She stood aside to let him pass. “Are you coming in?”
He stepped inside and glanced around the apartment. “Nice. Clean,” was all he said before taking a seat at the kitchen bar.
“Your sister hasn’t been to work,” Anton said.
“I know.” Could he really be surprised by that under the circumstances?
“Where is she now?”
“At school. I don’t expect you to keep paying for it.”
“You can’t afford it on what you make,” he said almost too reasonably.
“We’ll manage.”
“Come back to the house with me.” His accent wrapped around her, enveloped her like warm, dark liquid chocolate.
Although she’d wanted to fling herself at him only moments before, now that the offer was on the table… “I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
She shook her head fiercely. “No.”
“Why did you leave?”
Annette didn’t answer, not trusting her voice, not trusting that she wouldn’t start ranting about how awful Brian was and how awful Anton was for subjecting her to his presence in the first place.
“Kiska, you know I can just take you. I can easily overpower you and take you out of here. You live in a very quiet neighborhood with a lot of empty apartments around you. No one would stop me.”
“Please, just let me go. You know I’m not going to the police. I would have already. I’m not a threat to you.” If there were a decent bone in her body, she would have gone to the police for Shannon and anybody else like her who might fall onto Brian’s bad side. And yet, she couldn’t bear the idea of Anton going to prison, which made her one fucked-up hysterical lunatic.
“And what about your sister?” Anton pressed.
“She won’t talk, either. We just want our lives back, without you. I just... can’t anymore.”
“Why not?”
Inexplicably she felt like she should bake something for him or at least make him a fresh pot of coffee, but she refused to be lured into this mindless subservience again. Who the hell had she become? Whoever that was… it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be.
“You know why not. Shannon. Brian… He could snap again. It’s just too much. All of it. I can’t live like this anymore. I want to be free.”
Anton’s expression hardened. “You want a lot of things, kiska, but freedom isn’t one of them.”
“You’d like that to be the case, wouldn’t you?” He was still so arrogant and sure of himself even as she practically ran screaming from him—at least in her mind. In reality, she found her body inching ever closer to him.
“I know you can take me away and lock me up. But if you aren’t going to do that or kill me, just leave. I’m asking you nicely to release me from this contract.”
He laughed, but it was a hard, angry laugh. “You pretend this was all some painful duty, but I watched you bloom underneath my hands. I saw your pleasure and excitement. I saw your desire to please me and be mine. You can’t erase that or pretend it didn’t happen.”
“I’m not pretending. I’m telling you to leave me the hell alone!”
“Maybe I can’t live with you free out in the world pretending you weren’t affected by me. A few days back home, and you’re already back to lying. And you know how I feel about liars.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of black leather gloves. He didn’t break eye contact with her as he slid them on.
Up until this point, she realized she hadn’t been truly afraid of him. Their relationship, as strange as it had been, had stopped feeling like a hostage situation a long time ago even in that last two weeks before she’d run away. While she knew he could take her back to the house and that he very well might, emotionally she’d remained still like a lake in winter.
And yet now, it seemed as though something had shifted in his plan. In the next moment, she knew what… though really she’d known for over a minute. He pulled a long terrifying knife out of his coat and unsheathed it. It wasn’t just a knife. It was the knife. The knife in question. The one that had done the damage to Shannon. Were there no other knives in the world?
Anton was between her and the door out of her apartment. If she ran, she wouldn’t make it to the door that led to freedom, she’d only make it to the door that led to an even more enclosed space—her bedroom.
“Master,” she said backing away, her hands in the air vaguely resembling surrender.
“Oh, so now it’s Master. Now that you think you’re about to die.”
She had thought that, and yet, when he said the word it sounded so much worse and so much more real. In their brief separation, something had clearly snapped inside his brain. Suddenly he seemed a lot more like Brian than she wanted to admit. Brian was the crazy one. Not Anton. And yet, it was Anton who loomed over her with the knife.
She backed up until she ran out of space and there was a wall at her back with Anton moving ever closer. Her legs buckled, suddenly refusing to support her, and then she was huddled in a ball on her knees at his feet.
“Master, please. I’ll come back with you.”
He made a sound of disgust. “No. It would be a lie. I don’t want a lie. I can get Katya or any other girl to play and live a lie with me. I won’t do it with you.”
“So, what? You’ll kill me instead? How is that better?”
She jumped when the carved dragon handle of the knife hit the hardwood floor beside her. It bounced once, then the blade let out a sort of death rattle as it rocked back and forth a couple of times to settle on the ground.
“Pick up the knife,” he said quietly.
“No!” Whatever game he thought he was playing, she wasn’t on board with it. If he wanted to carve her up like a Christmas ham, he’d have to do it without her assistance.
“Pick up. The knife.” he said.
She stayed where she was, huddled, trying to transport herself out of this space and out of this awful day by sheer force of will. Maybe she should have grabbed it to defend herself, but such a thought was laughable. He could take it from her. Her joke of a grip and tiny wrist weren’t going to be a threat to him. If he’d brought a gun, it might have been different, and maybe he knew that, too.
“Pick it up!” he shouted into the stillness.
If she’d had nearby neighbors, they would have heard and maybe intervened, but they both knew she didn’t. As it was, she just prayed Jan’s class didn’t end early. And then she started praying that it wouldn’t end at all as she thought about her sister finding her. And what if Anton laid in wait and then killed her too? It had been the threat that had originally bound them together after all, though she’d never imagined something so intimate as a knife. She’d thought there would be distance. Cold. Impersonal. Maybe they wouldn’t even have to see it coming. Maybe a hit man taking out his marks from a clinical safe distance.
“If you think you’re going to get my fingerprints on this knife to make it look like a suicide… no one will ever believe it,” Annette said.
“Who said the knife was for you?”
“If it’s not for me, why the gloves?”