Page 45 of The Crimson Lily
“What the fuck…” Béatrice murmurs.
Mr. Zhang chuckles at our surprise. His mouth bleeds. He has one black eye more than me and two teeth missing.
“I see you brought Charlie’s Angels,” Yi Zhang remarks with a sneer.
I look back at Maksim with mouth agape. “What the hell is this?”
I wonder for a brief second how long Mr. Zhang has been in Maksim’s grasp. Did Maksim capture him at the artists’ reception? No, Yi’s clothes look far too neat for that to be possible.
Maksim leans against the concrete wall and points at his prisoner.
“Your boss doesn’t keep a dagger in a storage house,” he states, as if that fact is more than obvious. “After Alejandro’s intel, I thought I’d check with my best informant. Isn’t that right, Yi?”
Mr. Zhang spits blood on the floor. “You kidnapped me!” he accuses.
Maksim hushes him with a smirk. “The storage was a trap,” he declares. “William has a whole army staged there.”
Zhang is now looking straight at me. His bruised little eyes fume with disdain. “Your little Bratva dog figured it out.”
I approach him, slowly, despite Béatrice holding on to my arm. I look at him more closely, noticing additional traces around his neck. It looks like he was strangled with a rope or a chain, or maybe bare hands. Something in a dark corner of my mind whispers to me, rustling about how pretty these bruises are, but how they look so much better on me.
“Where is William?” I ask, my voice lower than usual.
Mr. Zhang laughs at me. I don’t like that. Before I can do anything, Maksim slips between him and me and gives him a harsh fist to the jaw.
Ouch. That must have hurt. Something in me enjoys that idea.
Yi spits another chunk of blood. “William is long gone! Your stupid dagger is long gone!”
What? My eyes snap wide open. The dagger is gone? I check for Maksim’s reaction; he just gives me a slow, confirming blink. William is gone. William—the man who tried to kill me before—is gone. And so is his stupid dagger of glass. All of this—this mission, the risk of putting my life in danger, the two deaths—for…nothing?
There is just one thing I have to know, and if Yi is to be my only gateway to information, I need to ask him now.
“What the fuck is my part in all this?” I roar.
Yi Zhang simply laughs. He laughs and laughs until he has to cough from the blood in his throat. His raucous cackle ends in a grin.
“Ah, I understand now,” he says, slurping his own blood and saliva. “You’re the bitch with amnesia!”
He shouldn’t have said that. Maksim hits him hard in the stomach. Mr. Zhang screams and yelps.
“You’re the bitch everyone keeps talking about,” he rasps. “Everyone up the chain.”
“What do you mean?” I demand an answer, ready with knives.
He laughs again and again. A twisted laugh that starts to get on my nerves. I want my Bratva dog to beat it out of him.
“Oh, this goes far deeper than you can possibly imagine,” Yi explains with a crazed smile. “You’re caught up in a war, and the Bratva dragged you with them!”
“What war?” Man, I am losing my patience. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The war the Syndicate is winning,” he replies, slowly. “Because the Syndicatealwayswins.”
The Syndicate? What the fuck is that? What the hell is this man talking about? I look to Maksim, to Béatrice, who are both as clueless as I am.
“What does all that have to do with me, with the dagger, and with William?” I ask Mr. Zhang the last question I’ll ever ask him.
“The dagger is a key, and you were the keyholder. Your job was to keep the dagger safe, and you did, and the Syndicate thanks you for that.”
