Page 67 of Bratva Sacrifice

Because he does not believe what I believed so readily. And I know, if there is anything to be found, Anatoli will find it. And already—already I am afraid of what he will find. What it will mean for me. What it will mean for Katya.

Whether the betrayal was hers, or whether it was mine.

∞∞∞

It takes hours to sober myself again. Hours in which I stew in a noxious blend of anger and guilt, uncertain which is justified. Hours before Anatoli finds me again and calls me to my office. I know instantly only from the expression on his face that I will not like what he has unearthed.

He is brutal. Direct. He says, as he shoves a memory card into my computer and pulls up a video file, “She didn’t fucking run. And this is what you do to her out of stupidity.”

It is the video feed from the pit. Dated days ago.

Over the grainy crackle of the speakers, I hear the thud of shoes on the stairs. Piotr comes into view just at the corner of the frame, carrying a metal tray on one hand. There is some sort of sludge-like gruel coating the surface.

“Your dinner,” he growls, and I hear the wet, phlegmy clearing of his throat as he spits a glob of mucus onto the tray. He drops it to the floor, the sharp clang thundering over the audio. With his boot he shoves it until it hits the very farthest corner of the room. There is the soft chortle of his laughter as he turns, striding back up the stairs. The feed switches to night vision. Night vision?

Bastard turned off the motherfucking lights. Left her in the darkness.

A choked sob drifts from Katya’s throat, and she uncurls herself from the tiny little ball she has wrapped herself into. Something uncomfortable skitters in my chest as I watch her slowly drag herself across the floor, hear the metallic rasp of the chain attached to her ankle.

She does not care that Piotr has spit in her food. She is reaching for it anyway. In the cold, in the dark. It is pitch-black down there, but still she keeps edging toward that corner where the tray is.

A hoarse cry rattles up her throat—she has reached the end of the tether. The chain is too short, and the cuff around her ankle digs into her flesh until her breaths are short and tight from the pain. Her fingers hover just a few inches away, and she swipes them desperately, searching for the edge of the tray in the darkness.

It is too far away. There is not enough slack in the chain. Her hand hovers for a moment, fruitlessly stretching toward it. I see the moment she realizes it was deliberately placed too far from her grasp. Her shoulders slump. Her head drops. Her fingers curl back into her palm. She makes a wretched little sound—a sigh of defeat.

She goes utterly limp there on the concrete floor. My stomach roils with the liters of black coffee I’ve consumed in the effort to sober myself.

“I didn’t order this,” I say, and I hear the defensive slant in my words. I wanted her punished—I didn’t order her tortured. I didn’t order her chained. I didn’t order her terrorized or starved. And she would have to be starved, to be so desperately reaching for a tray she knew had been defiled. To stretch herself past the point of pain in search of it.

“There’s two more days of this,” Anatoli says, and he is careful to keep any inflection from his voice.

I cannot drag my eyes from the screen, from the desolated image Katya presents, hiding her face against the cold slab of concrete beneath her. “How many times did he spit in her food?” I ask.

“All of them.”

“How many times did he place her tray out of her reach?” My hand swipes over my mouth, a sour taste rising in my throat.

“All of them.” Anatoli makes a rough sound in his throat. “She didn’t betray you. She didn’t run. She was taken.”

“What?” I’m only half-listening; Anatoli edited this video for my enlightenment. It runs at high speed, now, rotating through hours of darkness and misery, broken only by brief snippets of the same—Piotr delivering food, spitting, shoving it to the farthest corner of the room, well beyond Katya’s reach.

“They took her from the bookstore,” Anatoli says. “They were careful. No store cameras. But he missed the bookstore owner’s dash cam. He parks his expensive car behind the store; wants to make certain no one damages it. It caught everything. He did not know to look until I asked.”

“You have this video?”

“Of course I fucking have it. You want to see this?” Anatoli asks, and his voice is reproving. “You want to hear her scream for you, for your help? To see her struggle and fight? To see her father’s man hit her with his gun, drag her inside the car?”

No. I don’t want to see this. What I am seeing is bad enough already.

“They had to knock her unconscious to take her,” Anatoli says ruthlessly. “They knew where to find her, when to find her, because Piotr told them.”

“He’s working with them.”

“He’s working against us,” Anatoli says. “I hacked his phone, his computer. He blames Catalina for the time he spent in the pit; blames you for punishing him only for looking at her. The Russos promised him power when they kill you. They intend to use Catalina’s death to start a war, since they will never have vengeance for Nicola.”

I have been manipulated into giving them the excuse for one, an excuse to call down the larger more powerful branches of the Russo family upon me. I surrendered my leverage against them in exchange for Catalina’s return.

I had assumed they had had her for at most a few hours. Instead, they had her for nearly a week.