Infernal: Bite The Bullet (21 page)

If I was feeling things correctly, he was drawing
a... who was I kidding? I had no idea what he was doing. He could be writing his
name there for all I knew.

Soon, all that occupied my thoughts was the
rhythmic pain, the humming in my bones and the soft Ukrainian murmurs that were
so far from his earlier cutting words they were almost a lull. The entire
situation became hypnotic. Konstantyn’s weight anchored me to the bed and the
camera blinked at me. I couldn’t move anymore, numb from the waist down, and
crushed by the pressure of what was going to happen to me.

“Nearly done, Neva,” he said, with that altered
softness that confused me. Between topping up the ink, and setting it to my
skin, his hands were gentle. When he handled me like that, I could almost
forget he was branding me as a sacrifice for some sick ritual.

I could only imagine how this all looked to the
voyeurs devouring my humiliation like rats on a corpse. It would look brutal,
no doubt, with me tied down and Konstantyn’s large body overpowering my slight
frame.

My body shook, the camera blinked, and a tear spilled
over from where I’d been fighting it back, a shaky sound in my throat the only
show of how close I was to breaking. If I wasn’t already broken. My mind and
body were so fractured with pain and fear that I could be in pieces, with only
the tethers of hope stringing me together.

“Neva?” Konstantyn’s voice stirred me.

The buzzing pain had stopped and I groaned,
feeling the burn down my thigh. His palm struck the freshly tattooed area of
skin and I twisted as much as I could to glare at him as fresh tears stung my
eyes with the bolt of pain.

“Get it together,” he said, releasing my hands
from the backs of my legs, only to cuff me to the bed. “You belong to Dante
now.” He unzipped the bag and began packing up his implements.

Tentatively, I stretched my aching legs. Any
relief was short-lived as a flush of pins and needles stabbed and prickled over
my limbs. I lay there on my stomach, cheek to the bare, stained mattress,
waiting for the pain to pass.

“Mariya,” I whispered hoarsely. In spite of
everything, I wanted to warn him. Though it changed nothing, I needed him to
know that he’d sold me out for a lie.

“Shut up,” he barked, and I had to bite down on my
lip to keep from screaming at him. “Don’t get too comfortable,” he said. “The
Seven are assembling as we speak. I’m coming back for you, and when I do, you
best be prepared. Do you understand?”

No. I didn’t understand. How in hell did he expect
me to ‘prepare’ for my own torture? Biting back my frustration, I just glared
at him.

“Be ready for anything,” he said, and as he backed
out the door, the bastard had the gall to wink at me.

He was coming back for me, he’d said, but the
minutes and hours ticked by, measured in cramps and dread thoughts. Mariya had
come back at some point, with a plate of food and a cup of water. Like I could
eat. I hardly dared believe Konstantyn was on my side. He’d tattooed me with
Dante’s mark. I’d heard him shoot Gracie. The good guy didn’t kill the victims.

Where he’d branded me, my ass was raw and
tingling, like I’d scratched at a vicious sunburn, and the solitude was making
me insane. I just wanted it over with, I wanted the waiting to stop. They
needed to get on with whatever they were going to do with me and then leave me
the hell alone. I’d thought I was strong, that I wasn’t crumbling, but
Konstantyn’s presence had widened the fractures in my resolve, and left me
wondering whether I was going to lose my mind before I lost my life.

The lock clunked open and I lifted my head wearily
to see who they’d sent for me this time. It was just Mariya, her face set in
cold beauty that chilled me when she looked my way.

“You must dress. They will come for you soon.”

She unlocked my cuffs enough to bundle me into a
luxurious scarlet silk robe. Her delicate hands smoothed the fabric over my
shoulders, and I felt the stitches of embroidery against my spine.

“What’s on the back?” I asked, trying to twist the
robe around to see. All I could make out were some black lines.

With a tut of irritation, Mariya straightened it
out again and cuffed my hands back together. “It is the ouroboros, symbol of
life and rebirth, the same as you wear on your skin. You won’t be wearing it
for long.”

Like that was some consolation.

She gathered up my untouched plates and left in a
swish of blonde hair. I wasn’t sorry to see her go, but her exit only meant the
bad stuff would be coming soon.

Swamped in thoughts, I rubbed a trembling hand
down my polished skin. That Mariya was here, willingly, was a revelation, and I
wondered just how much of it Konstantyn knew. If he knew at all. He had to.

Curling into my robe, I fought to get a grip on my
nerves, twitching every time someone poked their head around the door of my
cell, but none of them stopped longer than it took to leer at me with crude
suggestions and drunken promises.

I knew their faces. Alexei and the Friar from the
club, with his scarred cheek, came as no surprise, but there were others too,
including a high-ranking politician I recognised from his election posters, and
a doctor I’d met at the morgue when I went to identify Daniel’s body. Was he
the ‘Butcher’ Gracie mentioned?

Knowing that they’d been there, watching me,
manipulating me, all this time, did nothing to calm the paranoia wired into my
brain. Dante said there were seven. He’d also said Konstantyn would replace
Raider. Counting Dante himself, and the four I’d identified still left one
more.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but when Oliver
Dalton’s leering face had appeared at my door it hit me like a sucker-punch.

I ignored him, turning my face to the wall in an
attempt to look unaffected and aloof. No doubt I just looked terrified. That
none of them even bothered to mask their faces spoke volumes about my chances
of ever leaving the place alive.

“Get up.”

I bolted to my feet at the sudden snap, my head whipping
around to find Konstantyn standing at the cell door, keys in hand as he
unlocked the door. I shrank back.

This was it.

Too lost in thought and fake bravado, I hadn’t
heard him coming, and now I wasn’t ready. You couldn’t prepare for something
like this, but I’d been trying, and he’d shot it all to hell by being the one
to take me down.

The door creaked when he pulled it wider for me,
and I stepped forward with my robe gathered around me, refusing to look at him.
If I looked shaken, I wasn’t about to let him mock me for it.

“It’s time.”

“You know, everyone keeps saying that, and it’s
never actually time.” I exhaled, following him out into the tunnel, shivering
at the change in temperature. I hadn’t realised how warm the cell was until I
stepped into the chill of the hallway. Or maybe that was just the ice of terror
creeping up my spine. Even my kneecaps were trembling.

We got three cells down the hall before he turned
on me.

I leapt back, but he caught my chain before I
could stumble too far, and suddenly I was looking up into Konstantyn’s serious,
keyed-up gaze. The green in his dark eyes glittered with something I
recognised. It was fight, and determination, and it was the same look he’d
given me before he’d stepped out to face the police.

“We must hurry. They’re drunk, but they’re not
stupid. We have only minutes before I’m missed and someone discovers I cut the
video feed.”

I knew I was blinking dumbly at him, even when he
removed the cuffs and I rubbed the chafe of metal from my raw skin. My wrists
were bleeding, but I was still staring at Konstantyn like he was the devil in a
halo.

He glanced over at me once, in concern, then
pulled a big bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the cell we’d stopped
in front of. I managed to shuffle through my nervous shock to peer inside.

The cell was empty but for the two bodies rolled in
plastic sheeting and the bullet holes in the wall. My gorge rose. Everyone
knows that shape. We see it on films, in TV shows, but in life, knowing someone
was dead in there, that someone I knew was dead in there... Fuck, I was going
to be sick.

Konstantyn moved with fast purpose, and I watched
him with morbid fascination. There was no blood. Very clean, like he’d promised
Alexei. He released the knots binding the plastic on one of the bundles, and it
rolled away with a sickening thud.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Gracie, it’s time. Are you ready?”

My eyes popped back open at Konstantyn’s words and
only got wider at the sound of Gracie’s voice.

“God am I ever ready,” she said.

Gracie was alive, if a bit roughed up. She
struggled to her feet, dabbing a finger against her swollen, bloodied lip, then
winced, making a show of breathing that thrust her enhanced chest out. “I
thought you’d never come back. I couldn’t breathe in there, not knowing I was
lying next to a goddamned corpse.” She aimed a kick at the other roll. Raider
didn’t move or grunt. He was dead for real. Gracie cast me a bright smile and
fluffed her hair, and I smiled shakily back.

Konstantyn cut off the nice
wow-you’re-really-not-dead
reunion with his gruff voice. “You remember the way out?”

Gracie turned towards him with a frown that looked
like she was struggling with everything. I couldn’t blame her. He was scary,
even when he was on your side.

“I think so,” she said.

He growled and moved around me, scouting the
hallway. “That’s not good enough.”

“I’ll find it.” Gracie said resolutely, meeting
his eyes.

After a moment he nodded, and began splitting up
the keys, dividing them between us. I clutched my bundle rigidly, frozen to the
spot, awaiting his command. I wasn’t about to do anything to hinder our escape.

“Open the cells, get them out, now.” Konstantyn’s
demand rushed us into fumbling action, trying different keys in the locks until
they clicked open and those victims who were strong enough shambled out, like
corporeal ghosts, into the hallway.

I unlocked another cell, peered in, and was about
to pull out again when I noticed the small figure huddled in the corner closest
to the door. I knew her. Not well, but it was the skinny girl from my first
audition. She was in a bad way, pressed up against the wall like she could
disappear into it. I knew from experience that didn’t work.

“Can you walk?” I asked softly, crouching down by
the door and trying to find her eyes. She finally looked up at me, warily
ascertaining my trustworthiness. She must have seen something in my gaze that
told her everything she needed to know, because she shoved shakily to her feet.

I reached to lend her my strength.

“Walk? I’ll fucking dance my way out of this
cesspit if I have to,” she said.

I chuckled weakly and wrapped an arm around her
bony waist to lead her out to where the walking wounded were gathering in the
tunnel. They all looked dazed, some blinking in the light after being left so long
in relative darkness.

Konstantyn emerged from a cell with an unconscious
woman in his arms. At least I hoped she was unconscious. With the way she was
lolling I wasn’t even sure she was alive.

“She’ll only slow us down,” Gracie snarked,
breaking into my own fears over carrying a corpse out with us.

Konstantyn cut her a glare and shifted the woman
gently. “We’re not leaving anyone behind. Now, we go. Show us the way.”
 He was rigid, a wall of dominating tension, and I didn’t blame Gracie for
the nervous look she shot him as she led us around a dark corner and through a
maze of tunnels.

I could hear the rumble of the trains through the
damp walls. We were so close to civilisation, and yet we were still in Hell,
the path to salvation painfully slow-going between the injured and the drugged
and the dazed. Eventually we passed some bright yellow high-voltage signs and
metal vents that warmed the air over our heads, and Gracie slowed our
conga-line of fear.

“I don’t remember this place.” Her voice trembled
and the uncertainty in it shot a warning shiver down my spine.

“What do you mean you don’t remember?”
Konstantyn’s voice was a lash, and Gracie cowered, trying to recover her tongue
when he was glowering at her.

“I think we should have taken the left back there,
instead of the right. Or maybe this was the way. Shit, I can’t think. Not
enough oxygen in that goddamn plastic burrito you wrapped me in.”

She scrubbed her scalp, scratched at the insides
of her elbows and curled in on herself. Panic showed in the whites of her eyes,
while the other victims merely leaned against the walls looking defeated.

I refused to slump with them. I could hear the
outside, and I wanted to get to it so badly, I could practically taste the
River Thames.

“You told me you knew the way,” Konstantyn
growled.

“Excuse me, but I was higher than the Empire State
at the time, and carrying a two hundred pound weight on my shoulders. I was
afraid for my life. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the landmarks.” Gracie
hissed at him, her teeth bared in the fever of her fear, and my heart clenched.

Konstantyn loomed over her, with the girl still
limp and unconscious in his arms.

“You don’t find us that manhole, and we’re all
dead.”

Frowning at him, I left my charge leaning against
the wall and went to stand by Gracie. It was a show of solidarity, when he was
being an ass to the one person who could get us out. When his brows lowered in
my direction, I resisted the urge to huddle in my robe, and stood my ground.

“You’re not helping, Konstantyn. Knock it off.” I
rubbed a hand down Gracie’s arm, stopping her scratching tic and making her
look at me. “Gracie, just take it down a notch. You’ve done this before.” I
believed in her. I had to, or I was going to lie down with the others and give
up.