Day fourteen…

Hope and hysteria bubble up inside me as I hurry to my room. I reach into my pocket and pull out the envelope Helenka slipped in there. Inside the envelope is a thumb drive.

I plop down in my chair, turn on my laptop, and plug in the thumb drive, and the screen goes black, asking for a password. I give it the password that Helenka gave me.

I don’t have much time. Maks will be monitoring my computer activity, and whatever I see on here, he’ll see too.

A grainy video starts playing, and I almost fall off my chair.

There’s a woman tied hand and foot to a bed, thrashing, screaming in agony. A man is grinning and pressing a hot branding iron to her stomach. He’s an older man with a big shock of white hair, and he looks vaguely familiar. I think he’s a famous Russian politician, I just don’t remember which one.

He presses the branding iron down again, and she makes sounds that aren’t even human. Wordless howls bubble up from her throat, and then her eyes roll up in her head, and mercifully she passes out. But she isn’t out for long. Someone hurries over and zaps her with a cattle prod, and she convulses and gives a strangled cry.

I back away from the computer. I can hear her screaming and pleading. I clap my hands over my ears.

Please, no, please kill me, no, I’m sorry, no….

I hear footsteps pounding down the hallway, and the door flies open. Sergei, Maks and Slavik storm in.

Maks grabs the laptop from me. “Give that back!” I cry.

He spits out a contemptuous laugh and looks at the screen. His face wrinkles in disgust at the scene being played out there. Sergei’s mouth twists and his brow furrows, but he stares straight at the screen without blinking.

Then Maks sets the laptop down. I can hear the man shouting insults at the woman he’s torturing, mocking her. What hell-pit spawned him? What makes a man into a demon?

“Hey! You! It’s demanding a password,” Maks says impatiently. I look. A box has popped up on the screen now, although the nightmare scene is still playing. The man pushes the branding iron down onto her breast, and she screams so hard she chokes, eyes bulging. “What is the password?’

Shaking, I repeat the password. He tries it – and the screams stop, and the screen goes blank.

“No!” I cry out. “That was the password, I know it was!”

Maks shakes his head, frantically pushing keys on the keyboard, but the computer isn’t responding at all now. The screen is black as night.

“This needs to be given to the police,” I say desperately. “Get the video back up! Fix it!”

“There’s a virus destroying the computer as we speak,” he says. “There would be nothing to give them but a fried hunk of metal.”

Anastasia and her damn computer security lessons. She’s thought of everything.

Slavik hears something on his earpiece radio. He nods to Sergei, and all the men hurry out of the room.

As Sergei is about to leave, he says, “Don’t try to leave this room, or I will end you. I’m not fucking around.” He locks the door behind him. I hurry over to the glass door that leads out to the garden and try it; it’s locked. It’s never been locked before.

I pick up a chair and swing it at the glass – and it bounces off. Shatterproof glass. Of course. Not only that, but I see a little red dot winking in one of the curly wooden rosettes that adorn the doorframe. A security device. Now Sergei will know I tried to break the glass.

I don’t care. Anastasia knows something about that woman being tortured, and I need answers. The woman is almost certainly dead, but this must be somehow related to Vilyat. She’s gathered information about him and given it to her lawyers to use as leverage. She surely must have enough to take him down, to expose him, and the man with the white hair, and probably others.

They’re only gone for about ten minutes before Sergei comes back to fetch me. “Your aunt wishes to speak to you,” he says, his voice wooden. The steel is still there in his eyes, and I shiver.

He walks away without looking back, and I hurry after him. His legs are much longer than mine and they eat up the distance with fast, furious strides. I practically have to run to keep up with him.

Anastasia, Helenka and Yuri are gathered in the foyer. The lawyers are surrounding them, shielding them, including the one whose nose was punched. He’s got a bloodied napkin wadded up and pressed against it.

I wave at Anastasia. “I need to talk to you privately, now,” I snap.

She frowns. “Willow, we’re all leaving together. Talk to me while we’re driving.”

“Nope. Give me two minutes.”

Anastasia hurries over to me with a hiss of exasperation. Sergei is standing behind me, burning the oxygen from the air with his rage.

“What is it?” Anastasia demands impatiently. “Come on, Willow, I want to get out of here. Sergei has agreed to let us all go and leave us alone completely.” Like he had a choice.

“Helenka gave me a thumb drive with a video of a man torturing a woman,” I say. “And now it’s disappeared from my computer.”

“She what?” Anastasia sucks in a gasp of dismay, and glances at Helenka, who is leaning to the side, peering out from behind one of the lawyers. Helenka shoots her a look of angry defiance. Anastasia leans in to me, lowering her voice. “She didn’t see the video, did she?”

“I’m pretty sure she didn’t. Since Sergei only let you and me have laptops, she probably didn’t get a chance to watch it. She told me she’s upset because you’re keeping secrets from her.”

“Of course I am!” she whispers. “If she knew everything her father did, it would destroy her.”

“She’s stronger than you think. Obviously this video needs to go to the police and Interpol. Along with everything else you’ve got on Vilyat. The video disappeared. How do I get it back? You must have copies?”

“I have the information stored where it’s safe. And you can’t have it.”

I look at her in horror. “Anastasia. The police need that information.”

She shakes her head. “No. I have forced Vilyat to agree to a divorce, and he’s going to let me terminate his parental rights. He’s also giving me two million dollars which will be in an offshore account by the end of the day, and paying my lawyers an additional two million. He knows that if I die or disappear, everything that I have on him will be made public. I need this information to hold over his head. If I take it to the police, he might be able to beat the rap. Or he might get out on bail, kidnap the kids, and flee the country.”

Anguish floods through me. “You… I mean… Where did you get all of this information?” Maybe I could retrace her steps. Find out where she got it, get it myself, destroy him…

She waves her hand in dismissal. The kids are staring at her, their eyes as big as saucers. She glances at them, then shakes her head impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve been gathering it for years, waiting for the right time. Vilyat got comfortable and sloppy around me, and let his guard down. I’ve always been good with computers, even before I started taking those online classes, I just didn’t let on before now.”

Sergei burns her with his contemptuous gaze. “You had the information hidden in the bathroom of your house. That’s why you went back there. You shoved it up your twat to smuggle it out. Along with the cell phone, I’d imagine. Hope it wasn’t too uncomfortable.”

“After all the things Vilyat has forced inside me, that was probably the least painful thing I’ve had up there,” Anastasia sneers at him.

I feel sick with disgust. There are women being tortured right now, and Anastasia won’t help them?

“Sergei. We’ve got to get that video back,” I plead.

He shakes his head. “We can’t. Maks is the best, and if he can’t get it back, it’s gone. It self-destructed when we couldn’t give it the second password. I will be taking care of Vilyat soon enough, and that’s my only concern.”

“No, it isn’t! That woman in the video, Sergei, you saw that!” I cry, tears burning my eyes. “If you don’t care about that, you aren’t human! And don’t give me that melodramatic bullcrap about how I already knew you’re a monster, blah blah blah. That is a completely innocent victim being tortured.”

There’s no pity in his gaze. How is that possible? “She’s dead by now. You must realize that.”

“But the men who did that to her aren’t, and they’ll do it again!”

“Well, Vilyat won’t. Because I’m going to fucking kill him.” His face is a pitiless mask.

Helenka and Yuri are watching us from the foyer, horrified, fascinated.

“Keep your voice down,” Anastasia snarls. “There is no need to drag them in to this.”

“Sergei,” I plead, ignoring her.

He won’t be moved. “The laptop is fried. If we go to the police, I’m sure your aunt will just lie about it. We’ve got nothing.”

I swing around to face my aunt, and I shove her, so hard she staggers. I’ve never laid my hands on her before. “Anastasia,” I rage. “You fucking bitch. The women out there, the current or future victims, those are someone’s children too. I swear to God, if you don’t go to the police, I will find a way to bring you down.”

Her face goes slack. Her eyes are blank empty pools of despair.

“How old am I?” she asks.

I shake my head in confusion.

“What the hell does that have to do with anything? In your thirties. Who cares?”

“I’m twenty-five.”

She’s trying to claim that she is three years older than me? Twenty-five with a thirteen-year-old daughter?

“No. You were eighteen when you married Vilyat.”

“No, I was not. I had just turned twelve. He came to the child whorehouse that he ran with your father, the one for little girls. There was also one for little boys, by the way. And I’d be willing to bet my left tit that Sergei was in one of those boy whorehouses at some point. He’s the right age; the math adds up. What else would make him hate our family so much?”

Sergei doesn’t move. I don’t think he’s breathing.

No. Fucking no.

Anastasia won’t stop. She keeps stabbing my heart and mind with her words. “When Vilyat came to the whorehouse, I knew he was one of the owners, and I made him notice me. I managed to convince him to take me, to marry me, by pretending to be a frightened little virgin. I wasn’t a virgin, of course, but I used fake blood. I’d been pimped out since I was nine. I ran away from my pimp, and after a few weeks of living on the street on my own, your father’s men caught me and dragging me screaming into a truck, and they beat me bloody for screaming, and took me to the whorehouse.”

I’m splintering into a thousand pieces.

Anastasia’s voice is coming from somewhere up in the stratosphere now, hollow and echoing. “Helenka and Yuri have choices. They can choose their outfit, their breakfast, their boyfriend or girlfriend, their career. When I was their age, I had choices too. Convince a pervert to rescue me by seducing him with my fake cherry, or stay there and let old men rape me until I died. I thought Vilyat was a good catch, back then. He was handsome. He wasn’t old like the others. God, was I sick of sucking wrinkled old cock.” She shudders in revulsion at the memory.

I feel so cold and alone, as if I’m floating away on an ice floe.

Could this be true? Was my father a child-raping pimp?

“How old was my mother when she married my father?” My voice is a husky whisper.

Twenty. Please say twenty. That is what she told me. It must be true. Let me keep something.

She sighs, rubbing her hand across her beautiful face. “Fifteen.”

I can hardly feel my own body, but I summon up the last of my strength from somewhere and look at her. Tears are pouring down my face now. “Anastasia, women like Helenka are being raped right now. Young women. Little girls. Go to the police. I am begging you.”

She scowls at me.

“The police force there is riddled with corruption, and the men who use Vilyat’s services are rich and powerful. How well do you think that would go?”

I can’t give up. I must fight for those women. If I were one of them, I’d want someone fighting for me. “I’ve been reading in the news about the Politsiya raiding brothels in the St. Petersburg area over the last couple of months. Shutting them down, saving the women, arresting lots of people. Including politicians and a judge. So not all the cops are corrupt.”

She shakes her head wildly, blonde locks flying. “Enough of them are. My first client? A cop. Do you know how much cop semen I swallowed before I turned ten years old?”

I taste vomit in my throat, but I won’t give up. “Obviously if Vilyat is so afraid of what you’ve got on him, you have useful information.”

She takes a couple of steps backward. Now her tone turns sharp and nasty; her eyes snap with resentment. “It’s easy for you to be self-righteous, Willow. Your mother kept you safe. Your father saved most of his abuse for his whores.” Another blow. “You’ve never experienced what I have. I pray you never will. But I am going to do whatever it takes to keep my own children safe, and frankly, everybody else can just fuck right off. You think those women would risk anything for me? The world is an ugly place, Willow, and people only look out for their own.”

My breakfast is rising in my throat. “Then go. I’m staying here. I don’t care what they do to me. And you? You’re dead to me.”

She turns and walks away, and Yuri start crying when they realize I’m not going too. Helenka throws a final glance back over her shoulder, her eyes haunted. The lawyers hustle them out the front door, and they’re gone from my life.

Jasha watches the door slam, and then tears his gaze away. I can see that he doesn’t want her to go. I don’t think he deliberately betrayed Sergei, but I think that he was slack in his surveillance of Anastasia because he was developing feelings for her. She probably knows that, and she doesn’t care about him any more than she cares about me, or those women who are dead or dying, or anyone besides her kids.

I look at Sergei with drowning eyes.

My life was a lie. My mother was a child bride. The blood of monsters runs through my veins.

His face is grim, impassive.

“Tell me about my family. Tell me what they did to you. Tell me!” I scream.

“I can’t.”

Rage flares inside me. I’ve never felt anything like it. It consumes me like a wildfire. I turn and run into the living room and grab one of the empty wine glasses, and smash the cup off it. I slash my arm with the stem, drawing a bright red line of pain through my skin.

Sergei and Jasha pound towards me. I swing to face them, waving the glass stem, wild eyed, and then I jam the stem up against the tender flesh under my chin.

“Fucking tell me,” I scream. “My only family that I care about is leaving here, and I will probably never see them again. They’re safe, so you know what? I have no reason to keep myself safe anymore. What are you going to threaten me with? Pain? I’ll cut my own throat, Sergei, I swear to God I will.”

Jasha lunges at me and snatches the glass away.

My bones turn liquid and I fall to the ground, screaming and crying. “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

Then I realize that I’m in Sergei’s arms, and my throat is raw. I’m staring up at the ceiling, heaving. How long have I been screaming?

“Please.” I’ve never begged like this before. “If you don’t tell me, it will kill me. Nothing you can tell me will be worse than what my mind will fill in. For the love of God, I’ve got to know. The pictures in my head right now – they’re killing me.”

Sergei bends down and oh so gently kisses my forehead. Right there in front of his men.

He strokes my hair, and his eyes plead with me. “Willow. You’re too good for this. Too pure. It will poison you.”

“It’s already too late.”

“Fucking Anastasia,” he curses furiously.

I choke on a sob. “Oh, for God’s sake, Sergei. Yes, what she’s doing is wrong, but she’s a feral animal protecting her young. If I’d been raised like her, I might do the same thing. If you don’t tell me…it will end myself, one way or another.”

He stares at me, his gaze tender and infinitely sad.

“If I’m going to tell you about it, we need to make some preparations,” he says. He glances up at his men.

Maks pulls me to my feet and sits me down on the sofa, while the rest of them leave. “Stay there,” he grows at me. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. I am weak with fear of what I’m about to find out.

He comes back with a first aid kit, a towel, and a bowl of water. He washes and bandages my arm, without looking at me.

Then he leads me through the mansion until we reach a room. A padded room.

Sergei is inside, and I stumble in, shaking, even though it’s not cold.

“Stand right by the door, and be ready to run,” he tells me. He glances at Maks and Jasha and Slavik. “Take her out if I get too…”

“Yes,” Jasha says with a grim nod.

“And don’t leave her alone for a minute. She’s on suicide watch. When she goes to the bathroom, the door stays open.”

“Of course.” Jasha’s voice is weary and resigned.

Sergei runs his fingers through his hair, and his eyes go vacant as he stares into space. Into his past.

“Let me tell you a story,” he says.