I slipped past the door and continued on. No one shouted at me. My stealthy reputation was intact. The next opening was a makeshift office set up in an efficiency unit, and I almost sobbed when I saw a telephone sitting plain as you please on the desk, along with a sleek new laptop and a set of instruction manuals for a bookkeeping program and Excel.
Slipping in and shutting the door, I picked up the phone and depressed the disconnect. A dial tone buzzed and I punched in 0.
“Da?”
That was most definitely not an operator, unless the operator was a three-hundred-pound man with a smoker’s rasp and a cacophony of pop music in the background.
“Hello?” I said.
“Da? ”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Operator,” I said loudly into the phone, “I need an outside line.”
“Who are you? You whores can’t use the telephones. ”
This wasn’t getting me anywhere, clearly, and I was about to hang up and start trying random numbers when the door banged open. Ekaterina and Peter stood there. Peter had an old-model stun gun in his hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ekaterina demanded.
“Calling for a pizza?” I said. “That Valium macaroni really left something to be desired, let me tell you. I’m a growing girl.”
“The phones are wired for internal calls only,” said Ekaterina. “You think we’d leave a means to call for help so close to the hands of your kind? You Western women all think you’re entitled to a white knight, someone to save you from the harsh realities of this world.” She jabbed her finger at me. “Where is my brother?”
“Dreaming a little dream back in my suite,” I said.
Ekaterina snarled. “If you’ve hurt him…”
I held up my hands. “Relax. He’s fine. Concussed, but fine. Far better than he deserves to be. Listen, do me a favor and spare the lecture on my un-whore-like behavior? My head hurts enough as it is.”
Ekaterina gave me a cold smile, all perfect, gleaming teeth. “Very well.”
Peter depressed the trigger of the stun gun and the darts arced out and landed in my side. Just a small sting, and then I was on the floor, every muscle seizing, pain dropping a black curtain over my vision.
As I felt hands grab me under the shoulders and start to drag, I thought that I hadn’t really expected Ekaterina to shoot me. I was going to have to do something about those assumptions of mine.
CHAPTER 15
I woke up on a cold cement floor, curled in the fetal position. Everything hurt, but at least I appeared to be reasonably intact. I rolled onto my back, seeing nothing but a plaster ceiling with a stain that looked like Fidel Castro’s head. A look to the left gave me a windowless brick wall scratched with graffiti and a look to the right gave me a door of heavy-duty mesh with a lock.
Another cage. This was getting old real fast.
“You’re awake.” I saw shoes, male, Gucci. Very posh, and not a speck of dirt on them. I raised my head with difficulty. Getting Tasered is a lot like having six shots of tequila in a row and then beating your head against a wall. Unpleasant at the time, one hell of a hangover after the fact.
“More or less,” I said. “For certain values of awake.”
“That was a nice move with the clock radio. You honestly did take me by surprise. Trouble, just like Ekaterina said.”
The face that belonged to the Gucci came clear. Grigorii had a row of Steri-Strips on his temple, but otherwise appeared unscathed. The bastard.
“That would be an accurate assessment,” I said.
“My sister is usually accurate in matters of business,” Grigorii said. He crouched down to my level as I managed to sit up, feeling all of my muscles scream. “But she defers to me on matters of discipline. Tell me, do you feel you deserve it?”
“Dude, your people kidnapped me out of my fucking shoes and shoved me in a shipping container straight to one of the seven hells. What do you think?”
He chuckled. He really was eerily beautiful, like some sort of Tolkien creature that lived for thousands of years and lost all human feeling because of it. “We weren’t properly introduced before. I am Grigorii Belikov. I run this compound, and I am your only hope of staying alive long enough to regret fighting me off. How do you do?”
“I noticed you left out rat bastard and witch from that resume. And a lot better if you’d let me out of here,” I said.
“Ah. But you already knew I was a witch, for you’re a were.” He tsk ed at me. “I’m afraid I cannot allow you freedom … Joanne, is it?”
“That’ll do for now.”
Grigorii sighed. “You see, I run a very large and profitable operation here, one that turns on the good behavior of my girls. If they disobey, they become … less useful. But not useless.”
“I guess it’s the octagon for me, eh?” I said, trying to be cheerful even though I was aching and freezing. The dress and shoes were gone, and I was wearing a ragged, oversized gray T-shirt and what the good Lord gave me. My feet were bare and my hair was still damp enough to cause shivers all through me.
“You’re far too pretty to be torn apart,” said Grigorii. “No, you’ve merely been moved to a … specialized section of our enterprise. Sometimes there is a customer who has special needs, and you are here to accommodate him.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that. It was sinister even without the clipped British delivery and Grigorii’s creepy smile.
“Special needs … we’re not talking, like, wheelchair accessibility here, are we?”
“Astute
