Page 33 of Nemesis

I can’t decide if he’s right.

His head turns a second before a rough, hacking sound works its way free of his chest. Blood splatters to the floor beside my bared legs.

“We’re going to die in here.” The words wander free from my mouth in such a low, mourning tone that they shock even me. Vas’s head turns back to me, eyes widening a fraction before settling back to his usual mask of mirth.

I shake my head. “We’re going to die, and it’s entirely my fault.”

And I still can’t even figure out why.

One inch.

The blade dips into my bicep, denting the taut skin for a moment before my flesh splits open below. Warmth drips down my arm, splattering to the ground in a soft tick, tick, tick. I’m all too aware of the dwindling distance between that line of burning pain and the brachial artery lying one inch to the right. With the astounding amount of blood dripping down the rungs of my metal chair and seeping into my pants, I’m forced to wonder if a single nick could bring me down.

It’s a consideration I didn’t have to worry about during my other stints in captivity. Not so much the death part—sometimes I think it’s a miracle I’ve made it this long.

I hiss out my next breath when that knife rips free, only to come down again. One centimeter away.

No, it’s the blatant ignorance that I find myself weighing. My entire torso is littered with emotional decisions. This interrogation has turned into a hack job only a true novice could accomplish. My muscles strain as I watch the glint of the blade curve by the artery with a careless flourish. The pain is easily separated, oil rising to the top of a water glass.

The risk is not.

“Do you know how difficult it is to organize a ransom?”

The man hovering above blocks out the streams of light. It’s not until he takes a step aside that my eyes finally regain focus on his features. I make a good show of looking over his entire form, from the tips of his boots, all the way up to his dark, pitted gaze that reveals every desperate thought swirling beneath. I have to admit, some deranged part of me takes a small measure of pride seeing his formerly pristine leather boots sullied with splatters of my own blood.

“I can only imagine.”

Those red fingers grip the blade’s handle, which protests with a small creak. It’s the truth, regardless of the goading effect it has on my captor. When the Morozov Bratva picked someone up, you could be sure that the next time their faces were seen was when they were scooped out of the Moskva River in pieces and ID’d by lab technicians. We weren’t really the catch-and-release type.

But we also didn’t take women.

No.

A lump forms under my next swallow. I can’t let myself think about her right now. I need his focus to stay on me. The second I start dwelling on her, I’ll drown in unknowns. Why do they want her? Who would benefit from her ransom? If they’ve been doing their research, I have no doubt they could flip her over to a local skin trade on the black market for a quick buck, and yet, they seem wholly convinced she’d be worth more to someone else.

What would they do to her if that knife slipped just a little lower, and I bled out in this chair?

Stop.

“You’d think a simple picture would be enough to get at least one of the parties interested, I mean, everyone knows they’ve been looking for years…”

His rambling trail is difficult to follow through the sway of dizziness, but I force myself to pay attention. Maybe I was wrong about the centimeter. I always expected my death to be messy. I just didn’t expect to fight the pull.

“Maybe,” I clear my throat, ignoring its dry burn from the single word. “Maybe I should speak with my boss. Organize a trade-off. They’ll trust me.”

Shit, I don’t even know who this guy thinks I work for anymore. Siderov, Solokov, my uncle, or all three. It doesn’t really matter. Octavia was right. We need to get out of here before we run out of time.

Maybe, if I weren’t quite so distracted from blood loss and plotting, I would’ve anticipated the hit and tucked my chin.

Pain blooms across my cheekbone the moment my head snaps back. Warmth and salt fill my mouth. Blood, I realize, flicking my tongue over the cut ruptured by my own teeth.

“I don’t need your help,” he snaps, rubbing his own bleeding knuckles like I delivered the ache on purpose. “Stafford!”

The whining door answers his call. I don’t even need to glance up to pick apart which guard walks into the room. His familiar footsteps, heavy-footed and short, rumble the legs of my chair. My interrogator is already on his way out the door, still cradling his wrist from the hit.

“Move him back to the cage. I’m done for the day.”

With those parting words, the door on the other side of the room slams shut. His heels click off into the distance. I kick out one tingling leg, trying to get some blood pumping back through my stagnant system. It doesn’t really work—likely because there isn’t much blood left to pump. It’s funny how inconsequential that sticky, warm solution seems when it’s spread across the floor.