“Yes.”
“Why?”
Maksim exhales through his nose and looks around the room as if the answer is somewhere on the shelves, in the dust, in the old metal tools and paint cans and broken boxes.
When he looks back at me, his eyes are colder. “Viktor needs to die if I want to get what I truly desire.”
My throat closes.
I think of Alina in the corridor. The way she looked shaken when Maksim arrived. The strange softness between them. The old familiarity. The way he knew how to speak to her without asking.
Oh God.
“You and Alina,” I whisper.
His face changes.
There it is. The truth, or part of it.
My heart pounds harder. “You love her.”
He steps toward me again. “Don’t.”
But I can’t stop now. Fear and shock have made my thoughts move too quickly.
“You love her,” I say. “And she still loves Viktor.”
His hand closes around the back of the chair, hard enough that the wood creaks. “Don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
“I understand enough.”
“No,” he says, and now his voice finally cracks. “You understand nothing.”
The anger in him fills the room. I shrink back despite myself, and the movement hurts my incision badly enough that I have to bite down on a sound.
He sees it. For one second, the doctor in him reacts. His gaze drops to my abdomen. Concern flashes there before he smothers it.
That gives me something.
Not hope exactly, but a weakness.
“You’re a doctor,” I say, breathing through the pain. “You know I shouldn’t be here. You know I need to be monitored. I’m bleeding. I just had surgery.”
“I know.”
“Then take me back.”
He laughs once, softly, and it’s the worst sound I’ve heard from him yet.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No,” he says. “I passed that point a long time ago.”
The room seems colder now.
My body is starting to tremble from pain and fear and whatever drugs are still wearing off. I pull against the bindings again, more desperately, but the rope only bites deeper. My fingers feel numb at the tips. My ankles burn.