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“What?”

“He’s a cop, right? A dedicated one, even, according to you. We’re monitoring his activities. He knows you’re gone, obviously. But there’s nothing on file. No report, no inquiry, nothing.”

My eyes begin to burn all over again. I wish it was from anger. It isn’t. “Why are you doing this to me?” I choke out, my voice coming out thick and aching.

All he does is shake his head.

“Leonid,” I plead, trying my damnedest to incite some buried humanity in his cold, black heart.

He doesn’t even look at me. Instead, he whistles sharply, summoning his dogs. He turns away. “The guards will escort you to a room. They’ll be keeping an eye on you. Please, don’t do anything stupid. I’ll be back in the morning,” he says on his way away, away, and around the corner.

“You can’t just leave me here!” I cry out, storming after him.

It’s no use. He doesn’t even look back. The doors slam shut in my face.

The silence that bears down on me is painful. It fills the nave like floodwater, rushing into every corner the echo of the slam vacates. I choke on air. I turn away from the doors, head shaking, and pace back and forth. My hands raise, like I can pound my way out to the other side of the wood. Yet I know there’s no use.

I’ve been largely independent since I left home for college at eighteen. Being alone isn’t new to me. But this isn’t mere solitude; it isn’t anything I chose. There’s nothing about this situation that factors in my agency at all. And I know that he hasn’t left me alone, technically. With the faint shuffle of weight on the other side, and the whining creak of hinges when the doors reopen just for the very men who’d dragged me back from my narrow escape to enter, I’m disturbingly aware of the fact.

I jerk backwards. One of them has the audacity to roll his eyes at me.

“Come with us,” he says.

My pulse racing, I stumble back another step.

His hand drops to the holster that’s prominently strapped to his hip. “Move.”

My legs move of their own accord, propelled by some innate sense of self-preservation—or maybe just fear. It’s impossible not to be terrified when two men, who barely speak beyond brusquely-delivered instructions, flank me towards and up a narrow staircase. All I can think is: This is how I die. I failed his test. I spoke out of turn. Now, I’m going to die. They’re going to shove me from the roof like they did during the Ottoman era. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to d—

A heavy door is pushed open, and I’m forced inside the room with a hand on each elbow. Behind me, the door slams shut before I’m even done yelping in surprise.

Belatedly, I realize I’ve been deposited in the church attic.

It takes even longer to process what I’m seeing, though I suspect all the time in the world couldn’t help me accept it. My brain glitches. I stare at the bed by a romantic window that stares back at me, left open. The wrought-iron frame has been decorated in white linens that flutter beneath the breeze’s coaxing. There’s a glass of water on a nightstand. Beside it rests a stack of books—that surely aren’t for me. Except for how I suspect they might be.

What the hell?

Did Leonid set this up?

Who else could have—a well-meaning guard? That doesn’t seem likely, given the callous indifference they’d relocated me with. But if it was Leonid… Why would he do this? Guilt? No, that doesn’t feel true.

I want to scream.

And I know it’ll do no good to let myself. There are undoubtedly men on the other side of this door who’ll probably restrain me again. I can’t take that again. Just thinking about it forces me to sink down onto the edge of the mattress and press the heels of my palms into my eye-sockets until I see stars. They come away wet.

I’m not stupid. I’m too exhausted, too wrung out, too utterly depleted to fight the doubt that lodges itself behind my sternum like a splinter.

No Missing Persons report has been filed. I can consider that he hadn’t said the words with malicious intent—but they’d been cruel, and he’d known it. He’d wanted to sow doubt in my mind. He wanted me to believe there were worse villains out there, and to consider that I perhaps come from one.

What the hell am I meant to believe?

What do I do now?

Chapter 9 - Leonid

After my brothers had left last night, I’d had my men set up the bedroom in the attic for her.

I hadn’t considered, in that moment, anything beyond wanting her to be as comfortable as I could make her without letting her go.