Page 48 of The Pakhan's Captive
I want to hide, but I am frozen. I am a mother whose child has been kidnapped, and I am standing in a monster’s house, leaking for him. The self-loathing is a bitter, oily taste in the back of my throat.
Then my brain registers what he just said.
I pull back so fast I nearly crack my head against the wall. “What is wrong with you?” My voice has gone high and thin and I don’t care. “Get away from me.”
He doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t move.
“Get away from me!” I put both hands on his chest and shove. This time I put everything behind it and he takes one step back and I am already moving, already turning for the door, because coming here was a mistake.
It was a catastrophic, soul-crushing, desperate mistake. Theo is out there, scared and alone, and I am standing in this room letting this monster breathe on me until my own body betrays my son. The shame is a physical weight, a sickening heat that makes me want to claw my own skin off.
My eyes are burning. I will not cry in front of him again. I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing me shatter. I reach the doorframe, my hand trembling as I grip the wood.
“What makes you think,” his voice comes from behind me, still that same quiet that carries across any room, “that if I find the boy, I won’t kill him too?”
I stop walking.
The words “kill him” go through me like a physical blade, shearing through the lust and the shame and the exhaustion. For a heartbeat, the air in the room feels like it’s been replaced byshards of glass. My vision whites out. The tears finally tip over, hot and silent, tracking through the dirt and blood on my cheeks.
But behind the tears, something else rises. It’s huge. It’s clarifying. It’s a rage so cold and so absolute that it feels like a religious experience.
You think you can threaten him?I think, staring at the grain of the wood under my fingers.You think you can talk about my son that way?
I turn around.
He’s standing in the center of the room, hands loose at his sides, his face that unreadable, beautiful mask of cruelty. He looks like a god deciding which mortal to crush next. I look at him across the space, this man I have hated and feared, and I make a decision that I can never, ever take back.
The “Mara” who lived in Budapest is dead. The “Lena” who ran from Moscow is gone. There is only a mother now.
“You won’t kill him,” I say. My voice isn’t shaking anymore. It’s as steady as a sniper’s aim.
“And why is that?”
“Because he’s your son.”
Your move, you asshole,I think, my heart finally steadying into a slow, rhythmic drumbeat of war.Save him or kill us both. But don’t you dare threaten him again.
12
RAZVAN
Did I just hear that right?
My son..?! What?
I go completely mute.
She’s standing there and her words are still in the air between us and I’m standing in the center of the room with every coherent thought I’ve ever had evacuating my skull at the same time. A son. She has a son. She ran from my bed five years ago with my drive and my phone and apparently also my?—
What the actual fuck?
She’s watching me. I’m not moving and I’m not speaking and the room is so quiet I can hear the clock on the mantle ticking and I cannot make my body do a single useful thing.
“He’s four?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s stripped of the “Wrath,” stripped of the polish, stripped of everything but a raw, hollowed-out shock.
She hesitates. I can see the gears turning, calculating if the truth is still her best weapon. Her jaw works, and then she repeats, “He’ll be five next month.”
I finally do the math. It takes half a second and hits me like a physical blow to the throat.
