Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“Let’s talk about this another time,” he told Alli. “We’re all exhausted.”

“But—”

“Questions later.” He pulled her up with him as he rose to his feet. “Right now it’s time to rest.”

_____

AT THE doorway to the master bedroom, Jack paused, watching Alli pad into her room and softly close the door. Then he turned to Annika, but before he could say anything she beat him to it.

“Come in,” she said. Her smile widened. “I didn’t bite last night, did I?”

He smiled. “I think Alli is right about you.”

“Me being a psycho-bitch or wanting to get you into bed?”

He laughed, but the truth was that in these surroundings and this close to her he felt a frisson, an erotic charge that made him momentarily short of breath.

On his way to the bed he passed close enough for his hip to brush against her, where she sat, her legs crossed at the knee. Her wrists, which perched on her knee, were delicate, so thin they looked eminently breakable. He knew better. His gaze inevitably dropped to her legs, long, powerful, and gleaming in the illumination from the bedside lamps she must have put on when she’d entered the bedroom.

“You know you have this obsession to protect everyone,” she said.

He came and sat down on the bed next to her. “Is that such a bad thing?”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“Why did you ask me in here?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Last night . . . our connection . . .” She looked away for a moment. “I don’t want to be alone. I’m tired of being alone.”

“What about Ivan?”

She snapped back into focus. “Are you trying to insult me? Ivan was an assignment.”

He nodded. “I won’t sleep with you, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I’m not angling for any damn thing. My arm hurts and I need some rest. We all do.”

“All right then.” He slapped his thighs and, rising, went to the doorway. “I’ll be right outside on the sofa.”

As he was about to cross the threshold, she said: “I know who the girl is.”

Her timing was impeccable. He turned and stared at her.

“I know she’s the American president’s daughter.” She cocked her head. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“You told me you knew nothing about affairs outside your line of work.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know you then, I didn’t know whether I could trust you, so I thought it better to lie. The truth is, I can’t bear to be the victim of ignorance. Besides, it seemed important for you to keep your secret, changing her hair, her appearance, whatever, and since then I’ve wanted to help you keep that secret. I would keep it now, even if we were captured, even if the FSB hurt me.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

She shrugged again.

“Why would you do it—protect Alli—if it came to that?”

“You know why. When I look in her eyes, when I listen to her voice, I see myself.”

“Even when she calls you the psycho-bitch?”

“Especially then, because her high emotion betrays her.”

Jack took a step back into the bedroom. “How do you mean?”

“That look in her eyes, the sound of her voice when the anger engorges her throat, when it seems as if she’s strangling on emotion, I know that look; I saw it every day when I looked at myself in the mirror. And that sound . . .” She shuddered. “The news stories were vague, even the so-called in-depth articles, but something very bad happened to her.”

“Yes,” he said as he sat beside her, “it did.”

“You saved her from whoever abused her. I can see that, too, in her eyes when she looks at you.”

Now it was his turn to look away. “She was abducted, bound to a chair and brainwashed, perhaps more, I don’t know. She won’t talk about it to anyone.”

“She’ll tell you.” Annika’s voice was as soft as a caress as she laid a hand over his. “She needs time, that’s all.”

Jack turned to look at her face. “How can you be sure?”

“Because she wants to tell you, she needs to tell you. I think she’s coming to grips with the realization that she can’t move on until she does. I believe that’s why she wanted so badly to be the one to talk to Milla Tamirova.”

Jack frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Milla Tamirova has certain . . . equipment, shall we say, that I think drew Alli.”

Jack was growing alarmed. “What kind of equipment? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Milla Tamirova is a professional mistress—that is to say she has a dungeon in her apartment.”

A chill sped through his system and he shivered. “Why in the world would she want to revisit—”

“To relieve herself of the terror, to conquer it. The only way to exorcize it is to demythologize it, to see it in the light of day, to understand that once she overcomes her terror she’ll no longer be its victim.”

Jack sat bent over, elbows on knees, hands clasped loosely in front of him as if in rumination or, maybe, prayer. Then he looked up. “I had no idea. I should be with her.”

Annika’s hand clasped his and he felt her steely strength. “Leave her alone for the moment. Allow her to regain her innate power. She needs to think about what Milla Tamirova must have shown her. If you interfere now, she’ll move away from both you and the hard work that lies ahead of her.”

Sighing deeply, Jack covered his face with his hands and lay back on the bed. Annika, turning, regarded him with empathy and perhaps a bit of pity.

“She’s yours, Jack, for better or for worse.”

“It’s all for the better,” he said, “believe me.”

“I do.” She hitched herself fully onto the bed, keeping off her left arm as she did and, before he had a chance to say another word, lay down on top of him. “There, that isn’t so bad, is it?”

ALLI, FULLY clothed, lay on the bed. She was staring at the ceiling, but in fact she was seeing the restraint chair in the center of Milla Tamirova’s dungeon. In her mind’s eye she sat in that chair, felt the restraints, hard, twisted, and nasty, against the insides of her wrists. She felt little electric shocks go through her, as if sparks launched from a nearby fire were singeing her, burning off the pale, almost transparent hair on her arms.

The demonically handsome face of Morgan Herr, whose pseudonyms Ronnie Kray, Charles Whitman, Ian Brady were all notorious serial killers, hovered over her, whispering in her ear. He told her things about herself—intimate things that she was certain only she could know, including private conversations she’d had with Emma, everything they’d discussed in their dorm room at school—as if he’d crawled inside her head and insidiously appropriated the details of her life.

She shuddered so deeply that her torso came off the bed as if through a bolt of electricity. She felt the familiar, horrific nausea rising in her, and she fought to stay where she was, held at bay the urge to flee to the bathroom and kneel beside the porcelain bowl to puke up her guts.

No , she told herself in a remarkably steady voice, you no longer need to do that. Morgan Herr is dead, there’s nothing more he can do to you. Whatever is happening, you’re doing it to yourself.

And yet, once again, as she’d felt in Milla Tamirova’s dungeon, she was paralyzed, completely powerless, as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.

“ Whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won .” Milla Tamirova had smiled. “ We can’t have that, child, can we ?”

But Milla Tamirova didn’t know, because Alli didn’t dare tell her, the other reason for her feeling powerless. The urge to cut herself open, to have the secret spill out with her guts, left her shaking and drenched in cold sweat. She could feel the bed vibrating beneath her, or was it her own body that was making the bed quiver?