by Claudia Gray
Then it hits me. Maybe this isn’t random.
A criminal operation—a professional one—that could be run by someone with a lot of money. A lot of influence. Someone who could get others to do his dirty work.
But no, I tell myself. He’s in love with my sister—for real, I’m sure of it. Conley wouldn’t do this, unless—unless he realized I suspected him—
“We’ve got her,” says the man just by my shoulder.
Someone responds: “I see that.” Only three words, but I recognize his voice.
Because it’s Paul.
15
I CAN’T SPEAK. CAN’T SWALLOW. CAN’T BLINK.
The unbearable terror of the past hour expands, explodes. Every thought I have vaporizes. Nothing remains but the hard truth: Paul kidnapped me.
Who is he in this world? How can he be a part of this?
I hear him take one step closer, as if he’s approaching. Yet he speaks to the others in the room instead. “She’s just a girl. I checked. She’s not even as old as I am.”
“Leonid said to pick her up if we had the chance,” says one of them—the one who grabbed me, I think. From the sharper diction of his words, I can tell he’s pulled off the ski mask; I hope he stays behind me, because I don’t want to see his face. I can’t see his face. “We got the chance.”
Paul swears under his breath; I remember enough Russian to know he’s angry. Furious.
And I’m not the one he’s angry with.
He didn’t mean for this to happen. That has to be it. Someone else, this Leonid person—that’s who kidnapped me. Paul’s mixed up with some seriously terrible people, all right, but apparently he never meant for me to be hurt.
Besides, a splinter of my Paul’s soul is within him. The guy I love is in there, just beneath the surface. I tell myself that he’s influencing this Paul’s actions. Playing a part in his decisions. My Paul will protect me.
So this will turn out okay. He’ll get me out of this. And now I have the chance I need to retrieve the next piece of Paul’s soul. But the terror of the past hour will take a long time to subside. My breaths come shallow and fast, my ribs straining against the duct tape every time I inhale.
He comes closer, and I feel his hand tug at the bottom of the black sack over my head. One of the men says, sharply, “What are you doing?”
Paul says, “The rest of you stay behind her. She already knows what I look like.”
Then he lifts the edge of the bag. In the first instant, the light seems overwhelmingly bright—but my eyes adjust, revealing a dimly lit basement, and Paul standing in front of me. He’s no monstrous version of himself, amused at my terror or eager to be cruel. Instead, he looks at me with much the same expression my own Paul would have in this kind of situation: worried for me, angry with my kidnappers, and determined to find the best way out.
Really, the only different thing about him is the clothing. Even if Paul could afford a slim-cut leather jacket like that, he’d never wear such a thing. Designer jeans, either. The outfit suits him, though, in a strange way.
“You’ve put us in a difficult position,” Paul says to my abductors, then goes silent again, obviously thinking hard.
Analyze your surroundings, I tell myself. My terror-fogged brain clears as I focus on each element in turn. The chill of this room. Cement floor, with a drain at the center. Cinderblock walls. Pipes and some rebar stretch along the ceiling, confirming my earlier instinct that this was a basement. While the rest of the guys remain out of sight, I can see their shadows reflected on the floor. The swinging light overhead distorts their shapes, but I can tell all of them are as big and bulky as the men who abducted me.
As for Paul—I now notice he’s been inked, a few blue-black lines apparent at the open collar of his shirt. It seems so incredibly unlike him to get a tattoo. His light brown hair is combed back and slicked with something that makes it seem darker. But he is still, fundamentally, the same.
“None of you have ever seen her before?” Paul glances around the room; nobody speaks. Finally he addresses me. “Who are these mutual friends?”
My mouth is so dry from fear that I have to swallow before I can say, “What are you talking about?”
“Your message.” The dry humor in his voice is familiar. “You said mutual friends thought we should go out.”
“Obviously I had the wrong Paul Markov.”
Paul remains suspicious. “Did Tarasov tell you to make contact?”
“Who?” I can’t remember a Tarasov from any dimension.
His frown deepens. “Derevko, then. Or Quinteros?”
“I don’t know who any of those people are. Is this—is this because of that Facebook message?” Who the hell attacks someone because they messaged them on Facebook? “Like I told you, I made a mistake.”
Paul inclines his head, like It’s possible. Obviously he’s still unhappy with the situation, but not . . . shocked. How can he not be shocked? These guys showed up with a kidnap victim. Namely, me.
This is obviously a criminal organization. I mean, they had a van, people watching me, waiting to see if they could kidnap me, all because I tried to get in touch with Paul in the most innocuous way, plus none of the others seem to have been born in the United States and holy crap I’m mixed up with the Russian mob.
How did Paul get mixed up with them?
He steps farther back, as if to study me from a distance, then leans against the cinder-block wall, like he’s completely at ease.
But he’s not. The tension in the way he holds his shoulders might be invisible to anyone who didn’t know Paul as I well as I do. Deep inside, he’s unsure of himself. Questioning what to do next.
I cling to this scrap of knowledge the way I’d grab a life preserver in the ocean. Is that uncertainty part of this world’s Paul, or the soul of my Paul coming through? It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is I know this man.
“Listen,” I say, as calmly as I can. Paul responds to logic. “You said you researched me. So you know I’m eighteen years old, I live with my parents, and I’m not mixed up in . . . in whatever you guys are mixed up in.” Time for a little creative invention. “Some friends of mine told me about a Paul Markov. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I got the last name wrong. Obviously you’re not the person I was looking for.”
Paul inclines his head slightly. “Persuasive,” he says. That’s not the same as I believe you, but it’s a positive sign.
“She knows your name, and she’s seen your face,” says one of the guys standing behind me, and the fear inside me once again boils over into panic. Every trashy true-crime TV show I ever watched has made it clear that they never let you see their face unless they plan to kill you, and while Paul would never do that, I don’t feel good about the others—i.e., the guys in the room who are bigger, and stronger, and who probably own guns.
Yet they seem to defer to Paul.
Quietly he says, “The police would investigate the murder of a young woman from the Upper West Side. They wouldn’t care very much about a kidnapping that resulted in no injury. Probably they wouldn’t even believe any abduction took place; they’d think it was a story she made up. Cover for sneaking out to a party, maybe.”
“There was a guy with her,” grunts one of the men behind me. “We knocked him down. Out, maybe. Didn’t have time to handle him permanently.”
Theo. By now he will have phoned the police, my parents, everyone. They must all be so scared.
Paul says, “Then we don’t have any time to waste. Either we have to get rid of the evidence, or we have to work out a deal.” He steps closer to me. “I don’t want police attention. How can I best avoid it, Miss Caine? By eliminating you as a witness, or by setting you free to tell the police you have no idea what happened to you?”
“Option two,” I say. “Definitely.”
“You can’t trust her to do that!” objects one of the goons.
“I don’t think she’s stupid,” Paul says.
“She knows that if we found her once, we could find her again. The police might take me in for questioning, but by now she knows I have many friends. Don’t you, Miss Caine?”
“All I want to do is get out of here.” But not too quickly. “You’ll drop me off? Don’t send me with the others. I don’t trust them.”
If he’s the one who drives me to God knows where, I’ll have a chance to bring the Firebird into contact with his body and rescue that splinter of my Paul’s soul. Then I can leave this dimension. Just leap out of here. Theo’s Firebird will tell him that I’ve left; he’ll follow me to the home office, where we can finally have it out with Conley. And this world’s Marguerite can wonder why the hell she came to on a strange street corner, call her parents or the cops, and go home without suffering anything worse than a few bruises, some confusion, and a nasty rip in her tights.
“She’ll stay quiet,” Paul says to the others. “If she doesn’t—we can remind her of the bargain we’ve struck.”
“Leonid has his ways,” someone behind me says. Which is his way of agreeing with Paul. Even with the duct tape around my chest and arms, I feel like I can breathe better. Within a couple of hours, this will only seem like a bad dream.
Later, I know, I’ll have to question how Paul got mixed up in this—I mean, seriously, the Russian mob? But I can’t think about anything that complicated right now. My mind boils it down to the absolute basics: Stay quiet. Trust Paul. Get home.
But Paul hasn’t said he’ll be the one to drop me off—
A metal door slams. My entire body tenses so hard the tape pulls tight across my belly and my arms. Heavy footsteps walk through some kind of hallway—slightly behind me—and then I hear a deep, strongly accented voice. “You went fishing, I see.”
While all the other men chuckle in a sheepish, brown-nosing kind of way, Paul’s face falls.
I don’t even need anyone to say the name. This is the man in charge. Leonid.
The footsteps circle around until I can see Leonid himself—still a shadow, mostly, lit from behind. He doesn’t look directly at me; the guy knows better than to show anyone his face. “This is a child. My grandmother could catch this one.”
Screw you too, I think.
But I know better than to say anything out loud. I’m not even going to look directly at Leonid—see, I can’t identify you, it’s okay to let me go—and I don’t want to draw any more attention. He’s not getting any reaction from me whatsoever—
—until he steps into the light, and I have to bite down on my own tongue to keep from crying out.
Not because he’s shown me his face, and proved he doesn’t care whether I live or die.
Because the face looking at me now is Paul, through a mirror darkly.
He’s older—rougher—hair as gray as his eyes—and coarser in every way, as if someone had taken Paul and stripped away everything that makes him beautiful, leaving only the brute behind. The nose has been broken a couple of times; his teeth are yellow from decades of coffee. Yet the resemblance is powerful, and unmistakable.
Behind him, Paul says quietly, “I’m handling this, Papa.”
Leonid is Paul’s father.
The puzzle pieces snap together at last. This is why Paul never goes home at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Why he doesn’t like his parents, won’t even talk about them. Why he has to get by on a modest grad student stipend, with no help from home ever. Paul’s dad is mixed up in organized crime. The reason they cut him off must be because he refused to join the family business.
Except in this dimension, Paul stayed. Now he’s trapped in the last possible life he could ever want to lead.
“You’re handling it, are you?” Leonid says to Paul. “You found out who she’s with?”
“No one.” Paul stands almost at attention. I always thought he was awkward with us—because, well, he is. But with his father, he’s even worse. Tense and uncertain. Scared. “The entire situation arose out of a misunderstanding.”
“You believe that?” Leonid’s finger brushes against my cheek, a cold, impersonal appraisal.
Paul nods. “Yes, I do.”
The guys standing behind me don’t even seem to breathe. I realize they’re nearly as terrified of Leonid as I am. Leonid’s not just in the Russian mob; he’s high up. Very high.
Enough so that he doesn’t care if I see his face or not. He’s too big a fish for the cops to net easily.
Leonid Markov cocks his head, and finally he speaks to me. “You’re a sweet little girl who knows nothing about business? I think maybe you are. You don’t remember any of this, even our names?”
My entire knowledge of criminal activity comes from Law & Order reruns. Probably not reliable. I stick to what Paul said before. “If I tell the police I don’t remember anything, you won’t come after me again. That’s all I want.”
He laughs out loud, pats my cheek. “Good girl.”
Was that stupid, persuasive, or both? At any rate, Leonid is out of my face now, standing up and looking at Paul instead. Paul says, “I’ll drop her off myself. Drive her to another borough. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”
He speaks so evenly that someone could almost miss the fact that he’s pleading for my life. Joy spreads its wings inside me. Paul’s going to be the one to drive me away from this place. I have a chance at rescuing my Paul’s soul. This will all be over soon.
“You’re right,” Leonid says. “It wouldn’t have to be, if I didn’t have such idiots working for me.”
Silence falls. Danger has become palpable in the room, but suddenly the threat is no longer directed at me.
Leonid steps back. In the harsh light of the single bulb dangling down, the wrinkles on his face cast strange shadows. “Idiots kidnap a girl where people can see them, where they knock down a witness and leave him there to call the police. Idiots kidnap a girl in front of a building with a security camera in the front. Idiots get us on the news!”
At first my heart leaps at the thought the authorities know I’m in danger—but that’s only instinct. In this situation, instinct is completely wrong. I was out of trouble; Paul had found the way to save me. Now those plans don’t count anymore.
Leonid reaches inside his heavy coat, and something about the way he moves reminds me sharply of Paul. For a moment father and son are superimposed on each other—old over young, corrupt versus good—confusing me enough that at first I don’t recognize the gun.
Then it’s as if there’s nothing else in the room. The gun makes everything else invisible, silent, irrelevant. The dull sheen of black metal stands out even in the darkened room. Then my vision focuses even tighter, on Leonid’s hand as he squeezes the trigger.
When the sound of the gunshot explodes in the room, I scream—in fear, and in pain, because it’s so loud my eardrums sting and I think they might have ruptured. Then I’m too scared to scream anymore. Through the ringing of my ears I hear a heavy, wet thud on the floor just behind me.
Leonid has one less henchman.
Every other guy in the room remains completely quiet, like if he shows Leonid enough respect, he won’t be next. Paul is the only one who challenges his father. “What did you do that for?”
“I don’t need idiots.” Leonid slips his gun back under his jacket as casually as I’d put my phone back in my purse. “This wasn’t his first mistake.” His gray eyes—so like Paul’s, yet so much colder—focus on someone else in the corner of the room, probably the other man who kidnapped me. “You—it was your first mistake. So you get another chance. One more. Understand me?”
Even as Paul clenches his jaw, flushed with unspoken anger, he looks toward me. His gaze is a message I think I would understand even if I didn’t know him so well: Don’t react, don’t move, and this won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.
“Clean it up,” Leonid says to his goons as he puts one hand on Paul’s shoulder, the gesture of the warm, loving dad he so obviously isn’t. “Come, Paul. We should talk
about what happens next.”
Don’t leave, I think.
But he has to bargain with his father, probably for my life. I force myself to remain calm as father and son walk away, and the heavy metal door behind me swings shut again.
Men grumble in colloquial Russian I can’t quite catch as they remove their dead or dying comrade. I only glean a few words—trash, hurry, silent. Why didn’t I study harder after I got back from my first trip? I’d gotten so good at Russian then, and I wish I spoke it fluently now. At my feet, I see a trickle of blood oozing toward the metal grid in the center of the room. With a rush of horror, I realize this is what the drain is for.
Finally I have to let the fear take me. A strange immobility sinks over me, and I know my expression has gone totally blank. This must be the way rabbits or deer feel when they see headlights coming on the highway. This is why they stand perfectly still as death rushes toward them.
All I can do is sit in this chair, feeling duct tape tight against my ribs, stealing my breath. My body shakes—trying to burn off the adrenaline shot into my blood so I could fight or flee. I can do neither.
I zone out. Time blurs. I am bound to this chair forever and for only a second before the metal door clangs again. My stomach clenches as I brace myself for Leonid—but when I see Paul, I can breathe again. Our eyes meet, but again, he doesn’t speak to me. “We need to set up a more convenient place for her to stay. She’ll be with us for a few days.”
Days? I bite the inside of my cheek. But captive for days is still better than dead.
“Why the hell are we keeping her?” one guy asks. They’re still working; I can hear the crinkle of trash bags being wrapped around a body. “The sooner we get done with her, the better.”
“Miss Caine turns out to be valuable,” Paul says.
Surely he doesn’t know anything about the Firebirds. They haven’t tried to take them, anyway; both of the Firebird devices are still nestled against my chest, metal edges almost cutting into my skin from the pressure of the tape. Nobody from this dimension should notice them easily.