Читать книгу Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me - Shannon McKenna - Страница 20

Val wiped spit off his face and pulled out of the silken clutch of her body, staring down at the shining pink folds distended around his cock. She left a slick sheen of gleaming lube on the latex.

She hid the tears behind her hand. He tried not to look. He didn’t want to see them any more than she wanted them to be seen. She was proud, haughty. Not the kind of woman who used tears as a weapon. God knows, she had plenty of other weapons in her arsenal.

This outcome exceeded his wildest hopes, and yet he felt shattered. He had obtained the means to keep Imre alive for a few more days, but he felt no triumph, not even relief. Just a sickening sense that he was sliding ever deeper into a pit that had no bottom.

It shook him that he had actually lost himself in the experience. He had forgotten Novak, Imre. He had forgotten about the hidden camera. He had forgotten every agenda but that of his own pounding body.

And he could fuck her again, right now. Gladly. All night long.

He disposed of the condom and arranged his erect penis inside his jeans as best he was able. The silent weeping was driving him mad.

“Stop it,” he broke out harshly in Italian. “Stop crying, for the love of God. I cannot stand it.”

“Vaffanculo,” she shot back. “I can’t control it, and it’s your own goddamn fault that I’m stoned. So deal with it, dickhead.” She tugged her skirt down. One of her stockings had slipped loose of the garter and rolled halfway down her thigh. He sank to his knees in front of her and rolled it up. The skin of her upper thigh was exquisitely hot and smooth. Lily petal soft. So fucking perfect. Her legs shook. She wobbled on her flimsy, eight-hundred-dollar spike heels.

His legs would shake, too, were he standing.

He did not want her to see the look on his face, so he leaned forward and pressed it against her mound, kissing her. A wordless apology that he knew she would reject violently, but he could not help himself. Could not resist breathing in more of her hot female scent and then more. Letting his secret tears soak into her skirt.

She made a catlike hissing sound and slapped at his face, but without much force. He looked up from that supplicating position at her face, flushed and wet, eye makeup blurred into a mask that just made her brimming eyes look brighter.

So beautiful, it made his chest clench.

He wanted to shove her skirt up and beg for her forgiveness with his tongue, but she would kill him for his pains, and he would not blame her. Even so, he wrapped his arms around her waist and clung to her, like a child. It was a stupid move, a vulnerable position. She could kill him in a hundred ways with the arsenal he’d plucked out of her hair or with her bare hands alone, for that matter.

He did not care. If she wanted to kill him, she was welcome to do so. He deserved it. He braced himself, waited.

No crushing death blow came down, though. No needle’s burning sting. Her hands slid into his hair, gripping handfuls of it and yanking, hard. Her nails dug into his scalp.

“You’ve fucked a lot of people you didn’t necessarily want to sleep with in your career, Janos, right?”

He tensed, sensing a tarpit. “Yes,” he admitted cautiously.

“Was it difficult?” Her voice was hard. “To drug me up, make me come? Did it hurt? Did you have to grit your teeth, hold your breath?”

It took a minute to gather the courage to answer her, with the stark truth—even though he knew that she would not believe him.

“No.” His voice hoarse, raw. “This is the part that hurts. The rest of it was incredible. I’ve never wanted anything the way I wanted you.”

She laughed through her tears. “Me? No, it’s not me you wanted. You wanted a piece of me. That’s all anyone wants. The pretty part, the smart part, the mean part. The part between my legs. The rest is a pile of broken pieces. No use to anyone.”

He tightened his hands on her hips, fingers digging into her curves, feeling the smooth heat of her, the play of sleek, strong muscle.

“The rest of you is beautiful,” he whispered. “Broken to pieces or not. All of it is beautiful.”

She covered her face, shoulders shaking with bitter laughter. “Oh, shut up,” she muttered. “There’s no point in bullshit sweet talk. It hurts to listen to it, OK? Let me be, Janos. I will never do what you want me to do. Nothing will convince me, understand? So stop torturing me. Just disappear. I am begging you.”

He took his hands off her body, and stood up. “You will not be better off without me. You will have no more peace, Steele. If it is not me shoving you around, it will be someone else.” He laid it out for her, his voice flat. “Someone much worse.”

“Worse than you?” Her eyes shimmered with furious tears. She dabbed beneath them to wipe up her mascara. “Not possible.”

“It is very possible,” he said stonily. “When PSS catches up with you, they will take Rachel and lock her in a room somewhere to control you, as they ordered me to do. And you do not want to imagine what will happen when Novak catches up with you…and Rachel.”

She flinched, and tried to twist up her thick, glossy hair with trembling hands. “And you think that calling the cops on me, messing with Rosalia, fucking with the adoption agency, isn’t controlling me with Rachel?”

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. “There is no comparison. I have done my best to protect her.”

“Oh, my. I am overwhelmed.” She stopped trying to put her hair up, and gathered the bristling array of hair ornaments into her hands as she shook it loose. She unlocked the door, yanked it open, and flung her parting shot at him. “What a fucking hero you are.”

He grabbed her wrist. “There’s one more reason why you should reconsider,” he said. “I have one final thing to offer you.”

“Oh, really?” She flung her head back, tear-blurred eyes blazing up at him. “Spit it out.”

“Drago Stengl,” he said.

The handful of hair ornaments clattered to the ground, bouncing and scattering. Her face was white to the lips.

“No one knows that. How…?” Her voice was a dry whisper.

The change in her eyes unnerved him. He felt as if he had just driven a knife into her chest.

“There was a photograph of you in Novak’s files,” he admitted. “It was taken at the memorial service some years ago, for the massacre in Zetrinja. I did some research and found out who gave the orders. I thought that you might be interested in, ah…news of him.”

“News? Of the man who murdered my father? I want more than news.” Her voice was colorless, dead. “I want his heart’s blood. I want him stretched on the rack. I want him screaming in hell.”

He had won, he realized. He had hooked her, but the realization gave him no satisfaction. On the contrary. It made him feel like a piece of shit to use her in this way. Turning a knife in old wounds.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I don’t have his location yet, but I have a solid lead,” he hedged. “I will help you follow it. In exchange for your support on my project.”

She laughed. “Project? What a word for it. What do you mean by a lead? If you are fucking with me, I swear to God I will kill you.”

“I know where his daughter is,” he said.

Her soft white throat worked. “Ana,” she whispered.

“Yes, Ana. She lives in Italy. She is married to an Italian businessman with connections to the Camorra. I have someone following her right now. A client of mine can introduce us, the wife of a Camorra boss. I can exploit the connection. If you like.”

“If…I…like,” she echoed, her voice hollow. She stared at him, or through him. She had forgotten that he was there. She was looking back through the years at something he could not see and did not want to. From her haunted eyes, he understood that it was as vivid as if it were happening here and now.

He understood that. There were moments in his life as well that had burned their indelible afterimage onto every day that followed.

He steeled himself. “So?” he prodded her. “Do we have a bargain?”

She made a choked sound, put her hand over her mouth, and lurched out the door. Her rapid, clicking footsteps receded down the hall.

Val gripped the door frame with his fist. Was that a yes? Nothing was ever obvious with that woman.

Three steps back, he reminded himself, but it was no use. The emotions he’d learned to step back from had never been like these. They had no place, no right to exist. Inconvenient desire and guilt. And grief.

Imre. He gathered up the hair ornaments, retrieved the video camera, and headed out a door at the end of the corridor that led out onto the grounds. He cut through the forest on his way to the parking lot. It was freezing cold. He had not bothered to retrieve his coat, but he was still in a near molten state, from the encounter with Tamara Steele.

He could melt the polar ice caps in this condition.

He loped through frozen leaves and twigs crunching beneath his slippery dress shoes and slid into the car. Hoping desperately that there would be wireless coverage. He did not want to have to drive away from her and Rachel. He hated to let them out of his sight at all.

He booted up the laptop. Ah, joy. There was coverage. He established a connection, activated the tiny videocamera embedded in the screen. Downloaded the digital video footage.

Editing it made his heart pound. The footage was too good, the angle paradoxically perfect, showing every detail of Steele’s flushed face, eyes closed, head thrown back, her perfect thighs clamped around his.

His chest ached. This experience was private, precious. And he had to throw it to that fiend, Novak. A chunk of meat to quiet the beast.

He edited out her tears, their conversation. A meaningless attempt to protect what he could of her privacy. He encrypted it, attached it. His finger lingered for minutes over the button. He closed his eyes and thought of Imre’s hands.

He clicked “send.”

He sat in the dark with his hands clamped over his face for over ten minutes until he could trust himself to link up to the videophone.

András’s grinning face flickered into view. “Ah, there you are. We were enjoying your show. Lucky pig.”

“I want to see Imre,” Val said stonily.

“Wait.” András disappeared. Val waited, staring at the blank screen, the antique chair’s carved back. Several minutes passed.

Novak seated himself in front of the computer, grinning. He had licked his purplish lips until they gleamed.

“Well done, Vajda,” he said. “Forgive me for making you wait, but I was riveted to the screen. Your performance with La Steele was magnificent. I have not been so stirred in years. I shall set up video screens in the room where I conduct her punishment and loop the footage the entire time. Those will be the last images she ever sees, before I gouge out her eyes. Perfect, eh?”

Val instantly manufactured white noise in his brain to block out the image. It did not work. “I want to speak to Imre,” he repeated dully.

“Of course, of course. I had him brought down the minute your video appeared in my inbox. He was privileged to watch it with us. Let me give the chair to him. I wish to go back and watch it again.”

Novak dissolved into a swirl of pixels. Another blurred, moving image as Imre was muscled onto the seat that Novak had just left.

The murky blur resolved into Imre’s face.

Val stared, his jaw aching. Imre looked shrunken and grayish and small. His eyes were sunk deep into their cavernous sockets. His cheeks looked caved in. He had aged fifteen years in four days.

Val’s hands clenched into fists. “Are they treating you well?” He hated himself for saying it. How stupid, how incredibly fucking inane the question was under the circumstances.

Imre’s eyebrow gave its habitual ironic upward quirk. “They have not beaten or cut me, if that is what you mean.”

“Are you eating?” Val persisted. “You have to eat.”

An irritated frown flashed over Imre’s face. “Don’t be a fool, boy.”

An agonizing, helpless silence followed. Val finally broke it, in desperation. “I will get you out of there,” he said.

“By betraying that poor woman? Delivering her up to torture and murder? Do not make me party to this, Vajda.”

Impotent rage swelled up in Val’s throat. “Do…not…judge…me,” he ground out.

Imre glanced over to his left. Loud, raucous bursts of laughter and lewd comments were audible. “This man is a demon,” he said quietly. “He will drag as many people to hell with him as he possibly can, and he wants you in particular to keep him company. Take care you don’t go with him.”

“I am doing the best I can!” The words exploded out of him.

“Indeed.” Finally, it was the dry, ironic tone that Val knew so well. “Was that your best? May God have mercy on us all. That performance was a bit much for an aged widower, boy.”

Val’s jaw tightened at the disapproval in Imre’s tone. “I cannot believe it,” he said. “Here I am, scrambling like a fucking monkey to keep you from dismemberment and death, and you are lecturing me?”

Imre’s lips twitched mirthlessly. “Fucking monkey is exactly the term for what I just saw, boy. And yes, I am lecturing you. Old habits die hard. I think you will have to do somewhat better than your best to get out of this predicament. Go with God, Vajda.”

The screen flickered, and the picture was lost. Val leaned over and knocked his pulsing forehead against the steering wheel.

Stuck-up, old bastard. Better than his best, his ass. What else could he do? Val was tying his balls in a knot as it was. Fuck Novak, fuck Imre, fuck them all. He wished he could find the nearest cliff to drive off. Let them sort it out however the fuck they wanted.

But he could not. Not an option. Not for him.

One more detail. It had been a wild gamble, assuming that Stengl was located near his daughter, assuming that Donatella could contrive an introduction. Assuming that the vain, capricious Donatella would even speak to him after years of neglecting the connection. She had wearied him to death, but now that he needed her, he regretted having been so lazy. He glanced at his watch. Six AM, an indecent hour to call her, in Italy, but he could not bear to wait.

He would explode.

He fished his cell phone out of his pocket, and closed his eyes to pluck Donatella’s number out of his long-term memory. It had been five years since the time he’d spent in San Vito, infiltrating that ring of smugglers, and the woman had a complicated, secret, personal life, aside from the rigors of being a Camorra mafia don’s wife. She might well have changed her cell number. She would scratch his eyes out for waking her. But he had never had any difficulty sweetening her.

His jaw clenched at the thought of having to fuck Donatella again. She was a beautiful woman, but she was selfish and spoiled and loud, and she had a streak of random cruelty that chilled him.

Imre. He forced out a harsh breath and dialed.

The phone rang three times. She picked up. “Chi cazzo sei?” she snarled. Who the fuck is this?

“Donatella. It’s me, Valery.” He caressed her with his voice.

“Valerio! Amore. I thought you had forgotten me.”

“As if I could, bellissima,” he said. “Forgive me for neglecting you. My life has been complicated lately.”

“Hmmph,” she grunted. “I can well imagine. What are you thinking, calling at this hour? Imagine if I had been in bed with Et-tore. How would I explain myself?”

“You would never take a phone with this SIM card into bed with your husband,” he said. “I take it you are in bed with someone else?”

“Do you care, Valerio?” Her voice was falsely sweet.

“Not as long as you love me best,” he murmured tenderly.

“How sweet. Always, carissimo. Although it would not do to neglect my succulent young Giuseppe, here.” She giggled, murmured something inaudible. “Perhaps you can join us some evening. The bed is wide enough for three. And Guiseppe looks…mmm, oh, sì…most enthusiastic at the idea.”

“Anything to please you,” he murmured promptly. “But first, I have something to ask you. Do you remember the earrings I gave to you, the ones with the poison beads?”

“Of course, amore. I treasure them. A fearless gift for a man like you to give to his lover. Did it never occur to you that I might kill you with them in a jealous rage?”

“It occurred to me, yes, but I do not fear death,” he said. “The designer of those earrings will be in Italy day after tomorrow, and she has an entire line of beautiful pieces containing all manner of concealed weaponry, poisons, drugs, explosives. Of course, I thought of you. Appropriate adornments for a dangerous beauty like yourself.”

“Ah, Valerio. Tesoro,” she cooed. “Am I so dangerous? Is that why you stayed away for so long?”

“Only for my peace of mind,” he assured her, his voice smooth. “But to give you a treat like this, I will risk coming out of hiding. Would you like to meet this woman, and see her wares?”

“Of course. I wish to see them all.”

“I thought so,” he said silkily. “I have a favor to ask in return.”

“You know that I can deny you nothing, tesoro. Ask.”

“Do you know a woman named Ana Santarini?”

“Ignazio Santarini’s boring wife? What on earth do you want with that stupid cow? You cannot possibly intend to fuck her!”

“No, not at all,” he assured her. “But I need an introduction to her for this jewelry designer. Could you arrange it for me? Preferably at her own residence.”

He heard the machinery grinding in Donatella’s mind. “I might be persuaded…if I could have the pleasure of your company once again.”

He sighed silently and rolled his eyes. “Of course, piccola. Could you arrange for the day after tomorrow, when I bring this designer?”

“So soon? You are crazy! I don’t even know if she is in town!”

“Invite her to see the jewelry,” he urged. “It would appeal to her.”

“And have that Santarini slut know all of the secrets of the pieces that I buy? She will tell everyone! What is the point of it?”

He clenched his fists. “Ti prego,” he said softly. “Please. For me.”

She made an irritated huffing sound. “I am going to Paris for a week to shop,” she announced. “You will join me there?”

“I cannot wait,” he said through clenched teeth.

“The entire week? Prepare yourself. It will be strenuous.”

“Have no fear,” he assured her. “Send me a text message with the meeting time and location with Santarini, va bene?”

Donatella paused and made a little clicking sound with her tongue. “Anxious, Valerio?” she purred. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble? Tell Donatella all about it, bambino mio. Maybe I can help.”

A muscle in his jaw started to twitch. He was in a bad way if even an empty-headed vacca like Donatella was tuning in to his nervous tension. “You already are helping me,” he said softly. “My angel.”

“February seventh, in Paris,” she reminded. “Mark it on your calendar.” There was a thread of steel in Donatella’s voice.

“Certainly. A dopo, dolcezza.”

A tedious back-and-forth of stupid endearments, and finally he managed to close the telephone. He released a long, controlled sigh.

Three steps back. A week of stud service in a luxury hotel in Paris was not too much to pay for Imre’s life. He would do it if he had to. But a sour, wrong feeling clung to him. It made him want to take a bath.

Ah, well, what the fuck. He might be dead by February seventh anyway. That was the best he could do to cheer himself up.

He headed back to the hotel, preparing himself for disaster. Steele had probably fled in the time it had taken to do this infernal errand.

But when he peered into the ballroom, she was there, wrestling a whimpering, protesting Rachel into her coat, bulging black diaper bag dangling on her other shoulder. She was deep in conversation with Erin McCloud. Now the other woman talked earnestly, looking worried. Tam shook her head in response. The McCloud woman patted Steele’s shoulder. Tam nodded, hoisted the child onto her hip, and headed toward the exit. Her pale face was set in stark lines, her eyes haunted. She looked so different with her hair down, shining and loose, brushing her perfect ass. Everyone stared as she passed.

She ignored the swathe of speculative murmuring in her wake.

He backed into the lobby and positioned himself carefully, waiting only until the direction she was going to turn was clear before he melted around the corner and into a stairwell.

Relief made his knees weak. She was not going out the front, to the parking lot. She was going out the back toward the breezeway that led to the guest houses. She was not running from him. Not tonight.

He was grateful. He did not have the strength to chase her again. He had no more cards to play, no more tricks. He was all out of ideas. If Steele ran now, his choices were brutally simple.

Steele or Imre. One of them would have to die, badly.

He followed at a safe distance, took note of the door she and Rachel disappeared into, and then strolled along the herringbone path.

A wrought iron bench sat in the shadows of a huge tree roughly opposite her guest room door. He sat down, bone weary. A thousand years old. The cold of the hard metal bench penetrated his clothes, burning into his flesh. He would have to get his coat if he meant to sit here any length of time, he thought, but he did not move.

He could not take his eyes off that door.

He didn’t like being compelled by anything, whether the forces originated from inside himself or out. Being manipulated by Novak, Hegel, even Donatella, was bad enough. Being jerked around by the shadow parts of his own fucked-up psyche was intolerable.

Yet there he sat, rooted to the bench, his ass turning to ice. Guarding her door but not to prevent her from escaping. On the contrary, he wanted to fend off the dangers that lay in wait for her.

He was cast in the wrong role in this fucking Greek tragedy.

People passed by without noticing him lurking motionless in the dark. Then a couple came ambling by. The tall, fair-haired man’s face was revealed in a beam of light slicing through the tree boughs. Sean McCloud and his wife, Liv. Sean spotted him and turned off the path. He guided his wife across the frosted grass until they stood before him.

The man’s piercing eyes made Val squirm. The picture he made revealed too much. Him sitting like an asshole with no coat outside a woman’s closed door. Hands filled with a bristling array of Steele’s deadly hair ornaments. A whining, hungry dog hoping to be let in.

Begging for scraps.

“What are you doing out here in the cold?” McCloud demanded.

Val’s long exhalation made a vaporous cloud in front of his face. “Standing guard,” he said.

His wife, a luscious, buxom brunette, gave him a polite but suspicious look. “If there’s any woman on earth who can look out for herself, it’s Tam,” she said.

Val acknowledged that with a shrug. “Overkill.”

McCloud grunted. “Well, then. You’ve got your work cut out for you.” He hesitated, looking puzzled. “Good luck,” he added. “I think.”

Val inclined his head. The couple turned and walked on. McCloud threw a troubled glance back over his shoulder. The low murmur of their voices faded into the darkness.

He was good at telling lies. The trick was to enter so completely into whatever role he was playing, he practically believed them himself even as he told them. But what he had said to Steele was not a lie. He had blurted out the raw truth to her. More truth than he’d ever told to anyone, even Imre. Braided together with half-truths, yes, but even so.

I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you. The truth of those words reverberated through him, an explosion from within. It blasted his whole relationship to the world out of alignment. A dangerous secret.

Dangerous secrets are beautiful, don’t you agree? He had taken Steele’s words in Shibumi as meaningless banter, but now, they rang in his head, as a fundamental truth. Imre had always been his dangerous secret. A treasure that he had to hide just so it could survive.

Most people had to hide their ugliness, their shame. With him, the situation was inverted. He had to keep the beautiful things secret.

Or else risk finding them dead on the bathroom floor.

Ironic. A man like him compelled by an irrational longing to protect Steele, instead of exploiting her. A dangerous secret, indeed. Like her jewel-studded pendant earring bombs. Her taser necklace. It was an urge he would have to keep secret even from her.

He sensed very strongly that she would not welcome it.

The key rattled in the heavy metal door, jolting Imre out of his deep contemplation. He had been mentally walking through the rooms of the Uffizi Gallery, looking at all the pictures he could call to mind. Which was to say, all of them, though his favorites were the clearest.

The mental construct disintegrated. Waves of faintness and dread washed over him.

Another visit. It pleased Gabor Novak to check upon Imre’s progress, or degeneration, to put it more clearly. The man liked to prod and pry for weaknessess, to inflict all the psychological torment that he was able. He was fiendishly talented at it.

Imre’s defenses were limited to silence, but it was a poor defense. Already, he was cringing as if he was to be beaten or burned.

The metal door swung wide, clanging with an ear-bruising bang against the concrete blocks. Two large men walked in, one training an automatic pistol at Imre, the other carrying a folding chair.

Novak shuffled into the room and seated himself. Beaming.

Imre focused somewhere beyond the man’s shoulder, clasping and unclasping his hands and fighting the urge to sit upon them to hide his frightened fingers.

He’d told himself not to be afraid. He was dying anyway, no? Soon he would lose everything he had to lose. If some parts, like fingers, for instance, died sooner, what of it? The pain would soon be behind him.

His efforts were futile. He could not talk himself out of the fear.

Imre was grateful, at least, that he was not wearing his spectacles. Only one lens was still intact. The other had been shattered in the second beating. Having one corrected eye and the other blurred gave him a blinding headache. Since the last thing he needed was more pain from any quarter, he had given up on the glasses altogether, and hidden them under his mattress. Thus, he could not see the hideous details of Novak’s face, the feverish glow of those jaundiced, bulbous eyes, only a malevolent blur.

Although he smelled the stench of the man’s breath all too well.

“I have been thinking about you a great deal, Imre.” Novak had the air of a man conferring an honor. “I believe you and I have something in common.” The man’s voice was pleasant, chatty.

God forbid, Imre thought, dropping his gaze to his twitching fingers. He willed them to lie still, to not draw attention to themselves.

“I can see by your color, your thinness, that you are being consumed by some wasting disease,” Novak said. “Cancer?”

Surprise betrayed Imre into looking up and meeting Novak’s eyes.

He dropped his gaze just as quickly, but Novak chuckled, pleased.

“I thought so. Liver, stomach, brain? Not long for you now, is it? I can feel it on you, Imre. How ironic for Vajda, is it not? Working so valiantly to save the life of a dying man. How long did they give you?”

Imre tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He began to cough, and once he started, he could not stop.

“Not long, no?” Novak laughed again. “Three months? They like to say three months. It’s their standard phrase. That’s what they told me seven months ago, but I live on, see? Rotting from within, true, but here I am. The pleasure I will take in this woman’s death will grant me another month, at least. These punishments charge me like a battery. Would you like to participate? It might have the same effect upon you.”

Imre looked up at him once again. “No,” he said hoarsely.

Novak blinked and smiled, pleased to have dragged another response out of him. “Then you can be a spectator when the time comes. It won’t be long. Vajda works fast. He has always been efficient.”

Imre grasped the edge of the bed. Horror darkened his vision. Faintness threatened. He teetered, on the brink of that long, dark fall.

“Poor man,” Novak crooned. “I feel for you, being old and infirm myself. The pain is terrible, no?” He dug in his pocket and took out a vial of capsules. He rattled them, then opened the bottle and shook one of them out into his hand. “Powerful slow-release opiates. Shall I give you one? I won’t leave you the whole bottle, because you would gobble them all at once, naughty fellow. But I will give you this pill, if you would just explain one thing that continues to puzzle me.”

He waited for Imre to reach for the pill, to beg, to ask what the one thing that puzzled him was. But Imre could not have spoken if he wanted to. He was frozen. Fear had turned him into a pillar of salt.

Novak’s eyes squinted to bright, wrinkled slits. “I wish to know how your catamite remained so devoted to you. When I was young, a man made me his pet in exchange for food and shelter, just as you did for Vajda. Do you know what I did to him when I was older?”

Please. No. Do not tell me. Imre closed his eyes, summoned up a deafening mental rendition of Bach’s first Brandenburg Concerto to drown the words out.

Novak’s voice cut through the music like a hot knife through butter. “I removed his skin strip by strip,” he said, almost tenderly. “Perhaps I shall do that to the woman. Let us make a tally, Imre. From now on, for every question that you disdain to answer, I tear off a shred of her skin. While you watch.”

He laid the pill on the blanket that covered Imre’s cot and stood.

“Take it,” he said magnanimously. “I can be reasonable, if you are reasonable with me. I am alone, as you are. We could have such interesting conversations if you would lower yourself to speak to me. We are just two old men, after all, facing the same ultimate fate. I am so curious about you. Vajda got his culture and sophistication from you, no? In fact, thanks to you, he became too good to work for the likes of me.” He laughed and patted Imre’s shoulder.

Imre flinched.

“I do hope that Vajda succeeds in bringing the woman to me,” Novak mused. “I will conduct the punishment upon you, if I must, but to be quite truthful…torturing a wretched old man who is already wracked with pain is much less satisfying. Pain is so familiar to you already, you see. The experience falls a bit flat. But do not fear. I am sure my András could wring a lively response, even out of a dying wreck like you. He is so talented. You will see, you will see.”

Imre squeezed his eyes shut. Tears slipped down against his will.

One of Novak’s men opened the door, the other folded up the chair. They waited until the boss shuffled out.

“Enjoy the pill, Imre.” Novak’s taunting voice floated through the door as he retreated down the hall.

The door clanged shut, the lock rattled. He was alone again.

The rictus melted. A long, violent palsy of terror shook him.

When the worst of it had passed, he took the pill and slipped it under the mattress. He might well need it more later than he needed it now.

His fingers brushed against the metal frame of the broken eyeglasses.

He pulled them out. Then he loosened the largest unbroken shard of the shattered lens, and pried it carefully from the frame. The glasses were old, made of real glass, not plastic, and the shard was thick, a rough triangle that came to a jagged, sharp point. He pressed it to the pad of his thumb.

A dark drop of blood welled up.

Imre sat motionless for hours, staring fixedly at that shard of glass until the lights snapped off, leaving him in inky darkness.