The location was hidden and secret, an unknown location on unclaimed land in an unnamed structure. Black site, Agent Kavinsky told me when he saw my eyes darting around the place, trying to put a name to what I was seeing. For all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist.
The perfect prison for Tatiana the Toothless.
The nickname had come a few days after her finale. Though not grammatically correct, it conveyed the creature behind the title well. She had betrayed her fellow women, ripping out their teeth, the only weapon they had that they didn’t have to share with a man. Tatiana had left them without their fangs, unable to bite. How was a dog meant to chew it’s leg off when it was toothless?
I considered that was how Tatiana felt for a time. A dog, chained down, unable to escape, and with no teeth. However, instead of growing teeth and offering to free her fellow animals, she began biting all the other prisoners.
Seeing her wasn’t as monumental as I had created in my head. In my mind’s eye, she hadn’t changed or faded, forever that beautiful woman whose heart was moldy and rotten. However, Tatiana was not half the creature she once was, instead now small and gray, eyes full of hatred and uselessness.
She didn’t get up when she saw me.
Tatiana’s prison was built to maintain dangerous criminals. A single bed, a toilet and chair. Allowing us to look inside was a large clear screen. I felt like a child tapping on the goldfish’s tank, waiting for it to do a trick.
Bits and pieces of her lay around the room. Books, magazines, pencils. They had even given her a red bouncy ball for enrichment, but it lay forgotten beneath the bed, gathering dust.
“Are you bored?” was the first thing I asked.
Tatiana leaned against the back wall, legs crossed. She wore a white jumpsuit, and her hair was shaved to her skull. Her lips curled back when she saw me. “Have you come to gloat, Elena?”
Her voice was scratchy, like she hadn’t used it in a while.
I stepped closer to the glass, spotting my reflection. If Tatiana was the bald tree in winter, I was the blooming meadows and emerald-green forests. Young, beautiful, ancient…and free.
“Why would I need to gloat?”
She spat. It didn’t do anything. Glass thicker than bricks separated us.
“Answer my question. Are you bored?”
“Obviously.” Tatiana glared at the agents behind me. A few had argued with their superior when they had seen me at the door, but Kavinsky had shut that down and brought me inside.
The young ones haven’t learned the different types of enemies yet, he had said.
You better teach them fast, I had replied. Before they end up making a new one.
Now, none of the young agents could meet Tatiana’s eyes.
I smiled to myself. “I’ll send you some books. Better material than whatever the government is providing you with.”
“Why?”
“I feel sorry for you.”
Tatiana flinched like I had hit her. In a way, I had.
“I forgot about you. We all have.” I went on. “You’re nothing more than an empty space in our home and hearts, slowing gathering dust.”
“And you have come to remember me?” Her eyes were dark. A glimpse of the Tatiana I had known shone through. “Here I am. Take a good look.”
“Here you are.”
Tatiana met my eyes with hers, filled with enough fury they could’ve burned through the glass. Once upon a time, I had wanted to ask her so many things, but, like her, the questions had faded from my mind. A few surfaced again as I took in the sterile white room and defeated animal it caged.
I slipped my hands into my coat pockets and continued to assess her.
“You look like a Russian when you stand like that,” Tatiana said. “You’re no longer the feral animal that bites whatever hand gets too close, no? Now, you’re something worse. The wolf with yellow eyes in the shadows, the snake lulling its prey by pretending to be asleep. Look what Konstantin made of you; look at the monster he created.”
My eyebrows rose at her assessment. “Do you have enough oxygen down here, Tatiana? Konstantin made me a mother and wife, but he didn’t make me powerful or brilliant. I made me, I molded me. The creature that stands before you grew from a seed fertilized on pain and watered by blood. And now that very same creature is on the other side of the bars.” In the reflection of the glass, my smile looked positively cruel.
We stared at each other in silence for a few moments.
“Yes,” she finally conceded. “I think you’re right. Only girlhood can birth such a beast.”
I glanced at the agents behind me before looking back to her. “Would you like to know how your son is doing?”
Tatiana glanced at the blank white wall. She seemed to be having an argument with it. “No. No. I don’t want to know anything.”
She asked, “Why did you come here, Elena?”
“I’ve come for answers about your daughter.”
She didn’t even flinch. “My daughter’s dead.”
“You and I both know that’s not true,” I replied. “Where is she?”
When she met my eyes for the second time, the gray of them had hardened into steel. I was almost relieved to see it; it meant the mundaneness of this place hadn’t absorbed her soul into its white void.
“I’ll never tell you. On my life, Elena, I’ll never speak a word about her. You can tear my fingernails out one by one, peel my skin off inch by inch, but I’ll never reveal anything.”
I understood. If I was in her position, nothing could make me fail my children.
But I wasn’t in her position and for good reason.
“That girl is a part of my family,” I said. “I want her back. I want to keep her safe and raise her. Nowhere else in the world is better for her than with her brother and father. You know this.”
“My mother used to think the same thing about my father, and he ended up killing her for some tight young pussy.” Tatiana sent me a look. “Hell is a better place for my daughter than being with her father and brother.”
“That might very well be where she is.”
Tatiana glanced at the wall again. “She’s safe.”
“I’m never going to stop looking for her,” I warned.
“You will. After a time, you’ll forget. Once a year, around a certain date, you might mourn her absence, but in time, she will be but a faceless ghost in your dreams.” Tatiana laid a hand to her heart. “Like she is to me.”
I traced her outline in the glass. So small, so weak. I had once cowered beneath this woman, risked my life and broken my heart to keep myself safe from her. I recalled when we had first met, that sickly swollen woman who had been so warm and loved. Little had I known, revenge had already eaten away at her heart and infected her blood.
If I had known, perhaps I would’ve put something else in the tonic I administered her.
“I’ll send you some books, Tatiana,” I repeated.
“I would like that.”
We observed each other for a little longer. I stopped outlining her, holding my hand to the cool glass.
“What do your hands say?” she asked.
Only a few words were written over my palm. “It’s my shopping list. Glue–Niko has a school project–eggs, yeast and flour–Dmitri’s making blueberry bread.”