Page 29 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

I wish I’d kept that promise.

The light overhead is low and flickering, but it still hurts my eyes when I crack them open a tiny sliver. They feel gummed together, and it’s hard to separate my eyelids. I take a deep breath and decide to keep them closed for the time being.

Step one is to breathe and do a quick self-assessment.

My thoughts are fuzzy, like a radio tuned to a frequency in between stations. My memories are gauzy, too. All I can remember is showing up to Anastasia’s apartment and her tackling me at the door, then her dog licking me … after that is a distorted blur. Faces I don’t recognize, places I don’t remember arriving at or leaving from.

I resolve to come back to that. Physical things first.

I wiggle my toe. It’s bare, which is strange. I don’t think I’m in a bed, judging by how cold and hard the surface below me feels. But if I’m barefoot and not in a bed, where am I? Did I pass out somewhere strange? That’s not like me at all. Then again, nothing that happened last night is like me. The whole thing was a mistake from the beginning.

The arches of my feet ache just as badly as the rest of me. I’m pretty sure that’s from the high heels Anastasia forced upon me. I should’ve fought her harder on that front.

Moving up, I expect to be able to still feel the sticky, squelchy leather of the pants I was wearing.

But instead I feel … nothing.

Bare skin on metal.

Am I … naked?

Okay, cutting this blind exam short. I’m going to open my eyes and figure out what the hell is happening.

I draw in one more breath, then force myself to open my eyes and look down, no matter how bad my head throbs when I do.

But what I see is somehow both scarier and more reassuring than anything else thus far.

I’ve been stripped naked by … somebody? And cuffed by my wrists and ankles to a cold metal table. I’m stretched out, facing the stone ceiling, as if I’m about to be probed by an alien.

I’m scared because, duh, that’s a horrifying thing to wake up and discover.

I’m reassured because this is obviously just a nightmare.

Any second now, I’m going to wake up on the couch at Anastasia’s apartment, hungover as all hell but still giggling about the night before. We’ll go get breakfast together, maybe those matcha pancakes she loves so much from Café Chez, and I’ll consume enough coffee to stun an elephant, and then somehow I’ll drag myself back home to start putting my life back together while simultaneously swearing that never again will a single drop of alcohol pass my lips.

That makes me smile. This scene can’t be real, so why even worry about it?

A metallicshhhhink!sound prods into my ear like an ice pick. I’m suddenly aware of a deep rumble coming from the same direction. It sounds like breathing.

I turn my head, wincing as I do because every inch of my body hurts so freaking badly.

What I see makes my blood run cold.

It makes me realize, with the sudden vivid shock of a car crash, that this isn’t a dream. This is very, very real and I am in a great deal of trouble.

A man is sitting on a stool in the corner, leaning back against the stone walls. He is sharpening a knife. That explains the metallic noise. As I watch, he does it again, and again, slowly and carefully like he is preparing it for something. I make myself promise not to think about how sharp that knife is by now. He’s obviously done this before, quite a few times, judging by the calm and confident way he draws the edge of the blade along the whetstone and examines it for minute imperfections.

If I think about that knife, I’m going to hurl my guts up immediately. I might puke even I don’t think about the knife, though, because when I look at the man’s face, I realize that I recognize him. And just like that, the rest of last night’s memories come rushing back to me.

The hotel room, the drinking, the hookah, the Frat Stars, the almost-rape—those fuckers tried to rape me!Anastasia and Kyle leaving me on my own, the police pounding on the door, me opening it up, seeing their faces, that feeling that something was wrong, but not having any other choices. Going with them, but we took the back stairs, not the elevator—why did we do that? Why not go out the front door? What were we hiding from? The white van, unmarked, the doors swinging open, Anton and Matvei—oh shit oh shit oh shit, they’re dead, they’re freaking dead—and then the lead cop turning to me with that flash of a needle in his hand, that one quick motion, the feeling of the shadows in the night all swallowing me up.

Then nothing … until now.

I remember his face. The guy with the whetstone was the “cop” with the piercings and the tattoos peeking out from beneath the cuff of his uniform, the one with the hair that was way too shaggy and long for a real policeman.

I remember his eyes. Honey-colored, teasing, taunting, crazed. They’re the same eyes that are flashing in the lamplight as he passes that knife over the whetstone again, again, again. The scrape of metal on rock is grating on me, wearing my nerves thin as though he is flaying me open, even though he hasn’t moved from the stool he’s perched on, hasn’t even realized I’m awake yet.

I must make a noise—a groan of pain or a whimper of fear—because he turns his face up to me, lazy and laconic, like a lion at rest. A smile steals across his face. It’s not a nice smile. I can’t see much of the room we’re in because of how I’m chained to this table, but the air feels cold and damp and somehow threatening. Are we even still in LA? I haven’t felt air this cold since the day I first set foot on campus.

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