I started at the back. The first record was dated December 2010. Ellie had broken her collarbone skiing. May 2011, she'd fractured her eye socket falling in the driveway. November 2011…
I blinked, looking away. I could barely bring myself to read the account of Ellie’s torture that lay so innocently in my hands. Because torture is what it was.
I bristled with anger as I read the passionless, impartial medical text. It was so devoid of heart that it may as well have been another language. It was so clear to me what had happened to her, I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to have picked up on what, to me, seemed like obvious signs of domestic abuse. I was no stranger to violence, I had meted it out every day of my life, but never to women, never to children, never to anyone who didn't deserve it.
It was a strange moral code, that was for sure, but it was all I had.
The man who had done this to her? He was another kettle of fish entirely. A bully, an abuser, a man, if you could even call him that, who got his kicks from hurting women. And not just any woman, but Ellie.
Finally, after pages and pages and pages of heartless record-keeping, something made sense. The hastily scribbled note read: referral, adult protective services? I almost tossed the papers in the air for joy, but the relief was short-lived, for there was no record of anything actually progressing for the better from there. It was a good thing I didn't. The whole folder read like a horrific catalog of abuse, and a timeline of a woman sinking ever deeper into a spiral of depression.
There was one question in my mind, though. This was a woman who had stood over me with a kitchen knife, ready to plunge it into my heart, and she'd only been around me for a matter of hours. How had she lived through years of unrelenting, unremitting violence without breaking? It beggared belief.
A record from June 2014, broken finger, mentioned: Stockholm syndrome? But again, nothing was actually done. I drummed my fingers against the marble counter, up and down, up and down, pounding out a relentless beat of frustration. It was scarcely possible to believe that, in this day and age, no one had said anything, no one had done anything, and above all – nobody had stood up and stopped it from happening.
I grabbed my laptop. The Alexandria Herald's website was still up from when Ellie had used the Internet. I closed it down and opened a private browsing window. Like everything in my life, I liked order. The computer was no exception. I never had more than one tab running at any time, never any more than one program active. Simplicity had been drummed into me at an early age, and the virtue of cutting everything and everyone that wasn't absolutely necessary from one's life had been made entirely clear. I knew exactly why Ellie had never torn herself free, why she'd allowed herself to become a punching bag for a broken, bitter man. I understood it all. The reason was simple.
The same thing had happened to me.
My brother Timothy, Tim was standing in front of me, his hands tied behind his back around the wooden post. His lips were tight, and white with fear. "Hit him, Roman," dad slurred, his words barely audible through the drink. It was a game our father had made us play a hundred times, but the word game didn't do the reality of it any justice. There was no justice in that basement. That dark basement, where hope disappeared as quickly as the light when the door to the hallway upstairs swung shut.
The rules were simple. Simple, but unyielding. If either of us refused to play, neither of us ate. If I failed to make my brother cry, I didn't eat that night. If my brother cried, he didn't eat. We had to do it, my father said, to toughen us up, to make us the instruments of death that we were born to be. We'd learned a long time ago that it was best to do as my father ordered. Tim would cry, and he'd wince bending over for a week, and the next week it would be my turn.
But if we didn't do it, then there was no food at all. If we did, at least we could share a couple of hurried bites in secret.
My body was stiff, tense with remembered hatred and fear. I hadn't thought of him in a long time, yet it was a measure of the power the man still held over me, and over my emotions that within seconds my heart was racing as fast as if I just finished a hundred meter Olympic sprint. We'd had a thousand opportunities to escape, my brother and I, but neither of us took them, not for years, not until it was too late.
Abuse doesn't start out as abuse. At the beginning, the flashes of anger and the beatings, they're rare, understandable. They only come out when you've done something wrong, and the rest of the time you're smothered by love, care and affection. Only, the longer it goes on, the less frequent the affection becomes, and the more accurate the anger. And then, after a while you start to crave those brief flashes of affection.
I kept reading. Anything to take my mind off the memories.
I walked to a drawer, pulled it open, hands white with tense, clenched anger. The drawer was stacked with cheap cardboard packages. Ten dollar cell phones, burners. I didn't want a smart phone, didn't need one and wouldn't use one, even if I had it. In my line of work, you keep using the same phone, you're not long for the world. I powered the cheap black plastic device up and punched in a number off by heart. It rang twice, and a man's voice answered, simply. "Go."
"Gregory," I replied gruffly. My voice was hoarse with barely contained anger. "It's Roman. I need some information."
I needed to know that whoever had done this to Ellie, to my Ellie, wasn't walking the streets. If he was, then one thing was absolutely clear in my mind.
He wouldn't last long.
15
Ellie
A nagging sense of emptiness filled me wherever I went and whatever I did, and this, coupled with Roman's sudden disappearance had me feeling both bored and jumpy.
I might not have known who I
was before the vast majority of my memories were scrubbed away in the accident, but I was pretty sure I knew what I wasn't lazy. I knew instinctively that I wasn't the kind of gal who could be happy to just sit around browsing the Internet all day.
I paced around the apartment, looking for something to do. I opened a cupboard, more out of absent-minded boredom than for any other, real reason. The dark closet contained enough cleaning supplies to manage an office building, let alone a small apartment, and like everything else in Roman's domain, it was neatly organized with military precision.
My mouth curled into a slight grin as I briefly considered cleaning the place, just for something to do, but I dismissed the thought as soon as it had arrived. "Yeah right," I said to no one in particular. "I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of perfect wife for this guy." No matter how hot, or mysterious he is… The last bit I kept entirely for the privacy of my own head. I wasn't even sure I wanted to admit to myself how much I fancied the reserved Russian, as much because of what falling for a man who was, in essence, my kidnapper said about me as for anything else.
As I restlessly paced through the apartment, I began to notice a divide that hadn't been apparent at first glance. Where the construction and decoration was complete, the rooms were immaculately clean, tidy and organized; but where Roman hadn't yet managed to finish painting, or putting up drywall, the exact opposite held true. Trays of dried paint, full pots and planks of wood were haphazardly piled up, begging for an accident.
I felt as though it represented two halves of a single, fractured globe. Still pacing, but locked up in my own head, I accidentally stubbed my bare toe against a heavy pot of light gray emulsion paint. I hopped around the room on one foot, holding the other tightly to ward off the pain and hurling obscenities into the air. But even as I catapulted myself around the room, just trying to keep moving, to keep my mind off the pain, I began to have the beginnings of an idea.