He’d left the hotel and stood in front of it, trying to hail a taxi.
He had his phone clamped to his ear, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying from this far away. He waited impatiently for the taxi, checking this way and that, a pissed-off expression on his face.
Where are you, Lucifer?I thought.Aren’t you coming for me?
“Don’t worry,” said a man speaking on his phone, walking in my direction up the alley, about to pass me by. "I've found her.
It took a second for the words to register. The man didn’t pass me by. He stopped right in front of me. Massimo?
I stared at the black dress shoes on the sidewalk before me and then brought my gaze slowly upward. The man was wearing aheavy overcoat, and in the years since I’d last seen him, he’d only gotten meaner looking.
My eyes met his, and I knew I was screwed.
I hadn’t seen Ivan Markovic in three years, and yet I knew him immediately.
Just like I knew my freedom was over.
“I’ve found my wayward fiancée at last.” His voice was full of mocking.
I sprang upward, but Ivan had been expecting it.
I felt the all-too-familiar sting in my neck before I even saw his hand move.
No. I didn’t want to get lost in my head again. Please, no. No!
“Come with me, Kat. It’s time to finally finish what we started.” Ivan grabbed me as I swayed, lifting me effortlessly.
The last thing I saw was Blackwood standing by a waiting cab, the interior a yawning black pit.
It swallowed me whole.
When your mindis not your own, you become an unreliable narrator. You learn to mistrust yourself. At worst, you feel betrayed by your own mind; at best, you become apathetic to the events around you. You have no control. You have no focus. You have no organization of thought. You are just a person reacting to things without context, existing in the heat of the moment without a past or a future.
You stop caring about any of them anyway. They stop being real.
I was in a taxi on my way somewhere. Men were talking loudly in the smoky interior of the cab. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear.
“Sergei is pissed, so the sooner we pull this off the better. Where’d you find the priest?” the man beside me asked. He had a lanyard around his neck that said he was a doctor.
Where was I going with a doctor?
The other man twisted from the front seat. He was familiar. He made me think of my mother somehow.
“Where are we going?” I managed to ask, though it felt like my tongue was too big for my mouth.
“Home, don’t you remember?” The man in the front laughed.
I stared down at my clothes.
“I don’t want to go,” I found myself muttering.
“I don’t give a fuck.” The guy in the front was still watching me. “Don’t you get it yet, Kat? Nothing you want has ever mattered.”
Satisfied with those cutting words, he turned back around, tapping on the dashboard merrily.
“Step on it. It’s fucking freezing out here,” he said to the taxi driver.
The doctor was sitting beside me in the back. I turned to study his face. It was almost familiar.