“Triton is every bit as much a coward now as when we were young,” Jude said, as if he were reading my thoughts. “Still scared of his own shadow. Still falls for the nearest bit of street trash. His own Madame Butterfly.” He looked me over. “Such a cliché. You’re even pregnant with the lieutenant’s child, aren’t you?”
He bent down and tapped my nose. I batted his hand away with slow, stupid movements that made Jude laugh. I tried to spit at him and failed miserably. Jude stepped back, chuckling as he leaned over to check on my mother, who had gone back to feigning unconsciousness beside me. I hoped.
“How unfortunate for Triton,” Jude remarked languidly as he turned his attention back to me, “that this piece of trash already belonged to someone else.”
“Then why am I here?” I asked. “Why not just kill him and be done with it, since that’s obviously what Carson wants?” It was a classic technique. Ask the questions you already knew the answer to. “Because you need him, don’t you? You and your stupid society. Eric has something he wants. The question is, what?”
“Triton owes a debt,” Jude replied gleefully. “A very big one, not that it’s any of your business.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’d say that makes it my business.”
My words came faster, less slurred. Adrenaline was taking the place of the wearing-off drugs. Vaguely, I wondered what I’d been dosed with. In the car, it had been a clap of something over my mouth—a handkerchief soaked with chloroform and probably something else to maintain the effect. Here, it was something milder. Perhaps a fucked-up cocktail of benzos to keep me calm and sluggish, maybe ketamine.
“You could let me contact him,” I tried again. “I promise he’ll be more amenable if you let me speak. Tell him I’m all right.”
It was never going to work. But I had to try. My mother’s body moved slightly behind my head, and I set a hand on her covers, looking for her solid warmth. I could barely feel her bones through the thin blanket. God, how much weight had she lost here?
Jude just shook his head, as if the suggestion were little more than a small child requesting ice cream for breakfast. “It’s almost cute, Cio-Cio San. But you’re not that stupid. You’re bait, pure and simple. So be a good little worm, and eat up. Can’t have our prime nightcrawler shriveling up too much.”
He gestured behind him, and his gorilla helper brought over the tray of soup. Jude set one on the table for my mother, and held up the other, bending over me to hold it to my lips.
“I’ll even help you, since your motor function seems a bit…deprived…at the moment,” he said. “Carson wants you well-nourished. Generous of him, isn’t it?”
I kicked out, causing Jude to spill the broth all over himself. He seethed, looking down at the mess of noodles all over his perfectly cut wool pants.
“That,” he said, “was unnecessary. Not to mention wasteful. Your lovely mother won’t be getting dinner now.” His hand snaked out and grabbed my jaw, forcing me to look at him. “Anton. Hold her.”
The large man smiled, and then I was lugged off the floor, shoved onto a chair at the table, and held there by a pair of arms that each seemed bigger than my entire torso while Jude secured my wrists and taped my ankles to the chair legs. When I was well and properly bound into place, Jude bent down again so he was only a few inches from my face.
“When you learn to behave, maybe we’ll let you go,” he informed me.
“You look like you pissed your pants,” I said.
Immediately, I received a harsh slap across the face. From her cot, my mother squeaked.
“Would you like to go on?” Jude asked through gritted teeth. “I happen to know Anton would love to have his turn. And I hate to tell you, but he’s not nearly as nice as I am. It’s why he’s Carson’s favorite.”
I said nothing, but only because the lump on the cot began to shake.
“That’s what I thought,” Jude said with satisfaction. “Now it’s time for dinner.” He accepted the second bowl from Anton and held it up to my lips. “Drink.”
I eyed the soup. It smelled so good—the ubiquitous instant noodles similar to the kinds my mother had always kept in stock in our house for easy meals and after-school snacks. But addled as I was, I wasn’t stupid.
I shook my head. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I was starving. I was hungry literally all the time now that I was pregnant, and I probably hadn’t eaten in, what, twelve hours? The growl of my stomach filled the room.
Jude’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not an option, I’m afraid.”
If I hadn’t been sure he was drugging me with the soup before, now I was. “No.”
His eyes closed for a moment, as if he was gathering his patience again. It was a small victory, but I would take it. Even if I’d regret it seconds later.
“Hold her nose,” Jude said finally, standing back up.
My eyes widened as Anton circled around the chair and proceeded to close his broad hands over my nose, cutting off my air supply unless I opened my mouth. Jude stood poised with the bowl over my lips, and as soon as I opened them for a single breath, he wrenched my jaw the rest of the way open and proceeded to pour the broth down my throat.
I coughed, hacked, my body shaking against the onslaught. But some of it made it down, much to my dismay.
Jude stood back, observing with humor. “Had enough? Or are we going to cooperate now?” He looked back at the bowl. “There’s quite a bit more where this came from. Waterboarding by chicken stock. Very elegant.”
My choice was clear. Drown in lukewarm broth or allow at least some of it down.
Survival won.
Less than fifteen minutes later, I was asleep again, wrapped in a shroud of perilous dreams filled with probing hands and my cries in the dark. I didn’t know which parts of it were real. And at some point, I no longer cared.
12
Plaster dust accumulated in the corners, drifting across the tiled floors like snow. Through two small windows, both barred, I caught glimpses of barren fields in one direction, and some sort of large facility in the other. But whatever they gave me worked fast. One moment I’d be awake, asking for my mother, for Eric, for my dead father. The next I’d be surrounded by arms like tree roots, a waterfall of broth drowning my words. Then a sudden sweep of black, a bleary curtain that faded the winking winter sun.
Sometimes I fought them.
But they fought back.
The man with the goatee.
The other with the Russian accent.
“Eomma?” I croaked, barely able to form the word through numbed lips and a paralyzed jaw.
A lump across the room turned, and the tired, aching moon of my mother’s face appeared, her eyes deeply set into her wan skin, like two craters seen from space.
“Eomma.” My voice was a whisper slashed through.
She moaned, but her eyes didn’t open. My eyes closed too, and I dreamed I could feel her touch on my cheek, like I was a small child, while a deeper gnaw of hunger filled my belly and my bones ached with fatigue. We shared a collection of fevered dreams, unsure of how long they lasted, how much time had passed. Yu-na and I twisted on our cots, tortured mirrors of deliria.
The hours grew long. I wondered when the days would turn to weeks. Or if they already had.
The past blurred with the present.
“Eric,” I whispered as my eyes fell heavy again.
It was only in my dreams that he appeared. But it was also in my dreams that I started to scream.
2009
The T screamed away after I got off at the Harvard Avenue stop. Across the tracks, a line spilled from under the awning of Great Scott. I looked around, feeling shy, though I had been to this bar uncountable times by myself.
“Hey, pretty girl.”
I turned, and there he stood, a beacon of white and blond in a sea of black and spikes.
Eric smiled.
I melted.
“Glad you showed,” he sai
d. “Happy birthday, gorgeous.”
Gorgeous? I wanted to ask. He had used the term before, but, like “pretty girl,” no one in their right mind had ever called me such a thing.
“Well, no use wasting perfectly good tickets.” I held up the two pieces of paper.
“Good,” Eric said. “You brought mine too. They’re sold out, you know.”
I smirked. “Who says I kept it for you?”
But he didn’t even react. “Come on, Lefferts.”
Eric held out a hand. And eventually, I took it.
From inside the bar, flashing lights. A bass line like a woodpecker. The singer whistled a warning.
I handed our tickets to the doorman, who ripped them and handed Eric back the stubs, then stamped our wrists with octopi.
We fell into an oblivion of bodies and bass lines. I pushed away their sweating skins, clutching instead the dry palm that guided me through the masses. Wherever he went, Eric shone. A bright light. How could I tell him that sometimes it was too bright? That sometimes it blinded me.
Present
Blinded. That’s what I was. The sun, shining through the shades, speared my weary eyes. I didn’t want to sleep anymore, but I couldn’t take the yellow-white shards, the way they seemed to stick my brain like skewers.
“Is it done yet?”
Who said that? The voice was familiar. On some level, my whole body seemed to recognize it.
I rolled over on my cot, cold and clammy, but also hot and sticky. The room was freezing, so my toes and forehead—the two parts of my body exposed in the winter air—were frozen while the rest of me sweat out the effects of my ongoing anesthesia.
Nausea roiled through my system. The broth was wearing off again.
The door to the room was open. Arrogant, I thought blearily. It was right there. I could just walk right out. They thought we were incapacitated to the point where they didn’t even bother to lock us up properly.
Well, they were right.
“I thought I would wait on that, Titan,” a voice I recognized as Jude Letour’s said. “It seemed a hasty decision. After all, you might want to dote on it in the end.”
“Do it.” Carson’s voice was steel compared to his underling’s. That’s who I heard before.
My eyes were shut, but I could still envision those icy hazels clapping on me inside the ultrasound room. I placed a hand over my mostly flat belly. In response, it grumbled. How long had it been since I had eaten solid food?
“What about Triton? Has he responded?”
“He’s out, but unreachable. I’m not worried. He’ll be here.”
“He’d better. We need those boats. Everything is ready to transport, but I’ve got NIS sniffing around the plant. We need everything out of the country yesterday. Do you know he called the CIA on you?”
There was a grumble, something I couldn’t quite understand.
“Forgive me for saying this again, but don’t you think there is perhaps an easier way? Triton is so unpredictable, and the girl is difficult at best—”
“Triton lost his rights to her a long time ago. But she’s his fatal flaw. The child—well, that’s just for good measure.”
There was a shuffle that covered their voices as I strained to hear what they were saying.
“I’ve got a meeting in thirty minutes to smooth the passage,” Carson said. “Get it done, Jude. I don’t want to come back without it finished. Otherwise he might not cooperate.”
Footsteps left the outer room and a door slammed behind him. A few minutes later, a shadow appeared in the door—Jude with the Russian attendant behind him. He carried another tray bearing soup, which Anton carried over to my mother, and a vial and syringe, which Jude brought to me.
“This,” he grumbled, “is a bit out of my realm if you ask me, princess.”
“Then why do it?” My lips could barely form the words.
Jude’s eyes narrowed. “Shut up.”
I watched as the attendant pulled my mother up roughly and instructed her to eat her soup.
“Eomma,” I croaked. “Don’t do it.”
But her eyes barely registered me, dilated like saucers, and she sipped lamely at the bowl like a sick puppy.
“Since you’re awake, that will make this easier,” Jude said. “If you’ll just cooperate.” He affixed the vial to the syringe, then pushed the stopper enough for a drop or two of the clear liquid to pop out the top of the needle.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Nothing so bad, I promise you. Just a little something to help you relax.”
“I—no.” Protect the baby. These kinds of drugs couldn’t be good for it. I didn’t want more. I didn’t want any. “No, please. I’ll stay here. I won’t fight, I promise. Just…please don’t give me anything else.”
Something like regret crossed Jude’s face. But only for a second. “I apologize,” he said almost formally. “But it’s out of the question.”
He pulled down the blankets to bare my arm.
“No,” I said, finding more strength than I thought I had to yank my arm out of reach. “No!”
“Anton,” Jude called irritably over his shoulder.
I watched over Jude’s shoulder as my mother slumped back onto the bed.
“What did you give her?” I squawked, scooting back into the corner of my cot. “What the hell are you doing to us?”
“Hold her down,” Jude instructed Anton in a bored tone.
Anton did as he was told with brusque, efficient movements, though his face twisted into a cruel parody of a smile.
“What do you want?” I cried. “Eric is going to come, you know. He will.”
Jude just bared his two rows of capped white teeth in triumph.
“Oh, my little concubine,” he said as he tapped the side of the syringe. “We’re counting on it.”
“You’re going to regret this,” I warned him.
At that, Jude just shook his head. “You really are clueless, aren’t you? To a man like Titan? Like me? There is no such thing as ‘no.’”
There was a sharp jab in my arm. I jerked away, but only so much as my weakened limbs could manage, which wasn’t much under Anton’s strong hold.
“Triton has to learn that his actions have consequences,” Jude said. “He has to pay for abandoning his post like this. For going against the orders of his Caesar. He’ll pay for everything that he’s done and everything his father did too.”
“You’ll pay,” I slurred.
Jude just smiled as darkness swallowed me again.
2009
I took a long swallow of my beer. PBR, of course. Eric knew what I liked.
“I don’t understand. You said that’s what you wanted too. Just sex. No strings. Easy.” I traced a finger over the condensation on the beer can. “This doesn’t seem easy to me. Birthday presents. A concert. This is much more.”
“Maybe I want more.” Eric took a long sip of his vodka and watched my reaction. “Maybe I want everything.”
The music behind us seemed to drop a few decibels. Eric’s gaze didn’t waver.
“When was your last girlfriend?” I wondered. “Is this some kind of test? Reaching your quarter-life crisis and deciding you want to try to gut it out for once?”
Eric frowned. “What the hell does my last girlfriend have to do with it?”
Ah, so I’d hit a sore spot there.
I drained my beer and set it on the bar with a loud bang. “Why won’t you tell me? Have you even had a girlfriend before, Petri dish?”
He swallowed another large sip of vodka. “Have you had a boyfriend?”
“I have. A few, actually.”
I leaned against the bar, watching the crowd instead of my date. It was the usual you would see here. Indie rock enthusiasts mixed with a solid contingent of punk fans Where every non-Red Sox lover in Boston conglomerated on the weekends. A meeting of like misfits.
They were my people. But they definitely weren’t Eric’s.
“Bad
breakups?”
I drummed my fingers against the bar top. “You could say that.”
“Am I anything like them?”
I turned to look at him. “No one I ever took seriously.”
Maybe on the outside he was like those boys. The ones who came from the upper-middle class families in the Midwest. Who wore IZOD and played golf. Who hated anything spicy and thought Dave Matthews was the epitome of alt-rock.
But if I was being totally honest, I knew Eric was still different. Those boys dripped mediocrity, but Eric loved the best. Everything about him shone in a way those boys never had. And while they had talked me into the backs of their cars, toyed with me year in and year out, Eric never did anything but look me in the eye.
But the best liars could do that. They could fool anyone into thinking they were the genuine article, then burn it all up for the fun of it.
“We’ve been over this a million times. I know how this goes,” I said bitterly. “High school. College. It doesn’t change. The reality is that guys like you do not stay with girls like me. Why are you trying to force this into something it’s not? Don’t you remember Pretty in Pink?”
“As I remember, the preppy kid got the girl in the end.” Eric smirked. “Actually, I always thought the record store owner was the hottest one. Spiked hair and all.”
But I wasn’t about to be dissuaded. “Everyone knows that Andie should have ended up with Duckie, not Blane. He’s the one who showed up for her. Supported her. Loved her. That’s not up for debate. That’s canon.”
Eric’s disgust was visible, and for a long time, he didn’t speak, just turned his drink back and forth between his fingers. Finally, he looked up. “Do I look like I’m in high school, Jane?”
Some men in their twenties did, in fact, look like they were still prepubescent. I remember being genuinely shocked when I started college in a dorm full of gangly, baby-faced man-children. And they acted like it too. Especially when they whispered behind my back as I walked through the halls.
The Love Trap (Quicksilver Book 3) Page 11