Page 47 of Thrall
“Oh,trustis a very strong word,” Mila said. “But this is the best lead we’ve gotten so far. And. Well. I’d love not to kill you.”
Lucy wondered if her bar for compliments had just gotten very low, or if that was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in the past several days. “Thanks,” she said. “I’d love not to die.”
Mila cleared her throat and looked up at the sky, which had started to take on the orange of late afternoon. “Let’s get you some food,” she said. “I think we’re in for another long night.”
“Oh—I almost forgot,” Lucy said. She’d had an idea back in the library, before she met the vampires. And she was pretty sure Mila was going to like this one. “I think I know how to make that long night a bit easier.”
Surprisingly, Mila did not like the idea.
“I don’t get you,” Lucy said. “I thought you’d like some help making sure I stay put.”
“I would,” Mila said, from her spot on the bed. She had, reluctantly, agreed to Lucy’s plan. She’d been buried in instructional YouTube videos since they arrived back at the dorm. “But this is a first for me, as you might imagine. I’d like to make sure I don’t cut off the circulation in both of your wrists in the process.”
“I don’t imagine anything,” Lucy said honestly. “For all I know, you’ve got people tied up in here all the time.” Or maybe not all the time, but at least once or twice.
Then again, as far as she knew, Mila had only had two long-term relationships: a doomed childhood romance, and a lengthy commitment with Revenge. Neither left much time for tying anybody up anywhere.
With a loud exhale, Mila set about tying the restraints to her headboard. Lucy frowned over her shoulder. “Are those neckties? I thought we’d be using ropes.”
“Ropes chafe, Marquis de Sade,” Mila said. “I’m trying to keep you from leaping out the window, not trying to peel all the skin off your wrists. You’re lucky that I have about a thousand thrift-store ties from my sophomore-year suit phase.”
“Technically in this situation, you’re the Marquis de Sade,” Lucy said, allowing herself a brief moment to picture Mila’s suit phase. “It’s getting dark. Should you lock me in now? It might take time.”
“Dude.” Mila tied off the burgundy tie on the left to match the navy on the right. “If I promise to tie you up ten minutes before sunset, will you sit still and eat something? I’m just going to watch one more video.”
Lucy handed Mila the vegetarian burrito that she’d picked up for her before turning to her own double-steak. True to her word, Mila had returned her focus to her phone, but she looked up at Lucy periodically to make sure she was doing as she was told. Lucy bit back a sigh, and tucked into her burrito. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
She’d been hungry when she ordered it—at least she thought she’d been hungry. But now that she was eating it, it felt gristly and overcooked against her teeth. The muscle fibers felt like rubber. She would have eaten around the meat, but the sour cream, the lettuce, the cheese—it mostly just tasted cold. Only the steak, unpleasant as it was, had any real flavor.
She grimaced. Laurentius had said something back at the library, something about Hiro’s groupies craving rare meat for a few weeks. Was real food going to be this unpleasant until she rode the infection out?
Well. Not all real food was unpleasant. She could think of one thing that could make her mouth water. That thick, marbled, raw filet at Falls Quad Café the other day. And the faint sheen of red against the white butcher paper.
Lucy put her half-eaten meal back in the bag and withdrew her phone. That was enough eating for the night. It was time to turn her attention to something marginally more pleasant: the article Hiro had shared that was currently waiting in her inbox.
The Mountain Villa Massacre:
The Strange Case of the Volkov Family.
Do you like true crime?
If so, you’re not alone. Open your podcast app, and you’ll find dozens of murders and mysteries awaiting you, from polished prestige media outlets and wide-eyed amateurs alike. You might be forgiven for assuming this boom is a recent development. But long before there were podcasts, humanity was captivated by the macabre. In the Christmas season of 1916, less than one year before the Bolsheviks would change the future of Russia forever, one such case captivated Russia’s upper class.
The story is this: A few days after Christmas, 1916, the corpses of the Volkov family were discovered in their winter home. The father, Andrei. The mother, Anna. The daughter, Sofiya. The eldest son, Alexei. Their injuries, of course, were strangely minimal, given the condition of their bodies. They lay neatly and calmly at the nearly bloodless scene. If not for the two small punctures at their necks, they would not have looked injured at all.
It was a fascination for the aristocracy, for a while. The Volkovs had a profile just high enough to cause panic. But what fascinated everyone most was the missing son, Ivan. He had been twenty-five years old, fit and strong, a loyal advocate for his father and brother. No one wanted to believe he had done it. Though if he hadn’t, where had he gone?
But the case never entered the annals of history’s great unsolved mysteries. In November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution blanketed the aristocracy in fresh blood. No one remembered the Volkovs by the time everything was scrubbed clean. And Ivan never returned to remind them.
Lucy closed the tab. So perhaps a vampire had come to the Volkovs’ mountain villa that night, had turned Vanya and killed the rest. Or maybe Vanya had already been turned elsewhere. Perhaps he was the stranger in the villa, making sure none of his family would outlive him.
And yet the people who had known Ivan Volkov didn’t want to believe he’d done it. Maybe the vampire wasn’t anything like the man. Maybe in life, Vanya really had been the loyal brother and son everyone thought he was. Or maybe he’d never been that man at all. He died young and handsome. People never look at young and handsome men and correctly imagine what they can do.
“All right. Fifteen minutes until sunset, if you want to get set up over here,” Mila said. “You really don’t have to do this. I’ll be up all night watching you. I won’t let you go anywhere.”
Lucy set her phone down and decided not to say anything about the article for now. She wasn’t sure if she had gained any new information, really—just more questions.
“I trust you,” she said. “But I want you to be able to, like…blink. Or get a glass of water. And I’ll sleep better if I know I’m not about to climb out a window.”
