Nick shrugged. “No. But she is an excellent cook. It seems a waste.”
“You should have thought of that before you brought her here,” Zhoglo chided. “But it is better that the loss be painful for you. One cannot have something for nothing, no? Sacrifice is necessary to obtain something of value. It makes you value it all the more. My trust, my confidence—they have value, Arkady. Incalculable value.”
“Yes, Vor,” he muttered.
“This shall be your sacrifice,” Zhoglo said briskly. “Look upon it as an initiation ceremony. After tonight, you will be one of us.” Zhoglo leaned over, and slapped him heartily on the back. His hand thudded against Nick’s body, jarring him as if he were made out of cement.
“You shall see,” Zhoglo encouraged. “It will be worth it.”
Chapter
9
If she kept her mind on a narrow wavelength and charged forward in a state of constant activity, she could function.
Drain the marinade. Roll the beef in the peppers and spices. Cut radish roses. Trim yellow bits from the parsley sprigs. Peel and shape the baby carrots into perfect, uniformly smooth bullet shapes—
Wrong turn. No bullets. She pinwheeled in her head, seeking her delicate balance again. Back onto that narrow track. The Task at Hand.
Go, go, go. Cook a fabulous meal while a cold-eyed thug held a gun on her and stared at her body like he wanted to take a bite out of it. Mr. Big was keeping them both company.
In this bizarre context, Marla’s diaphanous peasant top had morphed into a slutty thing that barely covered Becca’s butt cheeks. Her nipples showed right through. So did her pubic hair. She could be wearing a feather boa and tit tassels for all it hid. A clove of garlic fell from her numb fingers, and she stared down at it, unwilling to flash any bare, sensitive bits to retrieve it.
God, how she missed her underwear.
Mr. Big scooped up the garlic for her. Everything he did made a mess and cost her precious time, but she couldn’t think of dismissing him. She would start to gibber and scream if he left her alone. He was the closest thing to an ally that she had in this house of horrors.
She gave him low-risk, busywork jobs to perform, just to keep him close to her. His eyes had that flat, dead look, mouth tight and sealed, the look he’d had before he’d dragged her upstairs and—
No. She wasn’t thinking about that. Stop. Ignore it. All of it. Especially the other man who crouched like a fat spider in the salon, waiting for his dinner.
She was actually quite good at ignoring terrible things. She’d gone through intensive training when she was twelve, when Dad got sick.
Dwelling on that episode of her life was a big screaming no-no, in terms of mood management. But she was miles beyond mood management right now. She was hanging on to sanity by her fingernails.
Just like she had back then. She recognized that sick ache. Grief. Fear. They were hard to tease apart. Hell of a time to be thinking about the bad old days. Maybe her life was flashing before her eyes. She was going to miss her life.
OK, back to the past.
Mom had forgotten that she even had kids, she’d been so focused on taking care of Dad. Becca didn’t blame her for it. She’d been the oldest child, nine years older than three-year-old Josh, ten years older than two-year-old Carrie. She’d taken over cooking, groceries, diapers. She’d kept the little kids bathed, gotten them off to sleep, heated Carrie’s bottles, cut the crusts off Josh’s toast, kept them occupied so they wouldn’t be a bother.
She’d soon discovered that being busy helped. It left no time to think about Dad lying in the bed with the morphine drip, that hollow look in his eyes that told her the morphine wasn’t enough. No time to dwell on bedsores, bedpans, the smell of disinfectant. Mom’s haggard face.
Becca focused instead on getting oatmeal into Carrie’s wriggling body, peanut butter sandwiches and scrambled eggs into Josh’s. Getting the laundry done, the dishes washed, the garbage taken out. Busy, busy, busy. It helped. It really did.
By the time it was over and the stash of funeral casseroles had all been eaten, Becca was too deep into the frantic busyness habit to stop. Just as well, too, because Mom fell apart definitively after Dad’s death. She was used up. There was nothing left for the rest of them.
From then on, it fell to Becca to keep it together. She learned to write checks and pay bills at the age of twelve. When she was thirteen, she learned the dire consequences of forgetting to pay property taxes for two years in a row. She put off creditors, dealt with the bills herself so that the past due notices wouldn’t send Mom off on a crying jag.
Or sink her into an even darker mood, when she would sit on her bed staring at the bottle of morphine capsules. Dad had hoarded a lethal dose of them early in his illness to have a way out if it got too bad. He’d never used them, but it had comforted him that they were there.
It didn’t comfort Becca. She combed the house for them when her mother was out, hoping to flush them down into the sewer where they belonged. In the end, her efforts were in vain. Terrible things happened no matter how prepared you were.
No amount of scurrying and effort could stop them. No mercy.
Dad’s stash hadn’t gone to waste, depending on your point of view. By the time Mom swallowed those pills, Becca had become expert at a lot of things, and seeing things from everybody else’s point of view was one of them.
She understood Mom’s despair. She understood Josh’s fighting, his problems in school. Carrie’s clinginess, bedwetting, nightmares, anxiety attacks. She understood the bank’s regretful necessity to foreclose. Mortgages had to be paid. That was how the merciless world worked.
She understood their relatives, none of whom wanted to deal with the financial and emotional can of worms that was her orphaned family.
She even understood the point of view of the life insurance people, when they’d informed her that the policy was void in the case of suicide.
Well, of course. Any reasonable person could see why. Becca was a reasonable person. She’d been reasonable about giving up going to college, in spite of the scholarship she’d been offered. It was flattering that they’d offered it, but it paid only tuition. Not for a roof over Josh and Carrie’s heads. Not for food for three, pediatricians, school clothes, sneakers, and all the rest.
Yeah, she understood everybody’s point of view but her own. She couldn’t afford a point of view. It was a window she didn’t dare peer out of. She was terrified of what she might see.
Anyway, fuck it. Remembering all that wasn’t going to help her now. Her eyes caught the gun-toting guy leering at her. He licked his lips. Rearranged his testicles.
Oh, God. Her stomach flopped, turned upside down.
No choice but to face it, straight on. Stark reality. As bad as it got. Like the day she found Mom on her bedroom floor.
What had happened upstairs with Mr. Big had leveled her defenses. Neurotic though they might be, they’d been all she had. They were in ruins. Colors were overbright, noises jangly, too loud or else fading out. The faces of the men in the kitchen stood out in high contrast. Carved by shadows sharp as knives, as black as ink. She glimpsed horrible things in the depths of their eyes.
“Keep it together,” Mr. Big whispered, shoving a paper towel into her hand. “Mop up your face. Stop sniveling. Get ready to serve wine and the appetizers.”
Sniveling? Snotty bastard. She dabbed her eyes and pressed the paper towel against her mouth. The anger focused her. And he knew it.
He stuck his hand into his pocket and rummaged till he came up with…her pink lipstick. Of all things.
“Showtime again. Don’t