Page 22 of The Crimson Lily

The apartment is all you’d expect from an art lover in Paris.

Tall white walls adorned with large paintings of dukes, duchesses, and still life pieces, along with many vases, amphoras, and giant fruit bowls made of clay and painted blue.

Maksim slips through the back window, which he managed to open too easily.

I wonder, for a brief moment, if he’s already been in this apartment before.

It sure seems like it because he knows exactly where he needs to go, and how he can avoid the security guards posted at different parts of this monstrous place.

“You’ve prepared this, haven’t you?” I ask—it’s a rhetorical question, of course.

He doesn’t answer. He can’t at the moment.

“How long have you and him…” Alejandro attempts to ask his prying question.

I know Maksim can hear. I wonder what he’ll think if I give Alejandro an arbitrary number of days, or what he’ll think if I tell Alejandro he and I are nothing.

“We’re not…?together, if that’s what you think,” I reply. I could say anything, but I picked the truth.

“Ah!” Alejandro blurts, drily. “So he beats you, and that’s where you guys leave it?”

I don’t know if he’s referring to the faded bruise on my cheek, the hickey, or something else I haven’t yet noticed, but his words have crossed a line. Béatrice shushes him; his comments are going too far, even for her.

In the meantime, Maksim clears his throat. Through the camera, I can see the safe I now recognize perfectly. He appears to be standing in a darker room, much smaller than the rest, with a large desk and this oversized metallic box.

“There’s a screen and a keyboard,” Maksim reports.

I know exactly why.

“Press the A and tell me what you see,” I direct.

He does, and I see a single word pop on the screen through the camera.

“Anathema,” he reads the word out loud.

Instinctively, I go for the closest pad of paper and Opera pencil. I am doing random operations, replacing letters for others. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it all makes sense to me. After a few computations, I return with the response. “Detonate.”

He types in the word, and another shows.

“Clairvoyance.”

I replicate what I did before, crossing out letters, switching them around, adding and subtracting vowels and consonants.

“What are you doing, Lili?” Alejandro asks, too curious.

“It’s based on a substitution table,” I reply, spontaneously, realizing it’s exactly that. I finish solving my next equation. “Encyclopedia.”

“Beautiful.”

I swallow something in my throat, hearing that word in Maksim’s husky voice. I trace new lines and scribbles with my pencil. “Colocynth. What’s the last word?”

He finishes typing, and the final word appears.

“Dark.”

I don’t have to calculate anything for that one. I take a deep breath before giving him the appropriate response. “Love.”

We hear a few clicks on our end, the sound of released gears spinning. The first door opens, and there’s William’s favorite toy: the puzzle box. It looks like the facet of a flat Rubix cube, joined by moveable sticks and circular symbols that can move across each case of this complex matrix.

I tell Maksim exactly which stick to pull, which token to move, which color to slide where.

He executes each of my instructions meticulously, attentively.

I can only hear his tamed breathing through the camera’s microphone.

He opens the second door and comes face to face with the last piece of this intricate riddle.

“It’s another screen and one button,” he declares.

“Press the button,” I instruct.

I hear a chuckle.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“It’s a riddle,” he announces. “How typical…?Your boss has quite the personality.”

“What does it say?”

“Pure and innocent, a carefree flower. Petals joined in a funnel that can tame a glower.”

I scratch my head, brainstorming how to answer this riddle, but it eludes me. Perhaps William has changed this one because I don’t remember it like that. I look to Béatrice and Alejandro, repeating what Maksim has just read out loud.

“A tulip?” Alejandro suggests.

I do know one thing about this riddle, which I immediately tell Maksim. “The answer should be given in Morse code using that button you see. Do you know?—”

I stop my sentence when I hear a sequence of long and short beeps.

Maksim has figured it out on his own. I have no idea what he came up with, but the final door opens, and I feel relieved.

We’re going to get this. I squint to see better through the low-quality image we’re receiving on our end.

Alejandro and Béatrice lean closer and squint with me.

We wait for Maksim to show us what we’ve come all this way for.

We wait for him to take the dagger in his hands and get the hell out of that place.

But none of that happens. Instead, deep within the safe, there’s a small piece of paper. Maksim takes it in his gloved hands and examines it. It’s a paper from the Opera hotel, with one simple sentence written on it:

Hello, Liliana. How does it feel to lose at your own game?

What the fuck?

At that exact moment, I hear a loud, shattering bang, and Alejandro is pushed against the wall. He tries to turn, to punch whoever stands behind him, but is greeted by a fist to the face. I scream and instantly rise to my feet.

“Liliana?” I hear Maksim’s whispers through the microphone. “Liliana, what’s going on?”

I can’t see what’s happening in the camera because another unknown person seizes me by the waist and lifts me in the air. A large man in a pitch-black suit carries me away from the desk and throws me to the floor. Then, he goes for Béatrice.

“Damn it, Liliana!” I hear again, then I hear nothing anymore.

These men appeared out of nowhere. The large one throws a hook punch at Béatrice.

Wrong move.

She dives in, latches on to his arm, and gives him her most powerful fist in the face. His head jerks back, and she continues with a drill of incredibly fast punches in his jaw and chest.

Alejandro tries to recover his stance, though his assailant is about to punch him again. Something inside me screeches—an instinct, a buried urge. I run to the man, pull his shoulder back, and strike him in the face with all my strength.

But that’s not hard enough.

He seizes my shoulders, forces me to cower back and fall on the bed behind me. Then, instead of hitting me, he seizes the gun attached to the back of his belt and points it at me.

A flash of metal, and all my thoughts halt.

A man pulls a gun to my head. I hear William’s voice behind me, ordering me to walk.

That same man is standing right in front of me, holding the gun firmly. I freeze. Béatrice dashes to him, but he holds his warning hand at her.

“You do anything and I shoot that bitch,” he threatens.

An American accent. I recognize the dark-brown hair and the beard. I recognize the big nose, the wrinkles by his green eyes. I’ve seen this man before, and I’m having the scariest déjà vu of all time right now.

The man signs for his partner, whose nose bleeds profusely, to take Béatrice and Alejandro and put them aside. His partner leads them to a corner, forces them on their knees, and ties ropes around them. He doesn’t hesitate to throw a punch in Béatrice’s face as revenge for what she’s done to him.

“Leave her alone!” I yell.

The American cocks his gun. “Keep your mouth shut, bitch!”

Béatrice spits blood out of her mouth and scowls at the large man. She checks on Alejandro to see if he’s fine, but his forehead is bleeding, and his nose appears broken. He leans on the wall behind him with his eyes closed. He looks like he’s begging for this madness to stop.

“Where is your Bratva dog?” the gunman asks.

“That’s none of your business!” I bark.

My response enrages him. In a stampede, he marches to the bed, catches a grip of my hair, and holds the gun beneath my jaw.

“I swear, bitch, I’ll shoot you if you don’t give me what I want!” he warns.

I laugh. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I’m laughing with a wicked grin. I find the situation…?entertaining.

“I had the Bratva beat information out of me,” I say and look him dead in the eye. “I know what your deal is. If you wanted me dead, you would have shot me the minute you got into this room!”

I spit at him…?and get a fist to my face.

He ditches his gun to the side and seizes my neck.

He’s squeezing way too hard. I can’t breathe.

I struggle. I batter his chest with my fists.

He keeps on pressing his thumbs against my throat.

I feel my fingers turn cold. I feel my head become heavy.

My eyes roll, and I just see the white ceiling through the glaze of my livid eyes.

I refuse to walk. William tells the man to lower his gun, then he wraps a silk scarf around my neck. I struggle. I fight him. He tightens the grip. I scratch his hands, try to go for his face. I lose consciousness and fall.

So that’s how it happened. At least, I’m pretty sure now. William is responsible for my accident, for my amnesia, for the loss of everything I knew.

The gunman lets me go. I fall back on the bed, inert. I think I hear another gun-cocking sound, but then, a sudden crack echoes between my ears. I hear thumps, grunts. I turn my head to the wall and see only moving shadows.

And then, bang . The shot of a gun. Silence. I close my eyes, focusing on the stillness. Someone lifts me up, holds me. There is warmth, the haze of an embrace.

“Liliana!” I hear a familiar voice call to me.

I can’t move.

“Fuck! Fuck! Goddammit, fuck!”

Is that Alejandro?

“Is she dead?”

Definitely Alejandro.

“She’s stunned,” the same familiar voice responds.

I manage to open my eyes and bend my head a little. It’s Maksim. He’s holding me close to his chest, his hands around my face, trying to wake me.

“Liliana?” he calls.

I nod.

“We need to leave,” he presses.

“How?” I can barely ask.