by Anna Zaires
“Wally Henderson is highly connected,” Peter explained to me a couple of weeks ago. “He caught wind of what’s going on long before anyone else on my list, and he staged a disappearance worthy of Houdini. So far, every lead our hackers have followed has led exactly nowhere. As far as we can tell, he’s not in contact with anyone from his former life—neither friends nor coworkers nor distant relatives—and he hasn’t made a single slip. No appearances on social media by his teenagers, no credit card use, nothing. A lot of his background is classified, but rumor has it, he was a CIA operative at some point, possibly a field agent working deep under cover. And while we haven’t been able to discover the specifics of how he’s doing it, it seems he’s been pressuring the authorities to turn up the heat from wherever he’s hiding.”
“You think he knows he’s the last name on your list?” I asked.
“I’m sure he does,” Peter replied. “Like I said, he’s connected, and not just in Washington D.C. He knows everyone in the international intelligence community, and he’s leveraging that to make me as high priority as any ISIS leader.”
I’ve been trying not to think about the implications of that, but it’s impossible. I can’t put my worry for Peter out of my mind. By all rights, I should cheer for the general and hope the authorities find my captor, liberating me in the process, but rational thinking seems to be beyond me these days.
“Why don’t you stop these jobs altogether?” I ask now as we approach the stream. “You must have enough money already.”
Peter shoots me an oblique look. “There’s no such thing as enough money when you’re on the run,” he says and pulls off his T-shirt, exposing a powerfully muscled torso. “Private planes and helicopters don’t come cheap.”
I look away to avoid flushing as he steps out of his shorts—he’s commando underneath—and wades into the stream after kicking off his boots. I see him naked all the time, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of his tautly muscled body on my senses. Nature has blessed my captor with a perfectly proportioned male frame—broad shoulders, narrow hips, long, strong-boned limbs—and intense military training has given him a physique Olympic athletes would envy. But it’s not his looks that fill my veins with liquid heat; it’s the knowledge that if I so much as glance at him in a certain way, the dark fire that always simmers between us will blaze out of control, and I’ll end up in his arms, screaming his name as he takes me against the slippery rocks.
“You know, you wouldn’t need all those planes and helicopters if you didn’t venture out as much,” I point out when he’s safely covered by the water. My voice is huskier than I would’ve liked, but at least my face is not bright red. “You’d be safer, and you wouldn’t have to… you know.”
“Kill people?” he suggests dryly.
“Right.” I busy myself by stripping down to my swimsuit as Peter turns to float on his back, leisurely moving his arms to offset the current. I don’t like thinking about the gruesome reality of Peter’s profession, not in any kind of depth, at least. I’m obviously aware that he’s a killer, but as long as I don’t dwell on it, it’s more of an abstract concept than something that’s constantly at the forefront of my mind.
Today, though, I can’t push it out of my thoughts, and as I wade into the deeper portion of the stream next to Peter, I find myself asking, “Do you like it? Is that why you do what you do?”
I expect him to deny it, to claim necessity or upbringing as the driving force behind his career choice, but he turns upright to face me, a dark smile curving his lips as he answers, “Of course I do, ptichka. Did you ever imagine otherwise?”
I stare at him, my skin pebbling with goosebumps as the current rushes around me, the water covering me up to my chest. The stream that felt refreshing a moment ago now feels like liquid ice, as chilling as that storm we were caught in. “You like killing?”
He nods, his eyes bright silver in the sunlight. “Death, like life, has its own allure,” he says softly, stepping closer to draw me against his large, warm body. “It’s a dark allure, but it’s there, and every soldier knows it. As a doctor, you must’ve seen it sometimes: the way pain transforms into the bliss of nothingness, agony into the peace of nonexistence. Death ends all struggles, heals all hurts. And dealing death… there’s nothing quite like it. You feel it: the vulnerability of yourself and everything surrounding you, but also the power. The control. It’s addictive, once you’ve experienced it… once you’ve held someone’s life in your hands and extinguished it on purpose.”
His words wash over me like a dark wave, terrifying and fascinating at the same time. I have seen some of what he’s talking about, have even felt the power he’s describing. Only for me, it was when I would save a life, not take one. I can’t imagine the lack of empathy it takes to use that power to destroy instead of healing, to take away someone’s very existence.
I was right to think him a monster. He is one, yet that realization doesn’t repulse me as it should. His admission, as horrifying as it is, doesn’t lessen the heat growing inside me as he molds my lower body against his, one hand gripping my hip and the other reaching up to frame my face. He’s already turned on, his erection hard against my stomach, and as he leans in, his lips pressing hungrily against mine, I close my eyes and wind my arms around his muscled neck, letting his touch burn away the chill of knowing what he is.
I’m in bed with the devil, and at this moment, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
That evening, we have dinner, all five of us, and as has been the case since the Nigeria job, Peter’s men converse with me throughout the meal, telling me a bunch of amusing stories about Russia and some of the former Soviet Republics. I’m still not completely comfortable around the mercenaries—I’m keenly aware that they’d kill me or anyone else without hesitation if Peter were to order it—but they’ve been excessively friendly since I treated Ilya and Anton’s wounds. It’s during meals like these that I learn about the customs of my captors’ country—they do consider it polite to remove shoes when entering someone’s home—and even pick up a few words in Russian.
“Vkusno. V-koos-nah.” Ilya repeats the word for me slowly, softening the “v” so it sounds like an “f.” “That means delicious, or tasty. So if you want to tell Peter you like something, you can point at that dish and say, ‘Vkusno.’”
“Vikusno,” I try, pointing at the roast chicken Peter prepared. “Fi-koos-nah.”
“There’s no ‘i’ in there,” Yan says, looking amused. “And don’t emphasize the first consonant so much. Just say it quickly, without breaking it up into three syllables. Vkusno. Try it.”
“Vkusno,” I parrot to the best of my ability, and all the guys, including Peter, laugh.
“That’s pretty good, ptichka,” he says, cutting more of the chicken for me. “They might make a Russian speaker out of you yet.”
I grin at him, absurdly pleased, and when he urges me to sing for them after dinner, as he often does with no success, I agree for once and belt out one of my favorite Beyoncé songs, the one I’ve been practicing in the recording studio he set up for me. Peter’s men listen, open-mouthed, and when I’m done, they clap and cheer so hard the dishes rattle on the table.
It’s the best evening I’ve had in months, and when Peter leads me upstairs, I embrace him willingly, even eagerly. We make love, and afterward, I don’t think of George and the fact that I’m sleeping with his killer. I don’t even think of my parents.
For that night, I belong to Peter and no one else.
31
Sara
The next morning, I’m back to fighting my feelings for my captor, but as the days go by, I’m aware that I’m losing the battle. He’s wearing me down, making me forget why I’m even trying to resist. He hasn’t said he loves me since we got here—probably because I threw the words in his face when we first arrived—but I can’t deny that in his own twisted way, Peter cares for me.
It’s there in the way he looks at me, the way he touche
s me and holds me. Even when our sex is rough, with the darker edge that still frightens me sometimes, he always soothes me in the aftermath, stroking and cuddling me until I feel safe and warm, cherished and adored. His power over me is absolute, and there’s something perversely comforting in that, something that taps into a part of me I never knew was there.
I wasn’t dissatisfied with my sex life with George. Over the years, we’d learned each other’s bodies and knew exactly what to do to get each other off. Before his drinking began, we had sex regularly, at least once or twice a week, and though we weren’t particularly adventurous after the first year, we played some sexy games on occasion, even used some toys. It was enough, I thought; it was as it should be. I never imagined the kind of sexual chemistry I now have with Peter, never thought a physical connection so strong could exist.
He fucks me so much I’m sore on most days, his appetite for me never fading. And I respond, though he often exhausts me with his sexual demands. I’ve never known someone who has so much energy. Over the past few weeks, Peter and his men have been training hard each day, doing hours of bodyweight exercises, running through the forest with rock-filled backpacks, and practicing hand-to-hand combat that looks as deadly as their weapons, yet he still finds the strength to go on hikes with me, swim when the weather allows, cook for everyone, and of course, have sex with me two or three times a day.
“Don’t you ever get tired?” I murmur as I lie draped over his chest one night, my heart still racing from the intensity of the orgasm I just had. Normally, I pass out right after our evening sex, but I napped this afternoon, so for once, I can stay awake a little longer.
“Tired?” He shifts underneath me, positioning my head more comfortably on his shoulder. His fingers tangle lazily in my hair, his heartbeat strong and steady against my ear. “Of what?”
“Just physically tired,” I explain. “You seem inexhaustible sometimes, like a cyborg of some kind. Don’t you ever want to just laze around and do nothing? Or slack off and not train with the guys one day?”
“I’m lazing around right now,” he points out with amusement. “And I have to train; otherwise, we run the risk of getting killed.”
I bury my nose against his neck, breathing in his warm, clean scent. Nap or not, I’m getting drowsy, the light tugging of his fingers in my hair inducing a state of near-hypnotic relaxation. Suppressing a yawn, I mumble against his neck, “That’s not what I meant. Don’t you ever just get tired? Like a normal human being? You know, limbs heavy, muscles sore, don’t want to move?”
His powerful chest heaves with a laugh. “Of course I do. I just have a higher pain tolerance than most. I wouldn’t have survived to adulthood otherwise.”
He says it lightly, his tone still amused, but my Peter revelation radar goes on high alert. He rarely talks about his youth—almost never, in fact—so when I do get a chance to learn something new, I jump on it, even though what I learn horrifies me most of the time.
“What was it like?” I ask, my drowsiness gone. Lifting my head off his shoulder, I meet his gaze in the dim light coming from the bedside lamp. “That juvenile prison camp you were sent to, I mean.”
Peter’s face tightens, all traces of amusement disappearing as he shifts me off his chest, turning to lie on his side facing me. “Like hell,” he answers bluntly as I pull a pillow under my head. “A cold, dirty hell, populated by demons in human form. Pretty much exactly as you’d imagine a labor camp in Siberia to be.”
I shudder, remembering a book I once read about prison camps during Soviet times, and reach for a blanket to ward off the chill spreading over my skin. “Was it like a gulag?”
“Not like.” A grim smile cuts across his face. “It was a gulag at one point, used to punish, and quietly kill off, dissidents and other undesirables. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the place wasn’t utilized for some time, but then someone got the bright idea to repurpose the facilities into a correction camp for juvenile delinquents. And that’s how Camp Larko was born.”
I fight the urge to look away from the darkness in his eyes. “How long were you there?”
“Until I was seventeen. So almost six years.”
Six years starting from when he was just a child—nearly all of his teenage years. My hand squeezes into a fist under the blanket, my nails cutting into my palm. “Why did they send you there? Was there no other alternative?”
His mouth twists bitterly. “Not in Russia. Not for an orphan criminal like me.”
“But you were not even twelve.” I can’t fathom that someone would be so cruel as to send a child to the frozen hell I read about in that book. “What about school? What about—”
“Oh, they taught us.” His teeth flash in another mirthless smile. “We had exactly two hours of instruction each day. The other fourteen, though, were reserved for work—that’s what we were there for, after all.”
Fourteen hours? For someone who was still a child? Swallowing the lump forming in my throat, I force myself to ask, “What kind of work?”
“Mining, mostly. Also road repair and laying pipes. Some construction work too, but that was only around our camp, to fix the Soviet-era shit that was crumbling all around us.”
I stare at him, not knowing what to say. I knew he hadn’t had an easy life, of course, but somehow I never imagined this, never realized that most of his formative years—a time when other boys his age played video games and challenged their parents on curfew—were spent doing hard labor under hellish conditions.
Trying to ignore the ache banding my ribcage, I reach out from under the blanket and brush my fingers over the tattoos covering his left arm and shoulder. “Is that where you got these?”
Peter glances down, as if just now recalling the ink that’s there. “Most of them, yes,” he says, folding his other arm under his head. “A couple I got later on, when I joined my unit.”
“What do they all mean?” I ask softly, tracing the intricate designs with my fingers. The one on his shoulder resembles a bird’s wing and a few more look like demonic skulls, but the rest are just abstract lines and shapes.
Peter’s gaze turns opaque. “Nothing. It was something to do, that’s all.”
“That’s a lot of ink to do on a whim.”
He’s silent for a few seconds. Then he says quietly, “I had a friend at that camp. Andrey. He was into this stuff—a real artist, you know. After we were there for a couple of years, he ran out of space on his own skin, so I let him practice on me. Every time something happened to us, good or bad, he wanted to commemorate it with a tattoo, and because he was so good, I gave him free reign with the designs.”
“Oh.” Intrigued, I rise onto my elbow. “What happened to that friend?”
“He died.” Peter says it casually, as though it doesn’t matter, but I hear the dark echo of grief underneath, the rage that passage of time wasn’t able to cool. Whatever happened to his friend, it had been bad enough to leave a scar… bad enough that remembering it now still has the power to hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur, but Peter doesn’t respond. Instead, he reaches over to turn off the light, then pulls me against him in our usual sleeping position.
I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, trying to calm down enough to fall asleep, but it’s impossible. Even the heat of Peter’s large body can’t chase away the lingering chill from his revelations. My mind buzzes like a ravaged beehive, the questions refusing to leave me alone. There’s so much I still don’t know about the man who holds me every night, so many things I don’t understand about his past. Everything about his life in Russia is foreign to me, as strange and mysterious as if he’d come from another planet.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore. Wriggling out of Peter’s hold, I turn on the bedside lamp and turn over onto my side to face him. As I suspected, he’s not sleeping either, his silver gaze shadowed with memories as his eyes meet mine.
“You said you were recruited from that place straight into your unit,” I sa
y, propping myself up on my elbow again. “Why? Do they normally do that in Russia?”
He gazes at me silently, then turns over onto his back, lacing his hands under his head as he stares at the ceiling. “No,” he says after a moment. “They usually recruit through the army. But in this case, they needed someone with a specific psychological profile.”
I sit up, holding the blanket against my chest. “What kind of profile?”
His eyes cut over to meet my gaze. “No inconvenient family ties or attachments, no scruples, and only minimal conscience. But also young enough to be trained and molded into what they needed.”
“Which was what?” I ask, though I suspect I already know.
Peter sits up, his expression carefully neutral as he leans against the headboard. “A weapon,” he answers. “Someone who wouldn’t balk at anything. You see, the insurgents were getting more ruthless, more fanatical with every year. The bombing of the subway in Moscow was the last straw. The Russian government realized they couldn’t limit themselves to civilized, UN-approved methods of combatting terrorism; they had to meet them on their level, fight them using every tool available. So they formed this off-the-books Spetsnaz unit, and when they couldn’t find enough trained soldiers to fit the desired profile, they decided to get creative and look elsewhere.”
“In Camp Larko,” I say, and Peter nods, his eyes like polished steel.
“Those of us who lasted there for any extended period of time tended to be strong, able to handle long hours of physical exertion under extreme conditions. Hunger, thirst, cold—we could endure it all. And as you can imagine, many of us fit the profile they were looking for.”
A shiver dances over my skin, making me draw the blanket tighter around myself. “So why did they choose you over the others?” I ask, fighting to keep my tone steady.