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“Yes,” I say.
“Are they obedient children?”
“Sometimes.”
“And what of your wife?” he persists. “Is she loyal to you?”
“Always,” I say.
Marko doesn’t like that answer. He shifts irritably on the cot, his cloudy green eyes fixed on me. His sclera are bloodshot. Vodka seeps out of his lungs with every exhale, acrid in the tight space of the cell.
“I confess,” he says. “I thought Sloane would try harder to find you.”
Anger churns in my stomach. The cuffs bite into my wrists as my arms flex against the steel.
I tell myself not to rise to the bait. Marko is trying to anger me. He may even be searching for Sloane, trying to goad me into revealing where she might be, and what she might be doing.
Calmly, I say, “All I ask of my wife is that she pay the ransom and keep my business running in my absence.”
Marko gives a dismissive snort. His gaze slides away again, pulled back to his own tormenting thoughts. His gnarled hands clench and unclench on his lap.
“We do everything for them,” he says. “We capture the world and lay it at their feet. And all we demand in return is fealty.”
I think, without saying it, that fealty cannot be demanded. It can only be exchanged between two people, freely and willingly.
Marko has never understood that.
He wants what he himself cannot give.
Because deep down, his only loyalty is to himself.
Perhaps to his daughter as well . . . I’ve never seen them together, so I can’t say. Even if I had, I doubt anyone can guess the deepest priorities of a man’s heart.
All I know is that I would offer my body and soul to save my wife, my daughter, or my son.
They are more precious to me than myself.
While my deepest wish is to see them again and hold them in my arms, I would never risk a hair on their heads to make that happen.
I haven’t answered Marko, and that irritates him further.
He holds the cellphone in his hand, gripping it so hard that I’m surprised his swollen fingers don’t shatter the screen.
“Do you tire of this, Ivan?” he says, jerking his head to indicate the entirety of the cell. “Do you want this to be over?”
He isn’t asking me if I want to go home.
We’re not playing that game anymore.
“Sometimes,” I reply cautiously.
“Are you lonely here? Do your thoughts eat at you? Does your guilt eat at you?”
His teeth are bared, the incisors the color of old ivory. The lid of his right eye twitches.
It strikes me thatMarkois lonely. His men worship him with slavish devotion—Kuzmo especially. But they are not his friends. And certainly not his equals.
Marko put a pen through the eye of his last ally. As for me, his oldest friend . . . I’ve become his most hated enemy.
