Sara

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The next morning, I’m back to fighting my feelings for my captor, but as the days go by, I’m aware that I’m losing the battle. He’s wearing me down, making me forget why I’m even trying to resist. He hasn’t said he loves me since we got here—probably because I threw the words in his face when we first arrived—but I can’t deny that in his own twisted way, Peter cares for me.

It’s there in the way he looks at me, the way he touches me and holds me. Even when our sex is rough, with the darker edge that still frightens me sometimes, he always soothes me in the aftermath, stroking and cuddling me until I feel safe and warm, cherished and adored. His power over me is absolute, and there’s something perversely comforting in that, something that taps into a part of me I never knew was there.

I wasn’t dissatisfied with my sex life with George. Over the years, we’d learned each other’s bodies and knew exactly what to do to get each other off. Before his drinking began, we had sex regularly, at least once or twice a week, and though we weren’t particularly adventurous after the first year, we played some sexy games on occasion, even used some toys. It was enough, I thought; it was as it should be. I never imagined the kind of sexual chemistry I now have with Peter, never thought a physical connection so strong could exist.

He fucks me so much I’m sore on most days, his appetite for me never fading. And I respond, though he often exhausts me with his sexual demands. I’ve never known someone who has so much energy. Over the past few weeks, Peter and his men have been training hard each day, doing hours of bodyweight exercises, running through the forest with rock-filled backpacks, and practicing hand-to-hand combat that looks as deadly as their weapons, yet he still finds the strength to go on hikes with me, swim when the weather allows, cook for everyone, and of course, have sex with me two or three times a day.

“Don’t you ever get tired?” I murmur as I lie draped over his chest one night, my heart still racing from the intensity of the orgasm I just had. Normally, I pass out right after our evening sex, but I napped this afternoon, so for once, I can stay awake a little longer.

“Tired?” He shifts underneath me, positioning my head more comfortably on his shoulder. His fingers tangle lazily in my hair, his heartbeat strong and steady against my ear. “Of what?”

“Just physically tired,” I explain. “You seem inexhaustible sometimes, like a cyborg of some kind. Don’t you ever want to just laze around and do nothing? Or slack off and not train with the guys one day?”

“I’m lazing around right now,” he points out with amusement. “And I have to train; otherwise, we run the risk of getting killed.”

I bury my nose against his neck, breathing in his warm, clean scent. Nap or not, I’m getting drowsy, the light tugging of his fingers in my hair inducing a state of near-hypnotic relaxation. Suppressing a yawn, I mumble against his neck, “That’s not what I meant. Don’t you ever just get tired? Like a normal human being? You know, limbs heavy, muscles sore, don’t want to move?”

His powerful chest heaves with a laugh. “Of course I do. I just have a higher pain tolerance than most. I wouldn’t have survived to adulthood otherwise.”

He says it lightly, his tone still amused, but my Peter revelation radar goes on high alert. He rarely talks about his youth—almost never, in fact—so when I do get a chance to learn something new, I jump on it, even though what I learn horrifies me most of the time.

“What was it like?” I ask, my drowsiness gone. Lifting my head off his shoulder, I meet his gaze in the dim light coming from the bedside lamp. “That juvenile prison camp you were sent to, I mean.”

Peter’s face tightens, all traces of amusement disappearing as he shifts me off his chest, turning to lie on his side facing me. “Like hell,” he answers bluntly as I pull a pillow under my head. “A cold, dirty hell, populated by demons in human form. Pretty much exactly as you’d imagine a labor camp in Siberia to be.”

I shudder, remembering a book I once read about prison camps during Soviet times, and reach for a blanket to ward off the chill spreading over my skin. “Was it like a gulag?”

“Not like.” A grim smile cuts across his face. “It was a gulag at one point, used to punish, and quietly kill off, dissidents and other undesirables. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the place wasn’t utilized for some time, but then someone got the bright idea to repurpose the facilities into a correction camp for juvenile delinquents. And that’s how Camp Larko was born.”

I fight the urge to look away from the darkness in his eyes. “How long were you there?”

“Until I was seventeen. So almost six years.”

Six years starting from when he was just a child—nearly all of his teenage years. My hand squeezes into a fist under the blanket, my nails cutting into my palm. “Why did they send you there? Was there no other alternative?”

His mouth twists bitterly. “Not in Russia. Not for an orphan criminal like me.”

“But you were not even twelve.” I can’t fathom that someone would be so cruel as to send a child to the frozen hell I read about in that book. “What about school? What about—”

“Oh, they taught us.” His teeth flash in another mirthless smile. “We had exactly two hours of instruction each day. The other fourteen, though, were reserved for work—that’s what we were there for, after all.”

Fourteen hours? For someone who was still a child? Swallowing the lump forming in my throat, I force myself to ask, “What kind of work?”

“Mining, mostly. Also road repair and laying pipes. Some construction work too, but that was only around our camp, to fix the Soviet-era shit that was crumbling all around us.”

I stare at him, not knowing what to say. I knew he hadn’t had an easy life, of course, but somehow I never imagined this, never realized that most of his formative years—a time when other boys his age played video games and challenged their parents on curfew—were spent doing hard labor under hellish conditions.

Trying to ignore the ache banding my ribcage, I reach out from under the blanket and brush my fingers over the tattoos covering his left arm and shoulder. “Is that where you got these?”

Peter glances down, as if just now recalling the ink that’s there. “Most of them, yes,” he says, folding his other arm under his head. “A couple I got later on, when I joined my unit.”

“What do they all mean?” I ask softly, tracing the intricate designs with my fingers. The one on his shoulder resembles a bird’s wing and a few more look like demonic skulls, but the rest are just abstract lines and shapes.

Peter’s gaze turns opaque. “Nothing. It was something to do, that’s all.”

“That’s a lot of ink to do on a whim.”

He’s silent for a few seconds. Then he says quietly, “I had a friend at that camp. Andrey. He was into this stuff—a real artist, you know. After we were there for a couple of years, he ran out of space on his own skin, so I let him practice on me. Every time something happened to us, good or bad, he wanted to commemorate it with a tattoo, and because he was so good, I gave him free reign with the designs.”

“Oh.” Intrigued, I rise onto my elbow. “What happened to that friend?”

“He died.” Peter says it casually, as though it doesn’t matter, but I hear the dark echo of grief underneath, the rage that passage of time wasn’t able to cool. Whatever happened to his friend, it had been bad enough to leave a scar… bad enough that remembering it now still has the power to hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, but Peter doesn’t respond. Instead, he reaches over to turn off the light, then pulls me against him in our usual sleeping position.

I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, trying to calm down enough to fall asleep, but it’s impossible. Even the heat of Peter’s large body can’t chase away the lingering chill from his revelations. My mind buzzes like a ravaged beehive, the questions refusing to leave me alone. There’s so much I still don’t know about the man who holds me every night, so many things I don’t understand about his past. Everything about his life in Russia is foreign to me, as strange and mysterious as if he’d come from another planet.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. Wriggling out of Peter’s hold, I turn on the bedside lamp and turn over onto my side to face him. As I suspected, he’s not sleeping either, his silver gaze shadowed with memories as his eyes meet mine.

“You said you were recruited from that place straight into your unit,” I say, propping myself up on my elbow again. “Why? Do they normally do that in Russia?”

He gazes at me silently, then turns over onto his back, lacing his hands under his head as he stares at the ceiling. “No,” he says after a moment. “They usually recruit through the army. But in this case, they needed someone with a specific psychological profile.”

I sit up, holding the blanket against my chest. “What kind of profile?”

His eyes cut over to meet my gaze. “No inconvenient family ties or attachments, no scruples, and only minimal conscience. But also young enough to be trained and molded into what they needed.”

“Which was what?” I ask, though I suspect I already know.

Peter sits up, his expression carefully neutral as he leans against the headboard. “A weapon,” he answers. “Someone who wouldn’t balk at anything. You see, the insurgents were getting more ruthless, more fanatical with every year. The bombing of the subway in Moscow was the last straw. The Russian government realized they couldn’t limit themselves to civilized, UN-approved methods of combatting terrorism; they had to meet them on their level, fight them using every tool available. So they formed this off-the-books Spetsnaz unit, and when they couldn’t find enough trained soldiers to fit the desired profile, they decided to get creative and look elsewhere.”

“In Camp Larko,” I say, and Peter nods, his eyes like polished steel.

“Those of us who lasted there for any extended period of time tended to be strong, able to handle long hours of physical exertion under extreme conditions. Hunger, thirst, cold—we could endure it all. And as you can imagine, many of us fit the profile they were looking for.”

A shiver dances over my skin, making me draw the blanket tighter around myself. “So why did they choose you over the others?” I ask, fighting to keep my tone steady.

His lips quirk in a dark smile. “Because right before they arrived, I killed a guard,” he says softly. “I staked him out in the snow and made him admit his crimes before I gutted him like a rabbit in front of the entire camp. My methods were… Well, let’s just say it was exactly what they were looking for. So instead of getting punished for the guard’s death, I got a new career, one that fit both my inclinations and my skillset.”

My palms grow slippery where I’m holding the blanket. “What were the guard’s crimes?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know.

The darkness in Peter’s gaze deepens, and for a moment, I’m afraid I went too far, brought up too many bad memories. But then he leans back against the headboard and says evenly, “He liked to boil boys alive.”

I stop breathing as bile surges up my throat. “What?” I gasp out when I’m able to speak.

“In the showers, we had either ice-cold or scalding water, nothing in between,” Peter says, his face tightening as his gaze grows distant. “The pipes would constantly malfunction, so we’d use buckets to mix the water before washing. Some guards, though, would punish us by making us stand under the water as it was, ice cold for minor infractions, scalding when we really misbehaved. One guard, in particular, liked the hot water remedy. He got off on it, I think. The others would just do it for a few seconds at a time, maybe half a minute tops, giving the boys superficial burns. But this guard, he’d push it. A minute, two, three, five… By the time Andrey landed on his shit list, he’d killed two fifteen-year-olds by boiling the meat off their bones.”

I taste vomit in my throat. “Andrey… your friend Andrey?” I whisper through numb lips.

“Yes.” Peter’s chiseled face takes on an almost demonic look of fury. “Andrey, who should’ve never been in that shit hole in the first place. My friend, who refused to let that prick fuck him and died in agony instead.”

“Oh God, Peter…” I press my trembling fist to my mouth, then reach for his hand, feeling his fingers twitch with barely suppressed rage as he fights to control himself. “I’m so, so sorry.”

He grips my hand like a lifeline and closes his eyes, breathing in deeply. When he opens them again, his expression is calm, but I now know the depth of the pain and fury that lurk beneath that controlled mask.

I was wrong to think that his family’s deaths made him into a monster. He was one long before Daryevo, the horrors he’d encountered in his lifelong struggle for survival stripping away whatever capacity for goodness he might’ve once possessed. His early victims were no angels, but once he went down the dark path of vengeance, he became like them, hurting innocent and guilty alike.

Carefully extricating my fingers from his grip, I move back to the middle of the bed. “What about that headmaster?” I ask, holding my captor’s gaze. I’m already sick to my stomach, but I have to know how deep the damage goes. “What did he do to make you kill him?”

Peter smiles grimly. “You haven’t had enough for tonight? No? All right, if you must know, he liked little boys. The younger, the better. I was lucky, because at eleven, I was already big, almost like a teenager. Way too old for him when he started at the orphanage. But the little ones… I would lie there at night and hear them scream and cry in their rooms when he came to them. Each night, I’d die a little bit inside, because there was nothing I could do, nobody I could tell who’d listen. The teachers, the police—they either didn’t care or didn’t dare make waves. This motherfucker was connected, you see; he was from some important family. So nobody did anything, and then a new boy was brought in, all of two years old. When I heard him go to the child, I couldn’t take it anymore. I took one of the kitchen knives, crept up behind him, and while he was busy assaulting the kid, I slit his throat.”

Of course. My dark knight taking vengeance again. I close my eyes against the hot sting of tears, my heart breaking for both Peter and the little boy. I suspected it was something like that, only I was afraid it was Peter himself who’d been the victim. Not that it means he hadn’t been. Opening my eyes, I meet his steely gaze. “What about you?” I ask unsteadily. “Were you ever…?”

“No.” His mouth flattens. “At least not as far as I know. I was always very good at defending myself, even when I was little. I don’t recall much before age three, though, so I suppose it’s possible—I was a pretty kid, according to old pictures. In any case, by the time I was in kindergarten, I knew how to use my fists, teeth, rocks… any kind of weapon I could get my hands on. The one fucker who tried something with me when I was five got his finger bitten off, and after that, I was generally left alone.”

I stare at him, relief battling with agonizing pity. And anger. I feel so much anger at the cruelty of the world that shaped him into the dark, tormented man he is today, into this ruthless, amoral killer who, despite everything, craves love and family. Did he find respite from his demons when he had Tamila and his little boy? Is that why he accepted her pregnancy so easily, becoming a husband and father when he could’ve simply walked away? Did they give him back pieces of his soul, only to rip it all away with their brutal deaths?

If so, it’s no wonder that their loss sent him spinning—and that vengeance was his default response.

At my long silence, Peter’s face tightens further; then a mocking smile curls his lips. “Too much for you, ptichka? I suppose I should’ve come up with some rosy story, one filled with rainbows, puppies, and piñatas.”

“No, I just—” I stop, my throat swollen with emotions. Gathering my composure, I try again. “I just wish someone had been there for you, the way you were for that little boy.”

He blinks slowly and pushes away from the headboard. “I just told you—I was fine. I could always take care of myself.”

“I know you could,” I whisper as he reaches for me, pulling me down to lie beside him as he stretches out on the bed and turns off the light. “But you shouldn’t have had to, Peter. No child should’ve had to.”

He doesn’t reply, but I know he heard me, because the arm looping around my ribcage tightens, drawing me closer as we lie together in the darkness, feeling each other’s warmth and deriving comfort from the steady beating of our hearts.