Read Online The Lost Labyrinth by Will Adams - Free Book Online Page B

must be about fifteen years old, the same age as his own twins. There were multiple livid bruises on her upper arms and chest, and what looked like a cigarette burn near her navel, and a livid redness around her throat, as though she’d been nearly asphyxiated. She would have been pretty, except for the accidental mask of hair glued by her own tears and blood to her face. There were spatters of red on the mattress too, along withother motley stains that Edouard had no desire to analyse. He turned appalled to Mikhail. ‘What the hell have you been doing to her?’ he demanded.
    ‘Nothing she didn’t want.’
    ‘How can you say that? Look at her! She’s begging you to let her go.’
    ‘What a person says isn’t necessarily what they want.’
    Edouard shook his head. ‘How old is she?’
    ‘How would I know that?’
    ‘Didn’t you think about asking ?’
    Mikhail laughed. ‘Look at you! You just want her for yourself, don’t you?’
    ‘You’re sick.’
    ‘Go ahead. She won’t mind, believe me. She’ll enjoy it.’
    ‘What kind of man are you?’
    ‘The kind you’d be, if you had any balls.’
    ‘I’m letting her go,’ said Edouard. ‘Where’s the key?’
    ‘I’m not done with her yet.’
    ‘Yes, you are.’ He spoke boldly and locked gazes with Mikhail, certain that righteousness would be enough. But Mikhail’s ice-blue eyes punctured his confidence, and he realised too late that this was a different kind of man to any he’d ever dealt with before, even to the other Nergadzes. His heart began to race, he felt a dryness in his throat, smelled a faintly rancid odour that he intuitivelyrecognised as his own fear. It triggered an unwelcome memory: waiting to be seated at a Tbilisi restaurant many years before, a drunken man tripping over his own feet and bumping into a second man sitting on a barstool nursing a glass of malt liquor clanking with ice, making him spill a little over his hand. His apology had been too slow, too dismissive. The strangest look had passed over the seated man’s face. He’d shattered his crystal tumbler on the marble bar-top, then turned and thrust its splintered base into the drunk’s face before giving it a sharp leftwards twist, shredding the man’s eyeball and ripping his nose and cheek apart, blood spurting and spattering across the bar and around the restaurant as he’d crashed howling into tables. Over the years since, Edouard had forgotten the victim’s ravaged face, but not the chill calculating look on the assailant’s face in the half-second before he’d attacked, as though rage was an army within his control, a force to be deployed at will.
    The girl must have seen the shift in power; her sobs grew louder, more despairing. Her fear infected Edouard. He felt beads of sweat on his forehead, and trickles running coldly down from his armpits. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, lowering his eyes submissively. ‘I didn’t mean anything.’
    For a moment he feared his apology wouldn’t work, but then the intensity of the moment seemedto slacken, and just as suddenly it was gone altogether. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ shrugged Mikhail. ‘We do have business to discuss.’ He picked up his trousers, fished out a small steel key, tossed it across.
    Edouard’s hands were shaking as he struggled to unlock the cuffs; but finally they snapped open and the girl grabbed a sheet to cover herself, hurried sobbing to the bathroom. ‘I’ll get her clothes,’ said Edouard, heading back out onto the landing. Boris and his men had just arrived, were taking seats around the coffee table, lighting cigarettes. He gave them a sour look, for they must have heard his confrontation with Mikhail. But you needed a thick skin to work for the Nergadzes; you needed to know who was boss. ‘Maybe we should give her something,’ suggested Edouard, when he went back up. ‘To keep her mouth shut.’
    ‘She won’t talk,’ said Mikhail.
    ‘How can you be sure? I mean, what would your