How can she stand it? How can she sit there on the floor without so much as a tensed muscle, or a clenched jaw, or a vein twitching in her neck, or a few white knuckles? The girl’s finger is being cut off—just like yours was, Nora; the girl is being tortured because of something you did! But she feels nothing.
I look down—I don’t think I ever looked back up—and see Niklas’s long fingers clutching my waist; at least he feels something. But he’s still guilty. We’re all guilty. Fear (and some kind of sick, sadistic love) of this woman is what keeps most of them quiet. But not for us; not for me or Niklas or Nora. The sake of a job and of another girl’s life is what binds us. Keep quiet and still—don’t break character!—or a lot more than a finger will be lost here today, I keep telling myself. Over and over again.
The girl crumples to her knees on the dais floor; blood stains her clothes, the crimson bright against the stark white of her dress. Blood glistens on the white marble beneath her, on Francesca Moretti’s lavish white robe. I don’t even recall when I lifted my head to see these things—now I can’t turn away. The girl’s cries carry through the room and for a long time it’s the only thing I hear; whimpers ominously amplified by the violent pumping of blood through my head.
“Now, Mother, you can leave. Take Ela with you and have the doctor tend to her wound.”
Tend to her wound? She makes it sound like the poor girl fell and skinned her goddamned knee.
“Is something wrong with your girl?” I hear Francesca say, but her voice sounds so far off; I’m not thinking straight. All I see is red, red, red, red. Blood and rage, blood and rage.
Wait—is she talking to Niklas?
“Naomi?” comes Niklas’s far-off voice.
I blink once, like flipping on a light switch, and the reality of the moment comes rushing back into my eyes like a flood of blinding light. I realize I’m barely sitting on the edge of the cushion now; my teeth are pressed together abrasively, visibly as though I’d been baring them the whole time like a rabid dog. I glance down at my hands, one digging into Niklas’s thigh, the other into the leather couch cushion. Slowly my fingers loosen and I pull my hands away, placing them into my lap. My face and my posture eases and melts back into calm. I swallow and lick my dry, chapped lips desperate for moisture.
“I-I apologize, Madam,” I say with the shaky, timid voice of Naomi. “I’m fine. The sight of blood has always made me uncomfortable.”
Niklas smooths the palm of his hand over the back of my head and down what’s left of the length of my botched hair, pretending to soothe his little pet. Or is he trying to soothe Izzy? After that…kiss, one that felt like something so much more than a role, after that I’m not sure I can tell the difference anymore. I’m unsure of a lot of things…
“She gets a little squeamish sometimes,” Niklas tells Francesca, still smoothing my hair, and oddly enough it does comfort me somewhat.
Emilio is looking at me again with that unnerving grin of his—he’s planning something. Bring it on, asshole. Whatever it is, I’m ready for you.
I look away from Emilio just as Miz Ghita is walking past with the girl on her arm. Tears stream down her face; she walks hunched over with her mutilated hand pressed to her chest by the other one; the front of her dress is drenched in blood. The elevator closes them off inside its glass walls and takes them down and out of our sight.
How the hell are we going to find Olivia Bram in all this? I bet Niklas never anticipated that Francesca would have ‘a few’ of her cyprians brought here for him to look at; it’s doubtful Olivia Bram will be one of them. This could take forever—literally. We’re not going to find that girl the way things are going. Something tells me—or reminds me—that bringing Olivia Bram home to her father was never going to happen. I hate more than anyone here to think that giving up on her is the only option, and that we should focus on kidnapping Francesca. But that’s what I’m beginning to feel. She’s no longer here. Or maybe she was never here. Olivia Bram is dead.
No—I refuse to give up on her. I won’t do it. No one cared about me enough to look for me when I went missing. Dina didn’t even know I was missing, thought I just moved away with my mother. But I was alone for years. I had no one looking for me. Olivia Bram deserves better.
What would be Victor’s next move?
It feels strange being on a mission and not hearing his voice in an earpiece; not having him here to tell me what to do, which pieces to move across the chess board. I miss him. I wonder what he’s doing right now.
Victor
Somewhere in Virginia
“You’ve been on our radar for eight years, Mr. Faust,” Dan Barrett, one of Flynn’s superiors, says across the elongated table from me, dressed in his finest cheap suit. “If we wanted to take you down—”