Semua Bab A Prey For My Enemy: Bab 11 - Bab 20

_Tatiana_He’d found me.I backed away from the door, one hand still over my mouth, my breathing shallow and frantic. Smething shifted near my foot.I froze.My heel knocked lightly against it, and before I could understand what I was seeing, I bent and caught the object before it could strike the floor.Then I looked down.A scream ripped out of me anyway.It was a doll. A life-sized doll, made with such detail that for one stunned instant I thought I was holding a child. Its face was pale and smooth, its glassy eyes fixed open in the dark, its body soft beneath my hands in the way a sleeping body might be soft. I flung it from me and it struck the bed with a muted, horrible thud, staring up into the ceiling as though it had been waiting there for me all along.My pulse slammed so hard I thought I might be sick. I clapped my hand over my mouth again, choking down the rest of the sound, and stumbled backward until my shoulders hit the wall. No. No, no, no. The room’s strangeness folded

— Tatiana — The storm came in from the north and hit the cliffs hard. I sat in the reading chair I have claimed as mine, regardless of what anyone said about whose chair it was. Had my feet tucked up, watching the rain do its level best against the tall windows as I read. Not aloud, this time. Just to myself. The sound of rain on glass has always been one of my favorite sounds: the persistence of it, the way it keeps going without needing to know whether anyone is listening. My mother used to say that rain was the sky grieving. I turned the page. I made myself stop thinking about my mother. The book was good. The lamp was warm. The ache in my chest had settled into something chronic enough that I'd stopped actively noticing it, the way you stop hearing a clock ticking once you've been in the room long enough. I had been a prisoner for thirteen days. I had developed a routine, which felt like defeat and also, perversely, like survival. I made my own tea in the mornings—Vera th

— Kain —I sat in my office with the security feed open and no intention of watching it.I worked. Reviewed eastern route assessments. Made notes in my usual mechanical pencil. I reviewed Anya’s latest intercepts and the secondary safe house inventory. By any observable measure, I was a man seriously engaged in work.The feed was open on a secondary screen.Fourteen days. She had been here fourteen days, and I had already memorized her reading schedule, her sleep cycles, the three places she gravitated to when she needed to think, the way she couldn’t pass a bookshelf without trailing her fingers along the spines.Four hours earlierThe guards had dragged Julian Ashford into my office still bleeding.The British lawyer’s coat was torn at the shoulder, hair disheveled, and a fresh split lip was already swelling. He’d been caught snooping near the perimeter fence on the east cliff path, phone in hand, trying to map the blind spots.“Found him circling the outer wall like a rat,” Dmitri h

— Kain —Tatiana continued to hammer her fists against the door like it would make any difference. Her hands were already turning red. Julian’s indignant shouts from the other side only made the corner of my mouth twitch.“No amount of force you could muster would open that door. ”Tatiana pounded harder. “Then open the fucking door, Kain!”I stepped behind her and caught both her wrists in one hand. Her skin was hot, pulse racing under my fingers.“Enough.”She snatched her hands back with surprising strength and immediately raised them to bang again. I caught her wrists once more, spun her around, and bent low. In one smooth motion I hauled her over my shoulder.“Put me down, you oversized caveman! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”Her fists beat against my back as I carried her away from the east wing. She twisted and cursed, her voice rising with every step.“Are you going to lock me up too? Throw me in a room like a misbehaving pet? Is that your grand solution, you possess

— Tatiana —He came to my door at six in the morning without knocking.“Get up,” he said.I had been awake. I woke up early, it is a malfunction I have had since childhood. My mother called it a design flaw but I had not been planning to announce it. I was reading, specifically, with my tea going cold on the nightstand, which was a perfectly acceptable use of 6 AM. “I’m reading,” I said.“Get up and put some shoes on.”I looked up from the page I was on and stared at the door. “May I ask why?”“No.”I put on shoes if found in the wardrobe and surprisingly they fit.He took me to the room on the lower level that was either a gymnasium or a very well-equipped torture chamber. It was large, rubber flooring, mirrored wall along one side, equipment that looked used and functional rather than decorative. He was already in the center of it, arms loose at his sides, watching me come through the door.I looked at the version of myself in the mirrored wall with my bed-hair, borrowed sweater and