CHAPTER 54
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9
Angie came around slowly, confusion clouding her brain. She struggled to place what was going on, where she was. She’d blacked out.
Why? How long? What had happened?
She tried to move her tongue. It felt too large. Her mouth was dry, tasted metallic. Her skull, her brain, her entire body pounded in pain with each beat of her heart. Carefully she opened her eyes, wincing sharply against light filtering down through a window up high. Near the ceiling. With bars.
A chill of recognition cut through her core.
I’ve been here before. What is this place?
Angie closed her eyes again and tentatively touched her fingertips to the base of her skull. They came away sticky. Blood? Hers? She groaned as she tried to move her head, to reopen her eyes. Her neck felt as though it might be broken. The muscles in her injured arm were afire.
She gave up for a moment, just lying there, trying to figure it out.
She’d gotten a call—that’s what had happened. From Nadia Moss. Just as she’d left the Russian club. Moss had whispered over the phone that she’d wanted to meet Angie in private, outside the club in the back alley, where she planned to take a smoke break—she couldn’t talk inside. Too risky, she’d said. Moss had sounded desperate.
Tension whipped through Angie. She fought to open her eyes again, to wake fully, to recall with clarity what had happened next.
Nadia had opened the back door into the alley. She’d called Angie over to the lighted doorway. Angie had been grabbed by the neck from behind . . . then a Taser. It had to have been a Taser. After that she recalled nothing, just blackness, apart from a vague recollection of being inside a vehicle at some point, something made of cloth over her head. Then . . . a thudding sound, a vibrating sensation. Chopper? A snatch of memory came to her—the feeling that she was inside a helicopter, flying during the night. It had been dark. Cold. A faint glow had come from electronics, maybe an instrument panel. Her hands and feet had been bound. She moved her legs now. Unbound, she realized. Her boots were still on. Hands were free, too. She tried to inhale deeply through her nose. She recognized the smell of this room.
I’ve definitely been here before.
Alarms clanged through her. Then Angie stilled. She felt a presence. Someone is inside the room with me. Tentatively, she sucked air in through her nose again, and she could smell him. An odor of perspiration underscored by a faint thread of masculine aftershave.
“Welcome home, Roksana.”
Electricity shocked through her body. Angie stopped breathing as she was whirled back, back in time. She was in the dank, dim room, the place Alex had taken her with hypnosis.
“I . . . was lying on a bed. In a dark room. There was someone with me in the darkness, holding my hand. A female. Her skin was cool. Soft. She was singing sweetly, gently, like a lullaby . . . those words about two little kittens. In Polish. Then she suddenly stopped singing. Someone had come in. I was scared. The room went blacker . . . There was a man in the room on top of her. Big, big man.”
“On top of who, Angie?”
“I . . . don’t know. The lady singing. He was grunting like a dog on her, and she was crying softly. Very scared. Wasn’t nice. Horrible.”
Angie lurched up. Her world reeled. Nausea surged up her throat, and she gagged. She was on a bed. She patted the surface around her, still unable to focus properly.
“Welcome home, Roksana,” he said again. The voice was low, deep. Sonorous. Terror rose inside her. She swallowed, then blinked frantically. I know that voice. I know it.
Her vision focused. She could see the wall opposite her and the barred window up high. She managed to turn her head sideways toward the source of the voice. The pale light coming in through the window shone on a big man. Red hair. Bushy red beard. Pale skin. Pale-gray eyes.
The red man. Bad man. It was him.
“Who . . . who are you?” Her voice came out hoarse. “Where am I?”
He reached forward and combed his thick fingers through her hair, snaking a lock around his hand. He angled his head, and Angie saw the blue crab ink on the side of his solid neck. “Gorgeous,” he whispered. “You grew up so beautiful, my girl.” He touched his fingertips to her lips, tracing her scar. She jerked back against the wall.
“Get your hands the fuck off me!”
He grinned. Light danced in his eyes. “This is where I bring all my girls, Roksi. Do you recall? This is where I kept the two of you and your mother. I wanted to bring you back here, for you to wake up and see it, and to remember it, and to remember me. I wanted to see and touch you, too, to look into your eyes and have you look back into mine.” He studied her. “My progeny,” he said quietly. “Resourceful girl. After all these years, you find me. You find my club. Very well done, Roksi. You are indeed my child.”
Bile surged into her throat. She could see it—in his complexion. His hair. The light-gray shade of his eyes. She’d found him. She’d found her biological father. And he was the red man. A monster.
“What . . . what’s your name?” she whispered.
He smiled. “Oly. Olyeg Kaganov.”
“My mother?”
“My whore once. Pretty little thing from Poland. Fell pregnant at sixteen.”
Angie’s chest crunched with emotions. She glared at him, trying to really see him, to absorb his face, the shape of his body, his smell. Trying to understand him. Her dad.
“You killed her. You killed my mother, didn’t you?”
His smile changed into something darker.
“Ana,” she said quietly. “That was her name—her name was Ana.”
“Very good. You get this from Semy?”
A pure white hatred filled her heart. It leaked a familiar burn into her blood, and the old taste of rage filled her mouth. It came with sharp, clear edges and restored clarity to her brain. It sliced through her system hand in hand with the pain beating through her body.
“Anastazja Kowalski,” he said quietly. “Daughter of Danek Kowalski, a political activist who was imprisoned and then killed during the lead-up to Solidarity in Poland.”
A grandfather. I had a grandfather, and his name was Danek Kowalski.
Angie focused fiercely on this news. She had family. In Europe. She was going to get out of this room, out of this prison of her past. She was going to find the rest of her family. She was going to let them know what had happened to Ana.
“Ana told me that her mother died when she was little,” he said, his gray eyes locked on her own. “Her father raised her solo. She was fourteen when the violence erupted in Poland and her father was taken. That’s when the traffickers got her. Here, see?” Zagorsky reached for a framed photo resting on the small table beside the bed. He held it out to her.