Page 114 of Deadly Knight

Andrei resumes the video and increases the volume, with her screams echoing throughout the stone room. On the recording and in the stone cell room I’m being kept in.

Katya’s cries are the same that I hear in my head all the fucking time. For each of the four kills, they quieted, but like a freight train, they’re all back, slamming me off the tracks.

Somewhere in the distance, the door shuts behind Mikhail and Andrei, leaving me alone with her screams.

Her fucking screams.

I can’t hear this anymore.

I refuse to watch. Once was enough. Once in which I was helpless to do a fucking thing.

I twist around, lowering to the ground, knees drawn up while I pick a spot on the floor to stare at and tune her out.

Their jibes.

My pleas.

Her screams.

It throws me back to that night. The night I should have been starting the rest of my life with her, but instead changed us both.

Katya screams and I jolt, hands scrambling for a weapon I don’t have.

She’s not here. She’s safe. She’s not here.

No matter how much I repeat it to myself, it doesn’t change the fact that once upon a time, Katya screamed.

And she was here.

And I couldn’t save her.

At some point,I drag myself from Dimitri’s bed and his apartment, shutting the door behind me in case Vanessa’s concerns do come true.

When my stomach grumbles, I head back upstairs but don’t eat.Can’teat. Not for lack of trying, but food is dry and unappetizing. Why should I eat when they’re probably starving him?

I pace my apartment, counting down the seconds it’ll take Vanessa to get here, after anxiously and impatiently looking up every flight from Moscow to Toronto, before realizing she’d take her personal jet.

Time blends, so even with a measure of the trip, I have no idea what time it is. What day it is.

I run myself ragged pacing my apartment, Dimitri’s shirt draped over me. Like a ghost; not living, not managing, not anything. It’s worse than the days following the hospital, when I was a mixture of hurt and anger, of trauma and confusion.

I’m not hurt. I’m not angry.

I’m numb.

Numb with thoughts of what he’s living through. Of how long he’s been fighting, waiting for someone to realize he was missing.

If only I didn’t scare him away. He would have come to me. Actually, we may never have left Russia. We would have stayed together.

This is my fault…

If I hadn’t pushed him away, he wouldn’t have quit the Bratva and followed me. He wouldn’t have been kidnapped.

“No, no, no,no!”

At some point, I ended up on the floor, my knees pressed into the hardwood, but I truly have no memory of falling. Or sitting. Or doing whatever I did to get down here.

Maybe the guilt will eat me alive.