Page 28 of The Crimson Lily

I approach him, slowly, despite Béatrice holding on to my arm.

I look at him more closely, noticing additional traces around his neck.

It looks like he was strangled with a rope or a chain, or maybe bare hands.

Something in a dark corner of my mind whispers to me, rustling about how pretty these bruises are, but how they look so much better on me.

“Where is William?” I ask, my voice lower than usual.

Mr. Zhang laughs at me. I don’t like that. Before I can do anything, Maksim slips between him and me and gives him a harsh fist to the jaw.

Ouch. That must have hurt. Something in me enjoys that idea.

Yi spits another chunk of blood. “William is long gone! Your stupid dagger is long gone!”

What? My eyes snap wide open. The dagger is gone?

I check for Maksim’s reaction; he just gives me a slow, confirming blink.

William is gone. William—the man who tried to kill me before—is gone.

And so is his stupid dagger of glass. All of this—this mission, the risk of putting my life in danger, the two deaths—for… ?nothing?

There is just one thing I have to know, and if Yi is to be my only gateway to information, I need to ask him now.

“What the fuck is my part in all this?” I roar.

Yi Zhang simply laughs. He laughs and laughs until he has to cough from the blood in his throat. His raucous cackle ends in a grin.

“Ah, I understand now,” he says, slurping his own blood and saliva. “You’re the bitch with amnesia!”

He shouldn’t have said that. Maksim hits him hard in the stomach. Mr. Zhang screams and yelps.

“You’re the bitch everyone keeps talking about,” he rasps. “Everyone up the chain.”

“What do you mean?” I demand an answer, ready with knives.

He laughs again and again. A twisted laugh that starts to get on my nerves. I want my Bratva dog to beat it out of him.

“Oh, this goes far deeper than you can possibly imagine,” Yi explains with a crazed smile. “You’re caught up in a war, and the Bratva dragged you with them!”

“What war?” Man, I am losing my patience. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The war the Syndicate is winning,” he replies, slowly. “Because the Syndicate always wins.”

The Syndicate? What the fuck is that? What the hell is this man talking about? I look to Maksim, to Béatrice, who are both as clueless as I am.

“What does all that have to do with me, with the dagger, and with William?” I ask Mr. Zhang the last question I’ll ever ask him.

“The dagger is a key, and you were the keyholder. Your job was to keep the dagger safe, and you did, and the Syndicate thanks you for that.”

Fuck. The safe. It all comes crashing down on my shoulders.

I designed that stupid safe, that complex puzzle box William cherished.

That explains how I knew everything about it.

But what the fuck does that mean? What is the Syndicate, and what is it to me?

I am petrified, caught in my own thoughts, in my own foolish attempts to make sense of all this.

Maksim flicks his chin at me to catch my attention. “Are you done?” he asks.

I just nod. I don’t have any more questions. I am in shock. William escaped. The Kinzhal Strastey vanished with him. Now, there’s even this weird-ass Syndicate in the picture, whatever that is. We are all puppets of a grotesque show bigger than us.

I am hauled back to reality by Béatrice, who pulls on my arm.

Maksim faces Mr. Zhang, his big hands around the captive’s face.

I only hear Yi scream. I see Maksim’s elbows peek out on his sides, as if he’s holding Zhang’s head and does something atrocious to it.

I hear the sound of squeezed flesh between Zhang’s cries. I don’t see anything else.

Béatrice runs upstairs with me on the leash of her arm.

Together, we go through the entire house to collect all my things.

We stuff everything in my suitcase and head into the streets of Paris.

I don’t have time to say goodbye to Maksim, though right now, I am in a catatonic state I can’t overcome.

Béatrice fiddles with her phone. Two minutes later, a taxi pulls up to us, and we drive off into the night.

It’s pitch-black darkness when the taxi drops us off beneath a large rectangular building.

We are outside of Paris, in a banlieue called Villeneuve-la-Garenne.

I stand still for a minute, looking at this tall construction that looks like a Lego piece.

We pass underneath an arch that leads us to a square, where I notice three more of these buildings surrounding us.

Béatrice opens a glass door that leads into a small hallway. We step into the two-person, or four-children, elevator and reach the eighth floor. I follow her until we face a reddish-brown door. Before she opens it, she looks at me and sighs.

“My mother and brother are sleeping,” she whispers, and I immediately understand she wants me to be silent. “Let’s go directly to my room.”

We enter an apartment with no lights on.

Béatrice takes off her shoes and motions for me to follow her in the dark.

She holds her phone’s flashlight as she leads the way.

I carry my suitcase by the handle with both of my hands so it won’t make a sound.

I see a few closed doors before we reach her bedroom, which is lit by tiny Christmas lights that adorn her bed’s headboard.

There’s a desk to my left, a bookshelf to my right, and a giant pillow sprawled out on the floor.

I want to sleep on it. The wallpaper has these cute and delicate strawberries scattered all over in all sizes.

This is definitely the bedroom of a younger Béatrice.

She jumps into her pajamas, and I do the same.

We sneak to the bathroom to brush our teeth together in complete silence, but we both burst into laughter simultaneously.

The events have just caught up with our minds.

We giggle, cry, panic a little. Her bed is just large enough to welcome the both of us.

We hold each other for a little while, rocking ourselves to sleep.

When I hear Béatrice’s faint snores, I roll to my side, tucking my hands under my chin.

I think of Maksim in this moment, feeling the heartache again.

I have a few tears waiting to swirl out of my eyes.

I don’t let them. I’m not going to cry for something that never was and never will be.