72. Bronwyn

72

brONWYN

I gave one last tug on the handcuffs and slumped, exhausted and defeated. I’d tried both breaking the chain and wrenching the pipe off the wall but all I had to show for it was scraped, bleeding wrists. I could feel Radimir looking for me upstairs in the club. He was going to wander right into Spartak’s posse and get killed and it was all because of me, letting myself get kidnapped like an idiot. All I need is a freakin’ tool or something. If only I wasn’t alone… I let out a long string of curses and kicked the pipe. It clanged and Liliya jumped back, startled.

And that’s when I remembered I wasn’t alone.

“Liliya,” I said, twisting around to look at her. “I can get you out.”

She blinked at me, then quickly shook her head and looked away. But I’d seen that millisecond of hope in her eyes, before she’d shut it down.

“I can!” I insisted. “Look, the Aristovs can win this thing. They can wipe Spartak out. You can be free of him.” I looked up at the ceiling, towards where I knew Radimir must be. “But they need their Pakhan to do it!”

She shook her head again and stepped back, crossing her arms protectively. “I guard you,” she said firmly. Her English was surprisingly bad, for someone who’d lived in America for years. Then my stomach churned: Spartak probably never let her go out on her own or make American friends. He kept her isolated and stopped her learning English to make it harder for her to run away. “I’ve seen how he treats you,” I said softly. “I know he hits you.”

She stared at the floor.

“I can get you out,” I said. “Liliya, look at me.”

She wouldn’t.

“ Look at me!”

She finally lifted her eyes, and I saw something like shame there.

“It’s not your fault!” I told her firmly. “It’s not! Look, I can get you out. Liliya, if you help me, I promise you I will get you out. You’ll be safe.”

There were tears in her eyes. She stared at me, wanting to believe me but terrified.

“We can get you a new name, a new identity. You can go wherever you want.”

She bit her lip then shook her head. Shit. I was losing her. I stepped towards her, stretching out as far as the handcuffs would allow. “Liliya, please! Help me escape and you never have to see that bastard again!”

She stared at me, blinking back tears...and then shook her head again and ran. Since she’d been the one with the flashlight, that left me in darkness.

I sighed and rested my head against the cool metal of the pipe. That was it, then. Spartak would hunt down Radimir and kill him. And then he’d come back for me and...my stomach heaved as I thought about being used by him and his men. And then I’d be dumped in a shallow grave somewhere when he got tired of me.

Minutes passed. Then I heard footsteps and an approaching flashlight. I looked up hopefully, then sighed as Liliya shuffled back into the room. My guard is back .

But something was different. Her hands were behind her back, and she was looking at me with huge, guilty eyes, a child who knows she’s done something bad.

She brought her hands out from behind her back and showed me what she’d been hiding there. Bolt cutters. I drew in a strangled gasp of hope.

“You promise!” she hissed. “You promise I get out?”

“ Yes!” I nodded frantically. “Yes, I promise.”

Liliya looked at me for three more heartbeats, debating. Then she leaned forward and cut the chain on my handcuffs. I grabbed her hand and crept with her to the doorway. “How do we get out of here?” I asked.

She pointed down the hallway. At the very end, there was a heavy metal door with a guard standing in front of it. We weren’t getting out that way.

There had to be some other exit. I crept with her down the pitch-black hallway. I found the door to the secret stairway Spartak had brought us down, but it was locked. Liliya and I searched the rooms one by one. The guards were stretched thin, now that Spartak had taken so many of them, and in the darkness, we could sneak past them if we were careful. The workers ignored us, too scared of the guards to so much as look up from their work. But there were no more doors and the only air vents were far too small to fit through. The place was a prison.

We were creeping through what I was calling the chemistry lab when our luck ran out. A guard saw us and grabbed me, trying to wrestle me to the ground. Liliya hooked an arm around his neck and pulled him off me and the two of them staggered through the middle of the lab. One of Liliya’s elbows caught a complex web of glass tubing and it went crashing over, spilling chemicals everywhere. Then the guard knocked against a gas burner, and it tipped and?—

The dark room suddenly lit up orange as flames licked across an entire tabletop. Shit! The chemicals must have been flammable. Fire was dripping down onto the floor, spreading to other tables. The workers began to scream and run and choking gray smoke began to fill the air.

The workers spilled out into the hallway. It was chaos, now: the whole place was still dark, with only flames and a few flashlight beams to light it up, and already the air was becoming hazy. My lungs were burning and like everyone else, I followed instinct. Get out, get out!

But as we reached the end of the hallway, the guard at the door raised his gun and yelled at us in Russian. The workers ducked in fear and retreated.

Oh fuck. Spartak couldn’t let the police find out about this place. The guard would be under orders: don’t let anyone out, no matter what.

They’d let us all die down here.