The Cruelty (The Cruelty #1)

He’s good-looking, about twenty, with shaggy dark hair and a little stubble. The charmer of the group, I’m guessing, sent out as a scout. He turns to Marina. “Your friend tells me to piss off. Don’t you think that’s a little rude?”

Marina slips out from under his arm. “I’m out of here,” she says in Russian, eyebrow cocked, meaning, If you’re smart, you’ll follow me.

I’m terrified of being left alone, but all I can do is smile at her and watch as she leaves. The guy plops down on her stool, his hand sliding down my arm to my hand. “So, what’s up? What’s your name, girl?”

“I’m called Sofia,” I say.

“And I’m called Christian.”

*

Christian’s friends are more or less as I guessed they’d be, douches of a dangerous kind. Each successive round of beer and shots of vodka—there are three of each in the first hour—inspires them to ever higher levels of douchery, as if there were a competition going on between them. Idiotic banter about soccer and cars alternates with impromptu wrestling matches. But in between, I catch snatches of conversation. They are in mourning, of a sort, for someone they knew. A funeral today. No, two of them. My palms start to sweat.

Christian tries to make small talk—What about you, girl? He asks me about my favorite season, my favorite color, my favorite soda, my favorite childhood pet. I reply as best I can, filling in the blanks of Sofia’s life just as Yael has taught me. Autumn, blue, Fanta, a rabbit named Alyosha. So much in common, he says.

But mostly they treat me like furniture. Something that’s just there. I endure the occasional hand on my leg, the occasional lewd question—Tell me, Sofia, are all the Russian girls in Germany whores?—but otherwise I’m just another club girl, and a Russian one at that, who won’t understand most of what they’re saying.

Then a new song comes on, nothing I’ve heard before, but there’s a collective gasp. The boys stir, then rise. They clink their glasses together, order more shots. This was their song. Gunther’s favorite. Lukas hated it.

A shiver rolls from my shoulders outward down to the tips of my fingers. My theory was right. Follow the path to the watering hole and there I’ll find the rest of the herd. I calm myself, force myself to be casual. “Who are Gunther and Lukas?” I ask.

Christian breathes deeply and rests his hand on my thigh. “Our mates,” he says.

“Oh?”

“They died last week. Motorcycle accident.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Here? In Berlin?”

“Paris.”

I close my eyes, hear the rush of blood in my veins. I reach for my ginger ale, drink it all. Reach for someone’s water, drink that, too. What do I do now, Yael?

“What’s wrong?” Christian asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “Let’s dance.”

We descend the staircase to the dance floor below, and I pray he can’t see my knees and hands shaking as I grip the railing. Every fiber in my body wants me to run to the exit, the evolutionary-instinct lizard brain telling me there is danger here, fire and predators. But Christian is my in. My in to Hamid’s killers. My in to my dad’s captors. You will be hard, Gwendolyn.

On the floor below there are bodies, too many of them. Moving through the room is like passing through gelatin. Every step, every breath a battle to not suffocate. But I lead him by the hand to the dance floor. We will dance together, Christian and I. Just long enough to get him to go somewhere private with me. Then I will torture him to get the information out or fuck him to get the information out. Either way, same result.

“Look,” Christian says. “Look, I’m sorry—I hate dancing. I suck. And really, I gotta get back to my friends. The funerals—you know.”

Inside, I seethe. But Sofia smiles. “What’s your number? I’ll text you. We can hang out.”

He gives me a kind of nervous schoolboy’s laugh, then tells it to me. I send him a one-word message, Sofia.

He checks his phone. “Got it.”

*

I head back to Marina’s place on the U-Bahn, replaying the scene at the Rau Klub, planning what comes next. In the window of the train, I catch a glimpse of my face, the tunnel walls streaking behind the reflection. The stuttering fluorescent lights in the car give my skin a terrible pallor, and there are deep shadows beneath my cheeks. My eyes have retreated into caves and the muscles of my jaw flare as my teeth bite down hard.

Something curious going on in my stomach and in my head: the terror I’ve lived with from the moment I found out my dad was taken is—what? Transforming? The word seems inadequate. The concept I’m looking for, it’s what happens to the guy in the Kafka story when he becomes a cockroach. Metamorphosize? I look it up in my phone.

(To) Metamorphose. Verb. 1. To change significantly in appearance or character, sometimes by supernatural means, esp. more beautiful or grotesque.

That’s it. The terror is metamorphosing into the thing inside me I first discovered in New York, the thing that Yael trained and refined. The thing is the flip side, the counterpoint, the shouted answer to the terror’s question. Asks the terror: What will become of me? Answers the thing: This.

My anger clouds my thinking, and since anger is the oxygen the thing inside me breathes, it’s in an eager mood tonight. Get Christian somewhere private at all costs, it tells me, tie him to a bed, and go to work on him with pliers and a cigarette lighter until he gives you the answer. But this, I know rationally, is no way to get information. I learned that from my dad as we watched news reports together of the torture of terrorists. “A man will admit to anything when you torture him. That he’s a terrorist. That he’s the devil. That he knows tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers,” he told me.

So, that other thing, then. Why not? Fucking him instead of torturing him—violence would be better, and less stomach-turning, than fucking him. But we’ll see. Anything it takes. Anything to win.

I miss the train stop and have to walk back from the next one. My mind remains on Christian and his friends. How could this collection of shitheads I met tonight have kidnapped my dad? What qualifies this band of petty fools who swill beer like water and try to punch one another in the balls to even look in my dad’s direction? I had pictured the evil that stole my dad from me to be powerful because it was large and brilliant and monolithic, an aircraft carrier that played chess. But here it is, an evil powerful because it is small and unthinking and many.

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