Last Hit (Hitman #1)(35)
Author: Jessica Clare

I can’t lie to myself—even with everything I know, I want Nick to come through that door and rescue me and hold me in his arms. I want Nick to make everything all right again. I want him to come and kiss me and make me forget.

But I’m scared of him now. Because I know the truth of what he is. He is like Yury. He is like Vasily. And I wonder if there are any other Daisies out there, huddled in warehouses, while Nick sits at a folding card table and waits for the captive to emerge from the bathroom.

This time, I can’t muffle my sob.

Yury doesn’t come into the bathroom after me. I remain there for hours, crouched on the floor, hiding in plain sight. I hear him talking on his phone, a one-sided conversation that might be about the weather or sports, for all the laughing he does.

Soon, though, I hear another voice. A woman’s voice. She coughs and says something in Russian, and Yury responds. The woman’s voice becomes whiny and pleading, and Yury’s tone grows short.

Then I hear another man’s voice. His Russian sounds different than the others, flatter.

And then, I smell food. It smells like french fries. My mouth waters.

Wary, I get to my feet and peer through the hole where the doorknob should be. I can see nothing. I will have to leave my sanctuary to see what is going on. My stomach growls, reminding me that I haven’t eaten, and I’m terrified, but I’m even more terrified of not knowing what is going on.

I open the door and emerge from the bathroom.

Yury is still sitting at the card table. He’s got a cigarette hanging from his lips and an ashtray parked on the table in front of him. Two other men are in the room. I recognize Vasily again, but the other man is a stranger. There is also a woman here. The woman is scrawny and bony, shivering in a heavy fur coat that looks like it was fished out of the garbage. Her face is caked with heavy makeup, her blonde hair stringy.

The men are wearing long coats, their faces expressionless as they regard me. The new man holds a bag of McDonalds.

They all turn at the sight of me emerging. The dark-haired man regards me for a long moment and shakes his head. "Christ, Yury. I thought we weren’t supposed to f**king hurt her. Sergei wants to sell her. She looks like shit, man."

I am startled—he’s speaking English, and it’s completely unaccented. This man—this newest assassin—is American?

Yury takes a drag on his cigarette and gives the newcomer a thin smile. "She is clumsy. Has accident." He shrugs. "Why do you care?"

"Because I get a cut when she gets sold," the man says bluntly. He tosses the bag on the table. "Some fine dining for you while you wait."

Yury grunts, and his gaze flicks to the skinny blonde woman in the coat. "I see you brought me present."

"Galina has not paid her debts to Sergei, and now she messes herself up on krokodil," Vasily says. "Is only a matter of time. So Sergei says to bring her here. She wants to work off her debts." The man smiles thinly. "Problem is, no one wants her."

"So why bring the pizda to me?" Yury looks only mildly interested. His gaze flicks over the woman. The rest of them are ignoring her…and me.

"Because Sergei said so," the American says bluntly. "I don’t give a shit what you do with her. I just don’t want her to be my problem."

Yury nods. "I will think of something." He pats the folding chair next to him, and the woman thumps into it.

"Sergei sent us here to relieve you of guard duty. We’ll take her off your hands for a bit." The American gestures at me.

My eyes widen and I take a step back toward the bathroom. Yury is the devil I know. I’m scared of him, but I’m even more terrified of this new man because I haven’t seen him before. He might be four times as sadistic as Yury. How can I trust any American that works with these horrible men?

"Nyet," Yury says. "We are having fun, aren’t we?" And Yury looks over at me.

"Fuck you," I say, my voice trembling. And I flinch backward in anticipation of someone attacking me.

But the men only regard me with the same cold, shuttered expression I’ve seen far too often.

"See?" Yury says in a flat, mocking voice. "Fun. She likes me. And I am sure she will be friendlier once she has something to eat. She will be good to me, then."

I won’t suck him off for food. I won’t. I ignore the growling of my stomach.

"Whatever," says the American. "So you’re going to stay?"

"Da. You may run off." Yury flicks his cigarette at the others. "I will call if I grow too bored. And until then, I will just play with my present."

The smile he gives the skinny woman makes me feel cold inside.

"All right, then," the American says. He looks at Vasily, nods, and begins to leave. The big blond man stays beside the front door, guarding it. Vasily isn’t leaving.

A moment later, it is just me, Yury, and the woman—Galina. Vasily remains by the front door, but he could be a statue for all the attention he gives to the situation.

Galina and Yury remain seated at the table, and Yury looks over at me, where I hover near the bathroom door, trembling and uncertain. He points at one of the metal folding chairs. "Sit."

Should I fight him? Disobey? My face throbs, and I can see no advantage. There was nothing I could use as a weapon in the bathroom, and the warehouse is equally empty. After a moment’s hesitation, I approach and sit across from Yury and the woman.

He nudges the bag of fast food toward me. "Eat."

I watch him to see if it’s a trick, and when he doesn’t move, I hesitantly reach for the bag with one bruised hand.

He gives me another thin smile and takes another puff from his cigarette.

There is a hamburger and fries in the bag and a napkin. I dig through the bag, hoping against hope that there is a plastic knife—something, anything—but there is not. After a moment’s disappointment, I grab the burger and unwrap it, taking a huge bite before they can snatch it away from me.

Yury watches me with amusement. "Americans have such disgusting manners."

I ignore him, wolfing down the food. There’s no drink, and I’m incredibly thirsty, but I don’t complain. After I eat the burger, I start on the fries.

Yury continues to watch me eat. The woman seated next to him seems to be rather out of it. Her expression is glazed and vacant, and she sniffs repeatedly as if she has a cold. As I eat, Yury cocks his head. "Give me your hand."

I still. This is the trap. I watch him, waiting.

He makes an impatient gesture. "Give me your hand."

Trembling, I extend my hand toward him. I expect anything out of this man except for what he does. He takes my hand in his and examines my fingernails. Then, he looks over at Galina and says something in Russian.

She obligingly sticks her hand out for him.

He pulls out his knife and grins at me.

My stomach churns.

Galina continues to sit there like a zombie.

"I think we will send Nikolai a little message. A little, how shall we say, ‘Hurry up.’ What do you think, pizda?"

I swallow hard. I want to know what he means, but I’m afraid. "What are you going to do?"

He examines Galina’s fingers and makes a face, angling her hand toward me. It is covered in dark spots, and in several places, it looks scaly and gangrenous. "She has much love for krokodil. It is a cheap fix when you are too broke to afford the good stuff." He puts her hand down and gestures that she should give him her other hand.

Galina does, just as easily and blankly as before. It’s like she doesn’t realize he has a knife in one hand. I wonder if she realizes anything.

He examines Galina’s new hand and then looks over at mine again. Then, he takes her ring finger and carefully pares the nail down with his knife. "The good thing is that Galina still has a decent finger or two, da? It makes our little message easier."

"What message?"

"Sergei says we cannot harm you. His buyer likes his packages whole. I understand this, but I think Nikolai needs a bit of incentive, yes? And what is more incentive than sending him his woman’s finger?"

My hands clench into fists and I hide them between my legs, horrified. "No!"

At the door, Vasily calls out a lazy warning in Russian.

Yury rolls his eyes and waves a hand at me, ignoring the other assassin. "Stupid pizda. Did you not hear me say that I cannot touch you?" He points the knife at Galina’s blank face. "But this one, she owes many, many dollars to the Bratva. And she has nothing left to pay with but her flesh." He sneers at the woman’s hand. "Her rotten, rotten krokodil flesh."

As I watch, he carefully places Galina’s hand on the table.

The woman could be a zombie for all the attention she pays. She stares blankly ahead, a hint of a smile curving her mouth.

When Yury lowers the knife toward her finger, I jerk to my feet. "No! Please don’t."

"Do not worry," Yury says with an evil smile. "She is so strung out she will not feel a thing. And this will make your Nikolai work faster, da? So is beneficial to all."

He poises the knife just above her knuckle.

I run out of the room and back to the safety of the bathroom, but not before I hear Galina begin to scream.

I throw up in the sink until I have nothing left.

Chapter Thirteen

NIKOLAI

I sit coach the next flight out. It was the only seat I could get. I wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow otherwise, and even that delay is too long. Despite the crowded conditions—the male next to me with the runny nose and the cough and the girl to my right who thought I might want to show her around when we arrived in Moscow—I sleep. I force myself. I ruthlessly push aside Daisy’s screams of pain and her ugly tears. I refuse to replay the words of Sergei as he talked so casually of raping Daisy and of selling her to a syphilis-ridden pervert in Dubai.

None of those things matter. What matters is that she is alive. Until she no longer breathes, my sole concern is rescuing her. After that…

Well, after that I would enact a vengeance upon the house of Petrovich and anyone else who had touched Daisy. It would be known throughout the world from Hong Kong to New York, in all the dark spaces, that if you touched something of Nikolai’s, vengeance would come to you and to your family and that it would not be in the form of death. It would be in the form of financial ruin, permanent maiming. It would be people returned to you with their limbs cut off and their bodies riddled with drugs. It would be so you could look every day upon the slow, wasted bodies of your loved ones and remember that all of this could have been avoided if you had just left me alone.

That is the message I would deliver to Sergei, to the Bratva, to everyone.

But to do this I must sleep. And I do.

But I am unprepared for the horror that awaits me at the airport. At the gate, a curvy flight attendant from Atlant-Soyuz Airlines approaches me. She is pretty from a distance but up close you can see the signs of krokodil use, green scale-like spots are evident around her chin and near her ears. Soon she will not be able to hide the marks, even with makeup. Soon the body tissue will grey and die and her skin will peel away, leaving only bone.