Page 97 of Tamed Enemy
But I’ve promised Cole.
I won’t cut.
I stare through the two-way mirror. I could go into that boardroom right now. I could sink a knife into Tarasov’s throat. Into his thigh, like I did to Pyotr. Into his arm and dig deep, let the bleeding out take longer. I could end his life tonight, end the con right now. We could send everyone home and be done with the charade.
But there’s one thing I want more than I want to use my scalpel. I wantjustice. I want Tarasov to suffer for everything he’s done. For that, I’ll wait.
I shove the kit back in my duffel, pushing it all the way to the bottom.
The door to the observation room opens just as I pull my hand free. Cole walks in with a brown paper bag. The smell ofChinese food hits me like a muddy towel before he sits down. “I can’t eat,” I say as he sits beside me.
“You can.”
I shake my head and reach for a keyboard like I have something important to type. But Cole shoves the keyboard out of reach, using the same gesture to tug me onto his lap.
My mind leaps back to the first dinner we shared as a married couple. At least he doesn’t have me in handcuffs this time.
He reaches around me to pull two white cardboard containers from the bag. A pair of chopsticks follows, bamboo wrapped in paper. He breaks them apart with an efficient snap.
“Cole…” I say.
He doesn’t bother answering. He just raises a bite of glistening beef to my lips.
“I’m not—” I start, but he slips the food past my lips.
Hungry. That’s what I was going to say.I’m not hungry.
But that’s a lie. I’m suddenly ravenous. I can’t chew the meat fast enough. I barely manage to swallow it down, and then my mouth is open like a baby bird’s asking for more.
Cole’s chuckle vibrates up my spine. He alternates feeding me beef with broccoli and kung pao chicken, taking occasional bites for himself. His arms stay tight around me. I’m sheltered. I’m safe.
For thirty precious minutes, we’re almost a normal couple sharing almost a normal meal at the end of almost a normal workday.
Then we go back to staring into the boardroom and waiting for our captive to break.
40
COLE
Forty-eight hours down.
The second day is a repeat of the first, minus Fiona Moran’s cameo appearance and the bombshell of Pyotr’s confession. The cubicle workers arrive. Megan takes her place at the receptionist desk. The Sawgrass guards free Tarasov from his hood, give him water and a bare minimum of calories, then take him to the john. Once he’s chained back to the table, Richardson and Bennett start hammering away.
At first, Tarasov stares into the middle distance.
But after a break mid-morning for another bottle of water, Tarasov finds a new wave of energy. He begins speaking in Russian, responding to every question with a sing-song answer none of us can understand.
Kate finally captures some of it on her phone and runs it through a translator. “Feckin’ gombeen,” she says. “It’s alove poem. Aleksandr Pushkin.” She reads from the app. “He dedicated it to the woman he loved, Anna Kern.”
Snorting with disgust, Kate transmits the information to Richardson and Bennett. She feeds them some of the translation she finds online, lines about phantoms and sorrow, about tears and love and life.
Unfortunately for Tarasov, Corey Bennett is not a fan of poetry. The interrogator slams his fist onto the table, knocking over Tarasov’s half-empty bottle of water. “Enough of this crap! Nobody gives a fuck what woman you lost.”
Tarasov gets a crafty gleam in his eye. “The poem is not about a woman I have lost. It is about a woman I will win. It is about my wife.”
He’s talking about Kate.Mywife. I consider shutting down this game right now. All it would take is a single well-timed eye strike or an elbow strike to the temple, a hammer fist to the side of his head.
Tarasov destroyed Lone Wolf by releasing my indictment for fraud. He turned Mr. and Mrs. A against me—a loss that hurts a thousand times more than losing Shannon ever did. Tarasov still holds that video from Kynk—one post of it anywhere, and what’s left of my reputation will be shredded forever, not to mention Kate’s illusion of privacy.
