Page 18 of Vasily the Hammer

I do not have one of these bags. Do I need one? Did I know Vasily had one before my brain deleted itself?

Also, I find several more guns stashed around. And knives. Brass knuckles.

My husband was definitely a thug at some point.

I’m going a bit stir-crazy, I admit to myself, and when I discover I can’t turn the TV on— I’m now remembering Vasily used hisphone for it yesterday— I decide I will absolutely die if I don’t get out of this condo. I have no idea where I am, other than Los Angeles, but that’s a vague word in my brain. But I do know there are some shops below us. Based on my closet, I do like shopping.

And I may not have a credit card, which is something else I have to ask Vasily about, but I did just see stacks of twenties and hundreds. The twenties are less suspicious, so I grab five of them— and then five more because I get this feeling that LA is expensive— shove my feet into sandals that feel a size too big, and walk out the front door.

I’m expecting a hallway, some neighbors, maybe some signs. Instead, there’s a single door at the end of a hallway no more than ten feet away, clearly leading to a stairwell, and an elevator in front of me. It opens immediately when I hit the button, and when I step inside, I’m unsettled by the fact that there are only two options on it, one to Floor 37 and the other to the basement.

Yeah, I really don’t like that. And I’m not walking down a billion stairs, so I resign myself to my captivity and return to the condo.

The door’s locked.

Crud.

With a sigh, I go back to the elevator and select the 37th floor. I know if I go to the basement, I can just go up the stairs to the ground floor. It’s possible itisthe ground floor, we’re just on uneven ground and so they put the parking deck on the half-underground level. But I get bad juju from the elevator, so I’d rather the shorter ride.

On the 37th floor, the elevator opens directly into an office. Huh.

It’s gigantic, way too much space. Like, only one corner of it looks used at all, and then the rest of it has a bit of filler furniture. The wall of windows has a couple of chairs with a table in between them, but they look awkward to sit in. And since it’s ninety degreesoff from our apartment and faces another building just as tall as this one, I don’t know why Vasily would want to sit here. There’s a bar on one wall that looks too perfectly arranged to get frequently used. There are bookshelves, but none of the books are in English. There’s an absolutely gigantic Turkish rug, heavily accented in deep reds, that takes up most of the floor and lends the room its only color. And then there’s Vasily’s large but unassuming desk.

Notably, there’s no Vasily at it.

I assume he does spend a lot of time here, though, and since I can’t learn anything about myself, I figure I may as well learn more about him.

More pills, and they look authentic enough, but they’re not in orange pill bottles. Someone went out of their way to transfer them into black ceramic jars so as to not disturb the aesthetic. Did Vasily do that? Did I?

There’s a syringe in the drawer, too, which freaks me out and has me seriously concerned that my husband not only has medical issues but also a drug problem, but then I find more syringes in a mini fridge. This time, the box they’re in clearly states that it’s for migraines.

Oh, poor thing. Migraines are awful, or so my brain insists without any evidence to back it up.

I find two cell phones, both charged and turned on. Locked, of course, and cleared of messages. I try my face and fingerprint on both, but neither phone unlocks. Bummer. Also, why does he keep so many phones? I don’t like that.

I don’t like the seven additional guns I find either. It makes me queasy to hold them, so I doubt I’m a gun person.

More confusing, the guns all have this quality about them I can only describe as Frankensteined. They don’t match. They’rehalf metal, half plastic, like a real gun and a kids’ toy were hobbled together, like the gun in Vasily’s bug-out bag. I get this urge to test one to see if it works, and that intrusive thought is enough to have me setting them all on the desk in a row and then pushing them as far as I can, to the very edge of the desk, before sitting back down in his chair, where I can’t reach them.

I go into the narrow drawer that runs below the top of the desk, a tray I’d expect to be filled with pens and note pads and paperclips, although those all feel like office supplies of a bygone era. So it comes as no surprise that it’s mostly empty.

Except for a box of condoms, and that makes my heart sink.

We’re married. I have to assume we’ve been married a long time. I spent some time examining that tattoo as best as I could in the mirror; I know enough about tattoos to know that the blurring of the edges is a sign of age. So why does he have condoms in his office? Wouldn’t we be past the phase of fooling around in his office?

I know our marriage isn’t perfect. Literally nothing that’s happened since he picked me up— heck, nothing since I woke up in a kitted-out box truck on the wrong side of the country with amnesia— has made me think our marriage is going great. And the fact that he hasn’t made any time for me or even answered basic questions is enough for me to worry that our marriage is nothing more than a piece of paper. But this?

This hurts.

And suddenly, I’m not feeling the motivation to go out in the world. Suddenly, the only thing I want to do is confront my husband.

Chapter 8

Vasily

I tell myselfnot to lose my shit when I walk into the apartment and Ana is gone but my bug-out bag is on my bed, opened, the money on display. She hasn’t taken all of it, but she’s taken some, and I don’t know where she’s gone.

This is straight out of her playbook. I bet if I get the security feed from the hallway, I’ll see her taking two steps out, changing her mind, and attempting to go back in, only to realize the door is locked. But when I call down to security to see if they have footage of which direction she went, they say she never left.

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