Thirty Days of Hate

by Ginger Talbot

  Nobody speaks to Sergei like that.

  Rage and shock bloom on his face, but I don’t wait for a reply. I just hurry into the shop.

  I have to pause and take an enormous gulp of air and let it out again to keep from screaming in fury.

  Tension and misery are making me queasy on the day when I’m getting fitted for my wedding dress. I refuse to feel guilty about being such a bitch. I have every right.

  I stand stock still for a moment, trying to brace myself. There are mannequins draped in gorgeous gowns everywhere, and I feel like they’re mocking me with the smiles on their plastic lips.

  Two attendants are eagerly hurrying towards me, and there are no other customers in the store. Sergei probably booked the whole morning just for me. I swallow a lump in my throat.

  A million emotions are swirling through me right now. I miss my mother so much. I don’t have a father to walk me down the aisle; I’ve got nothing but the memory of a monster. This isn’t how my dress fitting is supposed to feel. My fiancé and I are fighting, and for that matter is he even my fiancé? He never officially asked me. I want to cry. But I won’t cry.

  I feel so alone.

  I look for Ludmilla, and see her at the other end of the shop, pacing and talking on her cell phone.

  I reach up and pat my hair, sliding my finger between the strands. My lock picks, my handcuff key, they’re all there. I take them out every night and clip them back in every morning after I shower.

  I glance at the shop window and see Sergei standing there with his back to the store, rigid with anger. This isn’t what I wanted. I just want time. I just want him to understand me. I just want him to let me have a little bit of control over the most important decision in my life.

  I feel a sudden urge to run out there and tell him that I love him, plead with him not to be angry with me. I hate it when he’s genuinely angry with me. I need him. I want him. Why can’t he just work with me a little?

  But I’ve said those words to him so many times that even I’m sick of hearing them. My words have lost all power – they just hit Sergei’s force field of rage and tight control and slide right off.

  I feel weary and defeated as I let the shop attendant lead me down the hallway, and I can’t help but notice that there’s a door open at the end of the hallway – leading to an alleyway behind the shop.

  I could run.

  But I said I wouldn’t.

  Why do I have to keep my promise to a liar?

  I go into the fitting room, change into the dress, and just stand there as if I’m in a dream. I’m floating off in space somewhere while the attendant and her assistant fuss over me with measuring tapes and dress pins. They try to make conversation, but I’m mumbling answers, staring at the wall.

  The dress is a sleeveless ballgown style with a lace illusion neckline. It’s stunning, it’s perfect for me, and it makes me want to weep. And not with joy.

  Ludmilla comes in a few minutes later and joins me in the fitting room.

  “Everything all right back home?” I ask her.

  She smiles wearily, glancing at the attendants, who are on the other side of the room, chattering to each other in Swedish. “Yes,” she says in a low voice, speaking in Russian. “They’re picking a new reporter to be Akim. It’s all right. It was a good run. And you look beautiful, by the way.”

  I glance at myself in the full-length mirror. Can she not see the pinched, unhappy look on my face? Is it just me?

  Minutes tick by as they take my measurements, and then I’m changed back to my regular clothes and looking at trays and trays of veils and tiaras.

  Ludmilla’s phone rings, and she rolls her eyes. “Crap. I forgot to turn off the ringer. Let me just take this one call and I’ll turn it off.”

  She hurries out of the room.

  A minute later, she sticks her head in the door and waves at me frantically.

  I hurry out into the hallway. Her eyes are wide with horror.

  “He’s got Darya,” she whispers.

  I don’t need to ask who. She shows me the screen on her phone, and I see a picture from my nightmares. Darya’s angry, tear-stained face, staring right at the camera. There’s a gun barrel pressed to the side of her head.

  She has a black eye and a split lip.

  A wave of panic swells up and threatens to drown me. I lean against the wall, and my throat closes tightly. I can’t even imagine what she’s feeling right now. No, no, no.

  “We need to get her back. What does he want? Did he say?” I demand. I glance at the two attendants in the fitting room. They’re ignoring us right now, taking notes and chatting with their backs to me.

  “He sent me a message saying that he would trade her for you.” Ludmilla avoids my gaze. “It’s your choice. To be honest with you, I probably wouldn’t do it.”

  Brave Ludmilla, who’s risked the wrath of the traffickers for years? She would. And so will I. “Don’t sell yourself short. Here’s what we do. We can make this work. We’re going out the back door. Send him a message. Tell him that we will meet in Pevlovagrad at the Brick Market in six hours, and he needs to let her get out of the car and I need to see her walk away to safety before I’ll hand myself over. We’ll meet over by that stall that sells all the Soviet memorabilia.”

  “And then what?” she protests.

  “If we rush to the airport right now, Sergei won’t realize we’re gone before it’s too late. Right as I’m about to get on the plane, I’ll send him a message telling him what I’m doing, so he won’t be able to catch me, but he’ll be right behind us. I have a GPS tracker implanted in my right leg. If Cataha takes me…it will lead Sergei straight to him.”

  Her eyes widen in surprise. “My God. This might actually work.” Then she looks at me searchingly. “It’s a huge risk, though, you know that.”

  “Yes, I know that. It’s a worthwhile risk.”

  I don’t even want to picture Sergei’s rage – or his hurt. I’ve got to get out of here before I change my mind, because I’m utterly terrified. What will Cataha do to me before Sergei comes for me? What if Sergei can’t find me?

  But I have to do this. This is my chance. It’s not just rescuing Darya – it’s ending the reign of terror in the Pevlova Oblast.

  We hurry down the hallway and out the back door before anyone notices that we’re missing. I’m surprised that Sergei doesn’t have a man stationed there just in case. Or is that just me being paranoid? How far is Cataha’s reach? Has danger followed us here to Sweden?

  We’re rushing through the alley when the wind suddenly shifts and I smell the coppery scent of blood.

  A lot of it.

  I spin around. “Something’s wrong.”

  Ludmilla grabs my arm and tries to pull me.

  “We’ve got to hurry!”

  “I smell blood!”

  Her voice goes high and shrill. “Are you crazy? You don’t care about Darya at all, do you? She’s probably being raped right now – you’ve got to save her!”

  But I wrench my arm from her grasp and hurry back down the alleyway, and then I see it. A pool of blood, spreading out from behind a cluster of garbage cans.

  I lean over the cans to look, and a thunderbolt of shock strikes me so hard I stagger. Two of Sergei’s men, face down, knees to their chests, stuffed back there hastily to hide them. Dead.

  Ludmilla. The weird way she’s suddenly acting.

  How did she get away from Cataha’s man when they beat her up? Answer: she didn’t have to. The attack was a fake. Staged. So that she could beg Sergei to take her in.

  That phone call she was making in the dress shop…she was calling Cataha. She’d probably already told him where we were, so he had his men standing by in the city, just waiting for their chance.

  I spin around to face Ludmilla, whose face is so hideously twisted with rage that I don’t even recognize her, and draw in my breath to scream.

  She is holding a syringe, and she jams it into my shoulder through my coat
so fast I don’t even have time to struggle. It’s like being stabbed with a red-hot knitting needle. The wind swallows my cries and the world goes all wavery.

  The last words I hear are, “Fucking Toporov bitch. That’s for my sister!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  What day is it? How long have I been out?

  The first thing I feel is cold. Bone-chilling cold radiating up from the ground, sucking the heat and life from my body.

  The next thing I feel is pain. Throbbing pain in my right leg.

  “Willow. Willow. Are you awake?”

  I sit bolt upright, strangling on a scream of fear.

  There’s a nasty chemical smell in the air. It stings my nose and makes me feel queasy.

  Where they hell are we?

  I fling my hands out, and they strike something cold and metal. It’s dark in here; I can barely see. But by feeling around, I realize that I’m in a cage. Like an animal. It’s not quite tall enough for me to stand up in.

  I’m in a cage.

  The realization fills me with horror.

  Struggling not to scream, I squint in the darkness, looking around the room, and finally I see Darya, in a cage next to mine. She’s curled up on a thin mattress, hugging her knees, with a blanket wrapped around her. Barefoot, wearing leggings.

  I can’t make out much in the darkness, but I see a chair that looks as if it’s bolted to the ground, and a chain hanging from the ceiling.

  I scrabble around in my cage and see that I have a mattress and blanket too, so I crawl up on the mattress and wrap the blanket around me. It’s thin and scratchy, but it helps repel the chill a little bit. I’m only wearing leggings and a long-sleeved shirt.

  I don’t feel an ache between my legs, so I’m pretty sure I haven’t been raped. Yet. But this kidnapping is entirely different from the fake one that Sergei staged. He made sure that I woke up in a warm, clean room with water sitting nearby.

  Whoever has taken us wants to make sure that Darya and I are humiliated, miserable, and physically weakened.

  Sergei will come save us. Sergei will come save us. I chant in my head, a desperate mantra, a tiny spark of hope to cling to. How long have I been here? Why isn’t he here yet?

  I suck in breaths of cold air, and gradually the dizziness fades. My eyes adjust to the darkness. We are alone in the room.

  I’m horrified to see that there’s a bucket in the corner of the cage. Darya has one too, and now I can smell urine wafting in the air.

  They want to reduce us to animals.

  “Darya? Are you all right?” I mumble, then realize what a stupid question that is.

  “Not really.” She makes a sound that could be a sob or a laugh.

  “You called me Willow. How did you know my real name?”

  “They told me when they brought me here. They said I was just bait for you. Willow, you shouldn’t have come for me,” Darya groans. “Why did you do it?”

  “I had a plan,” I croak, and realize I am desperately thirsty. “This wasn’t part of it. How did they get you?”

  She shifts on the mattress, wrapping the blanket around her more tightly. “I’m so stupid. That bitch Ludmilla… We were both at work, and she asked me if I wanted to go out and grab a drink after work. I said yes. I honestly thought it was weird – she’s never been warm and friendly in the couple of weeks I’ve known her; she was always just pure business. But I was lonely and wanted a friend, and I felt kind of intimidated by her because she’s such a big deal at Reforma. So I went anyway. And of course…she drugged my drink. Can you fucking believe it? I mean, I would say I’m never going to go out for a drink again, but that’s not an issue. Because we’re both going to die here.” Her voice rises in a hysterical laugh.

  I want to reassure her, but how can I?

  I have to admit to myself – even if Sergei gets to us in time, I’m sure the place is heavily guarded. We’ll probably be murdered before he can rescue us – and that’s the best I can hope for. That our suffering will be over quickly.

  And all this at the hands of a woman I admired so much. A woman I trusted with my life, many times.

  “I can’t believe she did that to you. I can’t believe I was so wrong about her,” I groan. “Of all the people to sell out for money. How could she?”

  Darya coughs, and her body shakes. “It wasn’t money. She told me that Cataha promised to return her sister to her. Sabina. Her sister was taken eight years ago, and she’d given her up for dead, but Cataha showed her a recent picture of Sabina, holding up a newspaper from just a week ago. And she said that your family were the ones who took her sister in the first place. Is that true?”

  “Yes, it was my father.” I am hurtling off a cliff. Falling and falling. “But she shouldn’t have taken it out on you. What happened?”

  “She told me she was sorry that she’d had to involve me, but there was nothing she wouldn’t do to save her sister. And she said you deserved it. I don’t believe that, though. You didn’t know, did you?”

  “Oh God, no.”

  I can’t just sit here like this. I have to take action or I’ll go crazy. I crawl over to the cage door and test it. It’s locked, of course. I reach up to my hair, then suddenly realize that my head feels strangely light.

  All my hair extensions have been cut off. Frantically, I run my fingers through my hair, but every single tool that I had is gone.

  Then I realize why I have an ache in my right leg.

  The true horror of my situation hits me.

  Sergei will never find me. I’m going to die here.

  Because I told Ludmilla about the tracker, which means they would have searched my body for it and found it. The tracker would have been removed before they brought me to this hell pit.

  Everything is gone. My blades, my lock pick, cyanide pill.

  And even worse, I wonder – will Sergei think I ran, on purpose? Will he suspect me of murdering his men so I could escape? Is that a crazy thing to worry about? I don’t know. I’m so dazed with fear and thirst and terror that I can’t think straight.

  Tears fill my eyes and spill down my cheeks. I always knew that it would come to this, but it’s no less terrible.

  I’m twenty-three. I don’t want to die. I want to see my family again. I want to see Sergei again. I don’t want him to hate me. I don’t want him to think I ran away from him after I promised not to.

  I want water. I’m so thirsty.

  “I called up Grigor like you said, and he was going to meet me in St. Petersburg.” Darya’s voice is a pained croak in the darkness. “He’ll think I stood him up. Reforma will think that I just quit without notice. Ludmilla will make them think that, because she’s their shining star. Their heroine. You still think Fate doesn’t hate me, Willow?”

  I can’t even find words to answer her. I just hug myself and rock silently.

  Time ticks by, too slowly. Minutes? An hour?

  Finally, I force myself to form words.

  “We fight to the end, Darya,” I rasp.

  “Yes.” She clears her throat, which I’m sure is as dry as mine. “You were my friend. Thank you for being my friend.”

  And then the door flies open, and I choke in fear, because the devil is striding through.

  He’s still wearing his mask.

  They flip on the lights and flood the room with blinding white light. Tears burn in my eyes, and I blink frantically.

  He has four men with him. Without a word, they open up Darya’s cage. She scrabbles to the back of the cage, and one of the men pokes a cattle prod through the bars, making her scream.

  I want to cry out in protest, but what’s the point? These men thrive on inflicting pain and fear.

  She crawls out of the cage without a word, and tries to stand up, but one of the men kicks her back down to the ground, grabs her by the wrist, and drags her across the floor.

  Because she’s not even human to them. They have to degrade her in every possible way. She would have walked, but the
y want her knocked down and helpless.

  When they reach the chain dangling from the middle of the room, they tear her clothes off. My stomach turns to water.

  They’ll rape her while I watch.

  They tie her hands to the chain that’s dangling from the ceiling. Then one of the men turns a crank on the wall so the chain is pulled up, and she’s hauled up off her feet. Dangling, legs thrashing, tiptoes barely touching. The men hold various implements of torture. One holds a bullwhip, two have cattle prods, one holds an enormous knife.

  God, please let this end soon. Please let us just die.

  Next they open my cage door. I don’t want to be shocked with the cattle prod, so I crawl out, cursing under my breath. Cataha himself is standing by my door, and he grabs me by the hair, hauls me to my feet, and marches me over to the chair.

  They treated me differently. I wasn’t kicked to the floor, I wasn’t stripped. Why?

  “Tell me your real name. I want to hear it from your lips.” Cataha’s voice is creaky and strange.

  “Fuck yourself!” I shout at him.

  One of the men slashes at Darya with the whip, leaving a vicious red stripe across her stomach, and she jerks and makes a strangled sound. Tears run down her face. I can almost feel the agony of the whip on my own skin, and I can’t imagine what it cost her not to cry out. She’ll be screaming soon enough. She won’t be able to help it, no matter how strong she is. She’s only flesh.

  “Stop it!” I cry. “Why are you hitting her? I’m the one who’s not talking! Hit me!”

  But I’m an idiot. This is exactly how these men operate. They find out what will hurt you the most, and attack you that way.

  “Your real name!” Cataha barks again.

  Before I can answer, the man whips Darya again, and this time she screams and her body convulses. Her eyes are open wide, huge with terror.

  I meet his gaze. I am sure that my answer spells my doom, but I am doomed anyway. “My name is Willow Toporov.”