Page 62 of Lethal Alliance

“Don’t you have patrols to make?” Alexei stares at them with a cold, dead expression.

The men cast a wary look at the cameras overhead and step aside.

We shuffle back to the room, and I sink to the floor in the corner, my heart still thudding, careful not to look at Alexei.

That’s another rule I’ve learned.

The delicate balance of our strange existence here depends, I’ve concluded, on him remaining our guard. By the contemptuous way the rest of the men treat him, it’s clear they consider Alexei almost subhuman, but they also fear him. Even Vilnus, for all his bluster, listens when Alexei talks. He compensates for that by humiliating Alexei every chance he gets. He has made him our guard as some kind of punishment. So long as he believes Alexei hates his duty, and that we’re terrified of him, Alexei will remain our watchdog.

I shudder to think of what will happen if he is taken away and I’m left in the hands of someone like the guards we just encountered. I’ve seen the way they look at me.

I’ve learned to obey Alexei’s commands, to hang on to the lifeline of his quietly breathed instructions, the strange comfort of his lone eye staring fiercely into my own. That way the torture Vilnus forces him to inflict shrinks to a private space where there is only Alexei, me, and the cold blade pressed against my flesh. It becomes a strange, intensely intimate dance between just him and me, a place where we are entirely alone, the only two who truly understand what is happening.

I’ve never been more intimate with a man than a couple of kisses with schoolboys, both times at private parties in the homes of girlfriends. They were brief, fumbling encounters that left me with more questions than answers. I guess if I ever imagined having a real boyfriend, it might have been Matvei, who I danced with the night of the ball. He, at least, understands some of my world, if not the entirety of it. And he seemed genuinely nice, if a little bit naive.

Alexei isn’t anything like the boys from my school or the cultural center. He’s much older than me, to start with. I know Darya is twenty-seven, so he must be close to that, or in his early twenties at least, which makes him older than me by six to ten years.

And the fact that you’re even thinking about this is completely twisted.

The fact is that my lack of any real sexual experience hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it, even before I came here.

I think about sex more, I’ve always been convinced, than other girls my age.

Not that I’d know. I’ve never had friends I could talk to about that kind of thing. Girls my own age always seem impossibly young to me, like they live in a different world. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of the adult emotions in the room, the undercurrents other people my age seem to simply not notice.

The idea of having a boyfriend, someone like Matvei perhaps, seems to belong to that other world, the one of teenage sleepovers and dating. If I’m being honest, I can’t even imagine myself in that world.

My life isn’t like that. It never will be.

Any boyfriend I ever have will be carefully vetted by Roman, and my every move with him watched. If I had to take a guess, I’d say that if it is left up to Roman, my virginity is likely to be guarded, quite literally, at gunpoint until there’s a ring on my finger.

Maybe that’s why I’m having such a sick reaction to Alexei Petrovsky.

Because there’s nothing normal about the way I feel when he puts his hands on my body. Even if it is to cause me pain. And the more he does it, the more my body wants him to.

I know what Stockholm syndrome is. I did a project on it for media studies. The teacher showed us a photograph of the bank robber, Jan-Erik Olsson, who held up a Stockholm bank in 1973 and was so charismatic that his hostages wound up taking his side against the police. I’ve always thought the entire concept was crazy; how could you possibly like someone who has a gun to your head?

Only now that I’ve spent days with Alexei Petrovsky’s gun trained on me, and his knife slicing my flesh, I understand it far better than I ever could have imagined.

I joltawake in the middle of the night, startled by a noise I can’t place. I know it’s night because the harsh fluorescent lights in our room are dimmed some time after the dinner tray is removed and we’ve visited the bathroom. I hate not knowing what time it is exactly. The only way I can measure it is by how much I feel like I’ve slept. I also know that Alexei usually leaves us at some point during the night, replaced by Dima, the same man who drove the limousine the day we arrived, whom Alexei clearly trusts. It’s usually only for a short time, when Alexei showers and changes, and, I assume, tries to sleep for an hour or so. At first, I think that is what I’m hearing, just the change of guards.

Then I realize that Alexei and Dima are talking.

It’s a low, hushed whisper, barely audible, and they clearly think I’m asleep.

“How many?” Alexei asks.

“All of Dom’s crew. And Krasky’s. Your own crew, of course. At least sixty, all told.”

“It will go down sometime in the next few days. Tell them all to be ready, Dima. This place needs to be disarmed the minute Borovsky breaches it, or they’ll all be blown sky-high.”

“We know. We’ll be ready, Lex.”

“I don’t like the way Orlov is looking at Ofelia,” Alexei mutters. “He might come for her before it goes down.”

Oh, God. That’s what he meant about “whatever Orlov does before then.”

I shiver inside.

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