Day zero…

Columbus, Ohio, July 2017

It’s 10:30 a.m. and I stifle a yawn as I head to my lunch shift at the Cuppa Joe diner. I’ve already been awake for five hours.

My aunt and my cousins were still sleeping when I woke up and spent two hours on the dark web, visiting websites that teach me how to hack, then practicing my newly acquired skills. I do that every day. I’m trying to find the answer to an urgent question. What is Operation Salvat?

When I finished websurfing at 7:30 a.m., I woke up my aunt Anastasia and my cousins Helenka and Yuri.

After a quick breakfast, we peeked through the curtains of our apartment before we left, scanning for anyone or anything that didn’t belong there. Only when we were sure that we were clear did we leave the apartment.

Of course, we checked around us continuously as we walked to the private gym where we get free self-defense lessons, courtesy of a local women’s group. And we did the same when we walked back to the apartment building.

We’ve only been training for a couple of months now, ever since we went on the run from Sergei, and I wouldn’t say we’re ninja-level, or even badass-level, or, okay, the least bit scary. But we’ve learned some cool tricks that would at least give us a chance if Sergei or my Uncle Vilyat or any of the other shady figures from our past came after us.

I relax a little as I approach the diner. The sidewalks are crowded in the downtown district during the day. Crowds are anonymous. They swallow me up and I’m just one cell in a multi-celled organism. Invisible, indistinguishable.

Cuppa Joe has a green awning and a big plate glass window that turns into a bright mirror during the day. It’s a movie screen reflecting back the comfortingly dull daily rituals of downtown life. Right now, like clockwork, office buildings spit out streams of cubicle drones on their lunch break, and they flow towards the strip of road where all the restaurants huddle together.

I stare at the mirror-window as I stride up, looking for my reflection. As usual, it takes a couple of seconds before I can pick myself out of the crowd.

But then, I’m not really me anymore.

Three months ago, at the beginning of April, I was shoved into the back of Sergei Volkov’s limousine. He changed me, broke me, leaving me to put myself back together again. Broken things are never the same after you glue them back together, though. I am reinvented and made new, from the inside out.

Now I wear glasses, although I have perfect vision and the plastic lenses are clear. I slashed my long dishwater-blonde hair into a chin-length wavy bob and dyed it brown. I used to wear very little makeup; here I paint and cake it on. Red lipstick, rosy blush, cat-eye eyeliner. Anything to blur the resemblance of my new self, Sarah Maynard, to my old self, Willow Toporov.

They say change is good. But this is disguise, not change. My aunt, my cousins, me…we’re not much freer now than we were back in California, living under my Uncle Vilyat’s suffocating, abusive regime. Every decision we make, from what we look like to our daily schedule, is calculated to erase our old selves.

Then again, Aunt Anastasia is no longer having her bones broken and her face tenderized by the man who swore to love, honor and cherish her. Nine-year-old Yuri has stopped flinching every time someone raises their voice or makes a sudden movement. Thirteen-year-old Helenka won’t be married off to a gross old mob boss for political advantage in a few years.

I’m not sure why I’m in such a dark mood right now. Everything is going well. Two months ago, a sympathetic hotel clerk gave us a few hundred bucks of her hard-earned money so we could make it all the way to Columbus. Since then, I’ve managed to find passable fake identification for my aunt and cousins, and the kids can start school in September. Anastasia’s been weaned off prescription drugs, and she’s on the computer all day long taking online classes. She’s working towards a certificate in computer security. She and I have hacking contests sometimes. She’s at least as good as me.

There hasn’t been a single sign of trouble, but I realize as I walk into Cuppa Joe that I’m unusually jumpy today.

The familiar din pounds my ears, a mixture of conversation and music pumping from the jukebox.

I stand by the door and do a quick visual sweep of the room. Nothing jumps out at me.

Why is the hair standing up on the back of my neck?

There’s already a decent mid-morning crowd as I punch my timecard and go into the kitchen to memorize the day’s specials. I scan the customers again through the window; lots of regulars, nothing seems out of place.

But I remember what one of our self-defense instructors tells us all the time. Trust your gut.

My gut is tying itself in knots.

I’m still a few minutes early. I duck into the break room, head to my locker, and grab my apron and order pad.

After I’ve tied on my apron and stuffed my pad and pens in the pockets, as well as some bills and quarters so I can make change, I call my aunt.

“Is everything all right?” I ask her.

“Of course.” Her voice is wary. “Why wouldn’t it be? Has something happened?”

I don’t want to freak her out, but I want her to be on the lookout for…I don’t know what.

“I don’t know. I just have a weird feeling. Can you make sure that Helenka and Yuri are okay?”

“Sure.”

A minute goes by. I hear her walking around the apartment, and then her voice is back, panicked. “Helenka is gone.”

Fear blossoms inside me, and the stuffy room suddenly feels like a suffocating trap.

Think. Don’t panic. Panicking never solved anything.

“What about the alarm?” I demand. We have an alarm system with sensors on every door, every window.

“Hold on, hold on…” I hear her hurrying down the hallway. “It’s still enabled. Someone entered Helenka’s code five minutes ago. I was in the shower; I didn’t hear. And Yuri was playing a video game with the headphones on.”

That is against protocol. If she was in the shower, both Yuri and Helenka should have been on the alert, in case someone started kicking in a door or window.

Where is Helenka right now? Is she being raped? Cut to pieces?

“Damn it, Anastasia, how many times do we have to go over this?” I snap. “We are never safe. We can never relax.”

I can hear Yuri crying in the background. He comes right up to the phone. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s all my fault!”

Once upon a time, his loving, supportive cousin Willow Toporov would have comforted him. But now I’m Sarah Maynard, and Sarah is a mean, paranoid bitch focused on survival, not hugs and kisses.

“Yes, it is your fault, you and your mother, because you know what to do and you chose not to! Check her cell phone location. I’ll do the same.”

We all have cell phones with tracking enabled on them.

“I’ll hang up and call you back.” Anastasia’s voice is rising in terror. She’s about to completely lose it. If I were there, I’d slap her so hard her ears would ring. We don’t have the luxury of getting hysterical. After all our training for every possible emergency, this is how easily she falls apart?

We both hang up. My hands are shaking as I stab the screen on the phone with my fingers. I am desperately searching for the “find my phone” app. Damn it, I’m no better than Anastasia. Our first real emergency, and I’m losing it too. Tears burn in my eyes, and I blink frantically. It takes me three tries to get the app working.

Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead…

I enter Helenka’s location into the cell phone, and at the same time, my phone rings. Helenka is calling me.

Relief flows over me like a tidal wave, quickly followed by a prickly red anger.

“What the hell?” I snap into the phone.

“I just went to get the mail,” Helenka says miserably. “I just wanted to get out of the house for a minute. I had my phone with me the whole time. I checked around me. I practiced my situational awareness.”

“You are not allowed to leave the house without your mother, and you know that. You left without even telling her or Yuri? You both screwed up, big time. Why don’t you just hang a big ‘kidnap me’ sign around your neck if you’re so eager to be taken?”

“I am not eager to be taken.” Now she’s crying.

“Then act like you want to live another day. We will discuss this when I get home.” My heart rate starts to slow back down again.

“I hate that our life is like this! I hate it, Willow!” she sobs.

I stifle a groan. “Helenka, I hate it too. But we know what our choices are. We live like this, or you go back to your father, and he locks you away for a few years, then marries you off to some fat old pig for a lifetime of misery. And if he catches your mother, he’ll kill her. And beat Yuri senseless. Those are our choices. We hide, or we get caught and our life is a living hell. Are we clear?”

“Yes. We’re clear.” Her voice is sad and resigned, and it cuts into me. Helenka is lonely and bored and isolated, and I just ripped her to shreds for wanting the tiniest bit of freedom.

I hang up before I give in to my impulse to apologize to her. She can’t think it’s okay to let down her barriers, ever, not even for a single second.

I head into the restaurant and start taking orders.

An hour goes by in a blur. I’m so rattled that I’m checking out everyone and everything, looking at them through the dark lens of suspicion.

I recognize a handsome guy who’s been in before. Phillip. A lawyer. He’s wearing a nice suit, and he smells good. He smiles at me with perfect white teeth.

“Say…Sarah, is it?”

“Yes.”

“I was just wondering, do you ever have any free time after work?”

I instantly go into what I call “polite retreat” mode. “That is very sweet of you, but I’ve got a boyfriend.”

Disappointment crinkles around his eyes, and he nods, sounding a little sad. “He’s a lucky man.”

I hurry off to take orders from another table. Maybe he was genuinely a nice guy. Maybe he could have been ‘the one’.

Then again, I doubt it. Being with Sergei did things to me.

When he was being a bastard, he was the meanest, most loathsome son of a bitch I’ve ever met. And I grew up in a family of mobsters. But when he touched me…the sex was something I’ve never experienced before. Terrifying and exhilarating, like the swoop of a roller coaster ride. Insanely orgasmic. I still crave it, with a hunger that can never be slaked. I can’t imagine another man’s hands on me.

Unfortunately, Sergei is a stone-cold psychopath. Not only that, I broke an agreement that I’d made with him; I was supposed to stay with him for thirty days, and I left on the twenty-seventh. When I tried to go back, he threatened me.

Even if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. Not that it matters; I don’t want to go back – I think.

Sergei has split me in two. My brain tells me I never want to see him again, but my body wants to fly back into his arms. I feel like a junkie going through withdrawal; when I lie in bed, I literally ache for him. He’s my beautiful, savage fever dream, he’s a phantom who haunts my waking and sleeping moments.

Unwelcome images flash through my brain as I move from one table to the next on autopilot.

Me, tied down, legs spread wide, vulnerable and exposed. Sergei’s tongue stroking me until I’m weeping and begging for release. His hard hand smacking on my ass while his finger strokes the tiny pink pearl between my legs. I force the thoughts from my head; they make me ache with longing, and it disgusts me. Why don't I have more self-respect? Why does my heart pound faster for a man who insulted and rejected me?

As I’m heading to the cook’s window to put in my orders, the day manager, Harold, comes over to me. He’s short and fat and always has an apologetic look on his face when he asks for anything. He’s about as scary as a teddy bear with the stuffing leaking out, but in my heightened state of paranoia, I feel like he looks shifty and out of sorts.

“Hey, Sarah, how you doing today?”

I smile and nod my head, like one of those bobblehead toys that people put on their dashboards. “Just great, thanks.”

“Do you mind taking out the trash?”

I frown in puzzlement. Odd request. That’s the busboy’s job, and it’s really busy right now. “I’ve got to put in two orders.”

He snatches my order pad from my hand. “I’ll do it. Please take out the trash.”

I see his eyes shuttle to the side, and I know. Damn it. I’m not being paranoid; I’m right.

Somebody’s gotten to him.

My heart pounds faster.

I refuse to budge. “Why aren’t you asking the busboy to do it?”

A frown creases Harold’s forehead. He huffs out an exasperated sigh. “He’s busy.”

I glance at the busboy. He’s flirting with one of the waitresses. “No he isn’t.”

“Look, do your job or get fired.” His voice is unnaturally high. And he never speaks to me like this.

Anger floods through me. He’s trying to send me out into the back alley; I can just imagine what fun things are waiting for me.

We were safe. We were just starting to rebuild our lives. Why the hell can’t people just leave us alone?

“How much?” I snapped.

His eyes widen, and he takes a step back.

I move towards him. “How much money did it cost to sell me out, asshole?” I grind the words out. I’m taking off my apron as we speak. My job is done here. I’m unemployed, just like that.

He takes another step backwards, eyes like saucers. I’ve backed him against a wall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

I keep staring at him, and he goes pale. He’s almost crying. “Please. He said he’d cut up my wife and baby girl. He knows their names. He knows where we live.”

Now would that be Sergei, or my uncle Vilyat, or my Uncle Edik? Because it could be literally anyone from my former social circle.

How messed up is my life?

I head for the front door. I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and Harold tries to grab it from me.

“Get your hands off me!” I shriek at the top of my lungs. The din dies down. People are staring at us.

“Get back here! You…you stole my phone!” he tries to bluster.

“This phone?” I wave it over my head. It’s pink and has flowers on it.

He gives up and hurries towards the back door.

I quickly dial Anastasia.

“We’re burned,” I say. “I don’t know who it is. Grab your go-bags. You guys meet me at the location, you know when. Remember plan B. And if I don’t show, you run, and you keep running.” I don’t say specifics in case somehow someone has hacked into our phones.

We also have a plan C, D, E… I drill our plans into their skulls every night.

“Willow! No!” Anastasia cries. “We won’t leave without you.”

“I did all of this for you and the kids,” I insist. “Especially the kids. As long as you guys are safe, everything will be all right. If you’re taken, this was all for nothing.”

“I can’t do this myself.” Her voice is shaking with terror. Anastasia’s never been a strong woman. She’s nine years older than me, but I’m the one who runs the show, the one who makes all the decisions. I’ve tried to get her to be more independent, but every time I insist that she make a decision about anything, she has panic attacks and her chest starts heaving, and it freaks out the kids.

“Fucking man up, Anastasia. You will pack up and run for it, unless you want Helenka to be married to a sixty-year-old who will pump her full of babies,” I snap. “Unless you want Vilyat to beat your son until he breaks him.”

I’m playing dirty pool.

That’s what I am now. Dirty.

She’s crying as I hang up.

I elbow my way through a crowd of customers lining up to be seated, and make it out of the front door. I step out into the bright, hot daylight, and there he is. His eyes are trained on me like lasers, powered by hate and vengeance.

This is bad. This is worse than bad. “Hello,” I say, my voice steady, as my insides turn to water. Run, Anastasia, run. And never look back. “Have you come to kill me?”