The Doll (13 page)

ZAGREB, CROATIA

Flat on her back, arms to her sides, Neeva stared at the ceiling. The metal door was open and had been ever since she’d woken: open and wide like a tormenting bully who offered something just to take a swing if you accepted. Chained to the wall, ankle trapped
inside the rubber-coated metal ring, the tease of escape was far worse than being locked away in darkness. She yanked the chain in frustration, felt the solid tug, and deflated. She’d no energy left to scream and fight.

The guard who usually sat outside her door was gone and the language recordings had stopped. She didn’t know if this was bad or good, because in this place change meant something worse was coming.

She’d been bathed or showered since the water attack, because she was clean and the track suit smelled freshly laundered, and her hair was really weird. Shirley Temple weird.

A shadow filled the doorway. Neeva jerked upright and backed up against the wall. There hadn’t been any footsteps to announce the person, not even in the silence. She fingered the chain, which had enough slack in it to use as a weapon if the shadow got close enough.

The person ducked to enter and then moved out of the doorway so the light wasn’t directly behind, and Neeva could see the face—definitely the mystery person from yesterday, although the hair was different and the person now wasn’t so much an it as a he.

“May I come in?” the person said, and Neeva stared, blinking, not because of the polite nature of the request but because this was the first real-life English she’d heard in so long she’d lost track, and it was real American English, not all accented and stilted as if one of these animals had learned it in school.

“You’re already in,” Neeva said, and he smiled, kind of sad.

“Michael,” he said, and stuck out a hand.

Neeva didn’t move and after a while the hand withdrew.

“You speak English,” Neeva said finally.

“Apparently, so do you,” the Michael person said. “Very colorfully.”

Neeva snorted, and Michael stepped closer. About halfway into the cell, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and tipped his head toward the ceiling. Neeva waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Didn’t even look at her, which was more out of character for this place than anything else so far.

“What do you want?” Neeva asked.

His face shifted toward her. “To talk with you, if you don’t mind.”

Neeva let out a bark of laughter. Chained to the wall, she wasn’t
exactly going anywhere, and until now what she did or didn’t want had meant nothing. “Sure, talk,” she said. “But don’t you need to drop your pants and whack off first? That seems to be the order of things—that is, if you skip talking altogether.”

Almost as if to himself, he said, “You’re lucky.”

The words were like a smack in the face. “Yeah, for sure,” Neeva said, “I’m
so
lucky. That’s exactly what those pervs are thinking when they honor me with their presence.”

“They’re trying to degrade you,” he said. “That’s the best they could do without touching you. If you were anyone else, they would have beat and raped you. To humiliate you. Break you.”

The honesty of the explanation left Neeva without a retort, without any sense of up or down, and all the questions that had no answers came back again until Michael spoke once more. “I’m being forced to do a job that I don’t want to do,” he said. He turned to look directly at her. “I just want you to know, no matter what happens, this isn’t what I want.”

“I don’t see
you
in chains,” Neeva said. “So don’t talk to me about want.”

“I’m a prisoner here just as much as you are, wearing chains, even if you can’t see them.”

“Excuse me if I’m all out of sympathy.”

“I wanted to say it before the insanity starts,” Michael said, then stood and turned for the door. Neeva fought for a reason to keep him there. He was American. He was English conversation. Possibly he had answers to the big why and what. “You’re the person in the cell down the hall?” she said.

Michael nodded.

Neeva pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Can you answer the questions that nobody else will?”

Michael stopped and turned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can try.”

“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do they want with me? Is it for ransom?”

He studied her as if plotting things in his head, maybe weighing answers or trying to find words, then said, “This is a holding place, a waiting area. Someone put a purchase price on you and the people who control this building, the ones who kidnapped you, they’ve made it my responsibility to get you to the person who bought you.”

The words brought clarity. Neeva drew in a sharp inhale and said, “Knowing this, you’re going to just hand me over?”

Michael moved toward the door, looked back, and paused. “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I know who you are, and if I could find a way to save us all, I would, but I can’t. I have a gun to my head, and the more you fight me, the harder I will have to fight you back to save my own life. You understand?”

Neeva refused to justify the pitiful excuse with a reply. Instead she crossed her arms and glared.

Michael nodded. “I’m truly sorry.”

From down the hall came the sick thud of boots against the concrete. Michael’s head tipped up and then, as if Neeva ceased to exist, he straightened and walked out.

She tugged on the chain. Wiped away tears she didn’t even know she’d cried. In a fit of futile desperation she yanked harder and more frantically on metal that refused to give, while the anger and fear and frustration; the urge to destroy that had been building and building through the passing days; the want, the desperate want to hurt and maim and kill and exact revenge on anyone who’d had anything to do with this state of helplessness, came out in a curdling scream.

Munroe could count them by the footsteps, time them by the pace; she stepped into the hallway and stood in Lumani’s way before he reached her cell.

He breached her personal space, smiling slightly as if her antics amused him. Behind him were the Arbens, bullies waiting for the fight. One held a hanger festooned with the lace and velvet clothes that Neeva had worn previously. It would appear that the Doll Maker, in his fanciful wisdom, would have the girl travel in the costume—as if avoiding attention wouldn’t already be difficult enough—and had sent his men to dress the merchandise.

“Your tape and your blanket,” Lumani said, extending the items in Munroe’s direction until she took them. “Now you should move out of the way.”

She didn’t. Wouldn’t. Even if the girl at the end of the hall was nothing more than a barrier standing between her and Logan’s freedom, she couldn’t abide these men defiling the helpless with their eyes or their touch. “Let me have the clothes,” she said. “The package is my responsibility, I’ll see that she’s dressed.”

In the language he wrongly assumed she didn’t understand, Lumani instructed the man to pass over the clothing. Munroe took the
hanger and turned toward Neeva’s cell, and behind her a hushed argument erupted, which ended with Lumani’s clipped instruction.

Munroe draped the dress across the empty chair at the hallway’s end, placed the blanket on the seat, and carried the tape into Neeva’s cell, where the screams of animal fury that had followed her out into the hall were now silent. Neeva was backed up against the wall, positioned in a semicrouch with a play of chain held tightly in her hand, blond ringlets a jarring, comical contrast to the primal nature of the moment.

Munroe neared and Neeva shifted, tightening her grip and maintaining position even when Munroe stopped beyond lunging distance. Munroe knelt so that she was at eye level. “Please don’t try to fight me,” she said. “I’ll be forced to hurt you, and that’s the last thing I want.”

Neeva didn’t reply, didn’t lower her eyes, and Munroe’s stomach churned. The rules said no drugs and no bruises, but there were plenty of ways to create pain that left no visible evidence—her own suffering had taught this lesson well.

“We need to change your clothes,” Munroe said. “You can do it yourself if you want. I’ll give you privacy and leave you alone, I just need to know that you’ll cooperate.”

Silence.

“Will you?”

Neeva stared blankly, posture still tense, a jungle cat waiting to pounce.

Munroe tried again. “If you keep your hands and feet to yourself and do as I tell you, I’ll be nice, but if you fight, I’ll be forced to retaliate. You only get one warning, understand?” She waited for a reaction, any reaction, and when Neeva continued to eye her unblinkingly, she added, “Please don’t test me.”

Neeva breathed a slow and focused in and out, not the shallow quickening that would be spurred by adrenaline and produced by fear. Munroe had already seen the fight in the girl, and no matter how tiny, no matter how outclassed, she wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating the human spirit fueled by the desire to win. Still kneeling, still holding eye contact, she called for Lumani, choosing the language she’d been force-fed to make a point, knowing that Hungarian wasn’t his mother tongue any more than English was.

Munroe counted seconds and, without turning, knew when he stood behind her; held out her hand for the garment he surely carried.

The weight of the hanger tugged on her fingertips.

Again in Hungarian, she said, “I need the chair,” her sentence clipped short because although the words were inside her head and she understood their meaning, she’d not experienced the absorption of real-life interaction that allowed for her own fluency.

She didn’t turn when he dragged the metal chair, scraping it against the concrete, into the cell. Didn’t flinch when, mouth inches from her ear, he whispered, “Don’t push your luck, I’m not your errand boy.”

“I need a few minutes more alone,” she said, and waited until he’d fully left before slowly, theatrically, redraping the clothes across the back of the chair. With one last attempt to mitigate the inevitable fight with Neeva, she said, “I know you understand my warning.” Shifted the chair so that the clothes were within reach. “Take the dress. I’ll turn if you want privacy, but I can’t leave until you’ve changed.”

Nothing.

“Thirty seconds before I make you,” she said, and still Neeva didn’t react.

Munroe’s anxiety welled. This was a fight she didn’t want, one Neeva couldn’t win, yet a fight necessary to save Logan. “Time’s up,” she said. Still Neeva didn’t move.

Munroe set the roll of tape on top of the seat, stepped around the chair, and placed herself within reach of the inevitable strike. She stretched for the girl’s wrist and it was then that Neeva lunged, fist and chain swinging toward Munroe’s face, as if the chain was meant to go over her head like a hood.

Hand out, Munroe snagged the snaking metal. Twisted. Wrapped. Pulled Neeva off her feet.

In the delayed hesitation of Neeva’s shock, Munroe yanked again, drawing Neeva toward her, and elbow into the girl’s stomach, knocked her to the mattress. Neeva fell hard. Munroe dropped a knee into her and took the chain behind the girl’s head, winding it around her neck in the same choking move that Neeva had intended:
tight enough to constrict air but not enough to crush her windpipe or leave bruises.

Neeva’s body writhed to get away, hands stretched and flexed, attempting to fight the chain. Munroe leaned in harder, pinched the girl’s nose with one hand, and with the chain wrapped around the other wrist to keep it tight, placed that hand over Neeva’s mouth.

Neeva grew frantic. Clawing. Kicking. Bucking. Only when Munroe felt the strength begin to leave the girl’s body did she let go. Neeva gasped for air and lay limp long enough to take in oxygen. Then, like a battery suddenly recharged, she went at it again, clawing for Munroe’s eyes, tearing at her skin.

The ferocity of Neeva’s fight, her struggle for survival—to live, to wound, to maim and kill an opponent—if only to wake tomorrow and do it again, was a vivid flashback. Under other circumstances, Munroe’s conscience would rise in pride and camaraderie, would turn to fight beside this girl while they dug their way to victory. But circumstance had turned solidarity into a hollow void and Neeva, this feral, fighting animal, into an object to be subdued in order to set Logan free.

Munroe drove a fist into Neeva’s stomach, and when the girl gasped and again struggled for air, Munroe took Neeva’s arm so close to snapping that had Neeva not screamed and frozen in the struggle, her shoulder would have gone out of joint. There were tears in Neeva’s eyes, and Munroe recognized in them her younger self. Not tears of self-pity or pain, but of rage and frustration.

“I warned you,” Munroe said, releasing the chain but keeping Neeva’s arm in place. “And I will hurt you more if you don’t stop.”

Neeva nodded. And Munroe, in another reflection of years gone by, understood the gesture. Not a concession or submission but unbearable physical pain. The nod was a way to buy time. This fight wasn’t over.

Straddling the girl, Munroe summoned Lumani, who arrived in the doorway so quickly that he had to have already been nearby, listening and possibly watching from beyond the corner. “Your knife,” Munroe said, again in Hungarian, and when he hesitated, she added, botched and incorrectly, “I know you have it. I won’t cut the girl.”