Page 7 of Refrain (Beautiful Monsters #2)

CHAPTER FIVE

CHLOE

There’re three of them. They’re playing cards in the larger room, while the rest of us huddle together, two to a cot, our arms strapped down. One of them comes in, brandishing a syringe. Spotting me, he smiles. “This one is ready to make us some money…”

I jolt awake. Or did I? Pieces of my nightmare chase me into the present.

It’s too dark. A metallic stench taints the air, and my inner elbow throbs.

Terror claws through my belly as my thoughts dissolve and collide—and that’s not the worst part.

My arms are positioned on either side of me, weighed down by my wrists. Bound.

Don’t panic. I suck in air to avoid just that. One breath. Two. It’s cleaner than I’m used to. My new prison isn’t quite a cellar. Something above ground but still enclosed. A closet?

Either Grey has a funny concept of punishment, or someone else grabbed me in the aftermath of whatever happened at the club.

“Get off my case, Arno,” a man snaps, his voice sounding muffled but close. In another room? Deciphering his location takes a back seat to the name he said. Arno. It rings a bell. An alarming one. “I told you I don’t fucking know what happened. Someone tipped their hand, but it wasn’t me—”

“You don’t think I fucking know that?” a deeper voice cuts in. “But that’s it. Six fucking months down the damn drain—”

“You think it was the Cartel?”

“Fuck no!” Unstable laughter echoes off the walls. “Those fuckers couldn’t get in the door without shooting themselves in the foot. No. That shit was too clean. I’m just glad you got out okay. If I had known there was any risk, I fucking swear I would have never let you—”

“I know. I know.” A tired sigh follows . “Don’t sweat it. The Ruskies must have pissed off someone else. You’ll find out who. You always do.”

“You’re damn fucking right I will,” the other man agrees.

They sound closer now, as if they’ve been walking while chatting, nearing my darkened prison. The lack of urgency unsettles my stomach. They’re comfortable.

“Lie low for a while until I figure out what the fuck is going on. If anything happened to you, Dante would—” The man cuts off with a sharp intake of air.

“You can stop worrying now, Mom,” the other voice finally pipes up. “I did get a few boo-boos though. Want to kiss them better for me?”

“Knock it off, you little shit.” Another gruff laugh echoes off the walls, followed by a few more minutes of unnatural silence. “Take it easy, Espi. I fucking mean it. Come to the bar once you’ve gotten some rest, okay?”

“Okay.”

A door opens and closes. I think… My eyelids feel heavier by the second.

To conserve energy, I rely only on what little clues my senses can gather.

Judging from the muffled sound, a solid wall separates me from the room where a lone figure starts to pace.

One of Vlad’s men? No. They aren’t built like a typical guard.

Their footsteps barely make a sound, their path ai mless, bringing them closer.

Then farther away. Closer. Away. Closer.

On their next trip in my direction, the doorknob jiggles, and my nerves prickle to life. Get ready… I flex my wrists, testing the give of the manacles. One is loose enough to slip it off—if I can move, that is. My muscles react sluggishly to my brain’s commands.

Wake up! A few of my fingers twitch in response to the plea. Good enough. I even manage to peel one eye open as a rush of air alludes to a door opening. The entering figure must switch a light on nearby. Suddenly, everything is bright.

“Shit. You’re awake.” His surprise is a bad sign. In my experience, captors were only that confident if their victims were drugged. “Try not to move,” he warns, his tone gruff. “You’ll bleed through the—”

Move! The word triggers every instinct I have. My loose arm twists and I pull, ignoring the burning, icy scrape of my flesh against metal. Two agonizing tugs free it, but a smattering of rushing footsteps warns me that I’m too late.

“Shit—”

I kick my feet out only to feel air. Taking a risk, I throw my weight toward the empty space.

It’s a mistake. My head explodes, my thoughts splintering.

As if the agony surging down my spine jumpstarts my vision, it clears.

I’m in a room. The floor beneath me is smooth tile, and the lone window across from me isn’t barred.

An ebony sky serves as a fitting backdrop for the figure standing in the center of the room, watching me.

I blink rapidly to register his features. Glinting, blue eyes. Black hair slicked back away from a painfully innocent face. He switched the other shirt for a gray one, pairing it with ratty jeans.

“Take it easy.” He warily holds his hands out in front of him.

His voice. I recognize it from the earlier conversation. Espi. Is that his name ?

Not that it matters. If he works for the Syndicate, I’m as good as dead.

“Get these handcuffs off me—now!”

He winces.

I’m shouting. I’m screaming. “Get them off! Get them off—”

“Calm down.” He’s closer.

I smell him now. Mint and cigarettes. Did he pick the habit up from Piotr?

“Look!” He pulls a key from his pocket and holds it up to the light. “You lost a lot of blood. I didn’t want you to reopen the… Shit .”

I follow the direction of his gaze, wincing with every shift of muscle. My other arm is still attached to the edge of a narrow cot. Unlike the naked, industrial setup I’m used to, someone draped this mattress in red sheets—sheets that used to be white.

Vlad delivered his parting gift well. Rent flesh forms a gash from my shoulder down to my forearm—or so I gauge from the blood trail seeping through a white towel someone wadded around the limb.

Had he a larger knife, good ol’ Vlad would have lived up to the little nickname Piotr bestowed upon him—The Butcher.

“There.”

The pressure on my wrist loosens, but the loss of support throws me forward. I hit the floor hard, my vision blinking in and out of focus.

“Okay? Just take it easy.”

I have to brace one hand flat against the floor to hoist myself onto my knees.

“Are you fucking listening to me? You want to bleed out all over the fucking floor?” He’s shouting, the baby-faced angel.

That’s not what leaves me reeling. His voice breaks with an emotion I’m not used to hearing in another person. Not genuinely, at least. Worry.

The same emotion makes my heart hammer against my rib cage as my knees buckle, and his arm encircles my shoulders to keep me upright.

“If you don’t let me help you, you’re going to bleed to death. You want that? Huh?”

I don’t like how he phrased the question. Coldly. Definitively. As if he’d really leave me to my fate.

I should say yes…

“Lean on me.” The surprising note of authority springs my body into action. “Can you stand up?”

With his shoulder for support, I manage to.

Once on my feet, I scan the room. It’s smaller than I thought.

There’s a tiny closet near the back corner, its door opened to reveal the meager contents within.

A small array of T-shirts and a few ratty pairs of jeans hang from hooks.

So this isn’t a dungeon, but a bedroom. His?

“Can you walk?” The gritted tone drags my attention back to him. He’s eyeing the arm sandwiched between us, held at an awkward angle. “Try to move. Come on. One foot in front of the other.”

I try. He winds up supporting most of my weight, but we eventually make it into a larger room.

He must live here. Though what would serve as a living room in any conventional residence acts as storage for large, white squares.

My brain sluggishly tries to put a name to them.

Canvas. Some are blank, while others sport splotches of paint. Reds. Yellows. Oranges.

An inferno of color.

“All right, here we go…” He lowers me onto a gray couch that’s seen better days, and he has to nudge a stack of canvases out of the way to clear enough space for me. “Fuck.” Muttering under his breath, he darts to another corner of the room.

There’s a kitchen there—a small one, anyway—composed of a dingy fridge, a sink, and a single row of cabinets.

He snatches something from the top of the fridge and then turns to the sink.

Water runs. His shoulders move. He’s assembling something.

Another syringe? I wince; the throbbing in my inner arm is too distracting to focus for long.

“You injected me with something… Didn’t you?”

Guilt laces his tension, stiffening his shoulders. He doesn’t answer, and by the time he returns to my side, I can’t remember why the question even matters.

“Let’s sit you up.” His voice deepens as he crouches in front of me.

He has a boxy object tucked under his arm and a wad of wet rags in his fist. He sets the rags aside and lifts the lid of the box. It’s plastic, with compartments inside that separate what appears to be a makeshift first aid kit—gauze, scissors, and vials of liquid.

Liquid potentially potent enough to cause the disorientation disrupting my senses.

“What did you give me?” I muster up enough strength to grab his shoulder. “What did you inject me with?”

He shrugs me off in order to hunt through the case. “A tetanus shot,” he finally grumbles.

“What else?”

He meets my gaze, appearing as if he’s trying to decide how much he can get away with hiding from me. In the end, he shrugs. “A sedative.”

Shock doesn’t have time to finish racing through my system before he rears back on his knees, his expression grim.

“Look, I don’t know if you remember or not, but you weren’t exactly jumping at the chance to have me help you.

” He tugs on his collar, revealing a jagged scratch stretching toward his shoulder, and my nails throb as if in guilt.

“You were going to either scream loudly enough that someone called the cops or bleed out. I couldn’t let that happen—”

“So you drugged me?”

“Yeah. I did.” He holds my gaze without flinching.

There’s no gray with him. Just black and white. Either I inject you with an unknown substance, or you die .

“I need to stitch you up.” He rummages within his case and withdraws a black satchel, scissors, and a packet of surgical thread. The sort of stuff the average gangster wouldn’t keep above their freezer.

“Stitch me?” My words run together, thick and garbled. “You do this often?”

“It’s going to hurt,” he says rather than answering my question. “It’s going to hurt bad . I don’t have any lidocaine. I used the last bit of my narcs on you too, not that it seems to be helping with the pain.”

Only now do I realize how heavily I’m breathing. Sweat coats my skin. I blink, and there’s suddenly two of him.

“I could get you some whiskey…”

“No.” I shake my head. That was Ksenia’s old vice. These days, I barely think about the bottle anymore. “Just…just do it.”

He rises to his feet, and I can’t help the way I stiffen when he lowers himself beside me. Up close, I’m assaulted by his conflicting smell. He’s darkness. Smoke. Unknown. Clean. Too many different scents to pinpoint.

Then he touches the makeshift bandage and deciphering him takes a back seat to breathing. He wasn’t lying. With every sickening tug on the damp towel, blinding agony descends in full force. Gritted teeth can’t silence my cry.

“Jesus Christ—”

“Whiskey it is.” Without hesitating, he heads for the fridge.

I watch through blurred vision as he fishes a bottle from inside it and pours a small amount into a shot glass snatched from a nearby counter. He brings both back over to the couch and sets the bottle on the floor between my feet.

“Here.”

My fingers tremble as they accept the glass he’s shoved into my hand. I take a sip as the bastard uses the distraction to pour some of the liquid from the bottle directly onto my wound .

Liquid sprays from my mouth, along with a stream of curses I can’t even make out, though he calmly acknowledges each one.

“I know. I know.” With a suspicious sense of practice, he lays his tools out beside us while the alcohol sears its way through torn flesh and muscle. “All right,” he grunts out by way of warning. “Here we go.”

I can’t watch, so I stare at the wall and count the millions of ways my body succumbs to the whiskey along with whatever else he injected me with.

Whether it’s due to delirium or the alcohol, I don’t feel a damn thing.

Just the sickening push and pull of rent skin being sewn back together, stitch by stitch by stitch.

“It doesn’t hurt as much if you don’t focus on it. My brother taught me that. Once I busted my knee open jumping off the monkey bars, and he had to rush me to the ER, carrying me on his back the whole damn time.” He laughs.

The sound chimes through the dulled mush of my brain. It’s beautiful. Men shouldn’t sound beautiful.

“I had to get ten stitches,” he says grimly.

“Before they even got the needles, I started to wail like a fucking baby, but Dante… He tried to tell me a story to take my mind off it all. He was fucking terrible at telling stories. I think this one was about a duck or something?” He trails off as he racks his mind for the memory.

“I can’t remember, but it barely made any sense, and he finished it off with, ‘Fuck, that’s it.

The end.’” He laughs—more softly this time, but I don’t miss the broken edge to the sound.

It’s pained, shattering the beauty. “I was too busy laughing that I barely even noticed when the doctor finished up.”

He worked the entire time he spoke, gently manipulating the wound despite the prosthetics.

“You’ve done this before.” The words cling to my tongue as I blink more rapidly, fighting to maintain my view of a dingy, beige ceiling.

Focus. Don’t go under…

I think he’ll ignore me, but after four more tugs, he sighs .

“You’re going to need a lot more than ten stitches.”

I’m not sure how many it takes to seal me up by the time he finally swipes at the wound with more alcohol and wraps the whole thing in gauze fished from his kit.

No answer comes as he carries his bloodied tools over to the sink.

I watch him as my eyelids flutter, memorizing the careful way he scrubs each tool before neatly laying them out on a dishtowel.

The ease alone gives me the answer to the question he wouldn’t acknowledge.

He’s done this a lot .

“I’ll put you up on the couch,” he declares while cutting the faucet off.

I suspect he leaves the prospect of the cot out on purpose. Out of respect or a simple desire not to have his sheets bloodstained some more? I can’t tell.

It’s too hard to focus. It’s too hard to care. But his eyes hold me captive, the sole feature of his I can make out clearly. They’re electric, outlasting the darkness calling my name.

“Don’t die,” he tells me sternly. If his voice weren’t so soft, the words could be mistaken for a command. Not a plea. “I used my last bit of nylon thread on you.”