Birds of Paradise

  I watched the stare of death confront me as the man responsible for it, my very own grim reaper, took me to the edge of life and back again.

  And I loved every fucking second.

  Lukyan

  He closed the door quietly, though he didn’t know why he did so. Elizabeth was out, her body and mind both so spent that unconsciousness was going to hold her in its clutches for a long while. Nothing, not even him, was going to pry her away.

  He liked that.

  That he’d fucked her into oblivion while staring into the dead eyes of a man who’d dared touch her. The man he’d killed for degrading her.

  It was a slip, killing him, one he might pay for, but he had to do it. Everything in him thirsted for him to do it.

  She’d loved it too. That had pushed him over the edge. Made him go too far. He knew this because of the bruises that covered every inch of her body. The ones that had intensified with startling quickness between the time she’d passed out and the time he’d carried her upstairs and placed her in his bed.

  He’d examined them a long while, those marks. It filled him with dark satisfaction, seeing them. But also something else. A sharp discomfort at causing her pain.

  Pain she’d liked.

  Pain she’d loved.

  Lukyan’s cock pulsed even with the memory of it. She was never going to be one thing. He was never going to categorize her, learn her. And he found this exciting instead of unsettling. Every day would come with a discovery. A new piece of her, yanked from the dark corners she pretended weren’t there.

  Lukyan entered his operations rooms, the light of the screens, numbers, contracts not exciting him as they once had.

  Excited might’ve been too strong a word. He didn’t get such rousing emotions, not from anything. Killing was satisfying because it fed into the emptiness he had inside him. He liked looking into the eyes of people when they were taking their last breath, liked being sucked into their demise.

  Being responsible for it.

  He’d first thought he wanted that with Elizabeth. To watch her demise. To taste it. But he’d already done that. He did that every day. Death was attached to her very pores. She already lived in the abyss.

  He found himself being more excited at the prospect of living some warped life with her than spending a split second enjoying her death.

  Her death.

  The thought filled him with something other than enjoyment.

  Fear.

  He focused on the screen because he wasn’t giving himself the luxury of fear. The very presence of the emotion meant that he needed to be in front of his screen.

  He needed to kill.

  12

  Elizabeth

  Three Days Later

  He was sitting in the dining room when I entered. Just like last time.

  The last time he disappeared and appeared without an explanation.

  But this wasn’t like last time.

  Because after last time, he’d fucked me on the dining room table. Then he’d… taken me. He’d yanked out of me everything I’d had left to give and when he’d disappeared, he’d taken it with him. He’d invited those men into his home and made me witness more of his ugliness. Made me come to terms with more of my own.

  And then I’d woken up the next day and he was gone.

  No note.

  No nothing.

  I’d spent those days in limbo, wondering where he’d gone. If he’d stolen off in the night, if someone had stolen him. If he was ever coming back.

  I didn’t think I could’ve felt emptier.

  Lukyan proved me wrong, just seconds ago when his eyes made contact with mine after three days.

  It hurt. His cruelty. The fact that he merely nodded at me with his hard eyes and blank gaze when I entered the room.

  I didn’t regain my step once I’d frozen in place at the glimpse of him. Not like last time. I couldn’t perform, even a second, couldn’t mimic a moment of his coldness. I should’ve. To protect myself. To give some illusion of strength. To not be so fucking pathetic.

  “Sit down, Elizabeth,” he commanded mildly.

  I wanted to resist. To shout at him that he didn’t have the power to command me. But I was in the chair before I rightly knew what was going on.

  The wine in front of me remained after weeks of never touching it. But like sitting in the chair, I found the liquid sliding down my throat before I knew my hand had even circled the glass.

  Lukyan watched me intently, his eyes on the column of my throat as I swallowed two large mouthfuls.

  It was smooth. Slightly woodsy. And not exactly pleasant.

  I set the glass back down.

  “Where are you from?” I found myself asking the question that had been burning at the back of my mind for weeks instead of the more pressing one, which was ‘where the fuck have you been?’

  The rapid succession of blinks visible from across the table was the only indicator of his surprise.

  He didn’t answer immediately. Of course he didn’t. He was weighing up the consequences of telling me. Lining up the reasons why I’d asked. Figuring out how much of himself the answer to the simple question would reveal.

  I waited.

  “A place that does not exist anymore,” he said. “A dead place.”

  Again, I waited.

  He made me wait.

  “It was called Kadykchan. Now it is called nothing because it is a home only for ghosts.”

  He paused again and I continued my silence, using his own tactic to coax information out of him. I didn’t even expect it to work. But something about him must’ve been malleable, off-guard. So it did.

  “The town itself started its life as a forced labor camp,” he continued. “As most in that part of the country. Stalin opened it in the 1930s. The Kolyma River runs through it, as does access to mineral and gold deposits. So of course, the origin of my birthplace has pain, blood and death seeped into the foundations. Kadykchan welcomed its inhabitants with the promise of misery. A tradition that carried on long after the camp stopped being a prison.” He sipped at his drink. Speared at his salad.

  I did not. My hands were clenched into fists, lying on my thighs. I was silent. I was waiting for more. Desperate for more scraps of information about how this man I was trapped with became a monster.

  He gave me the information in his usual Lukyan way—with clinical explanation of the history.

  “The place that was the base of the suffering for all the residents of Kadykchan, the mine, was the backbone of the community until the late eighties. Then the shadows, the ghosts started to appear, to claim their home back. The Soviet Union collapsed. And the harbinger of doom came with it. There was an explosion in the mine, in 1996, killing 27 that day. It killed the town two years later. When the last residents left, they set fire to the town, literally.” The salad leaves crunched in his closed mouth. “Of course, I was gone long before that.”

  I let the information rush over me, the way he told the story of a town much like a Sunday night news special. But with less emotion.

  “What about your family?” I asked.

  He put his fork down. “What do you think knowledge of the past is going to gain you, Elizabeth?”

  I stared at him. “Knowledge is power,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Power is power.”

  The clank of our silverware on our plates took over the ricocheting pain of our words.

  Of his words.

  And I was the only one who felt pain from them.

  Not for myself, though I guessed I should’ve been hurt at his reluctance to open up to me. I wasn’t. He didn’t think his childhood, his life, was important enough to him to share with me. That’s what hurt.

  It was almost as bad as the pain of my upbringing defining me. Something was cold and detached about his, but that didn’t define him. Maybe that was worse.

  Or both were equally as bad because both bred two equally broken human beings. Broken in different ways, b
ut shattered was still shattered, no matter how it came to be.

  “I’m curious,” he said finally, tearing at the threads of the tapestry I was trying to build in my head, “as to why you remained with your family long enough to let them hand you to your husband.” He paused, and I let the words and their accompanying tone pierce my skin. “I’m assuming you didn’t have the same… condition you do now? That this is a result of your treatment?”

  I swallowed glass. “My treatment,” I repeated. “Yes,” I said finally, after chewing over many other things to respond to that with. “Agoraphobia develops from intense emotional or physical trauma. Which I retained from my… treatment.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait, or flinch at my tone. He waited. He’d asked me a question, and he was expecting an answer.

  I yearned not to give it to him, to stay silent and not offer him any more examples of how pathetic I was.

  “You mean to ask why didn’t I run? Try to escape?” I said finally.

  He nodded once.

  “Institutionalization, perhaps,” I answered. “My prison was my home for so long I knew nothing but bars.” I paused, taking a sip of my water despite the difficulty swallowing around the lump in my throat. “Or the more accurate and simplistic answer to your question is one you already know the answer to. Cowardice.”

  He didn’t move.

  “It would’ve been nice if I’d mustered up the strength to fight for my life. To have a life. But that’s not reality. Heroes and bravery are for the movies, for fiction. It’s the reality that you’re either a coward or a villain.”

  The unspoken label for each of us hung in the air.

  He didn’t speak. Didn’t offer me platitudes for not running, not fighting. Though I didn’t expect him to.

  We continued to pretend to eat.

  I decided to finally grasp onto that fictional courage.

  “Where have you been?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. That would be far too easy. He wasn’t going to give me anything easily, I had come to realize this.

  “On a contract,” he answered simply.

  I waited for more. He didn’t give me more.

  “Killing someone,” I clarified.

  He nodded.

  “Who?”

  His eyes met mine. “Does it really matter? It’s not the person who matters to you, is it? It’s the act itself.”

  I chewed on my lip. He watched me. Intently. So intently that the need I’d been trying to push down since the minute I entered the room jumped in my stomach. My heartbeat quickened. My breathing shallowed.

  “No,” I said through the waves of my desire. “No, I don’t think it is. I knew who you were, what you were, from the start.”

  His eyes bored into me.

  “Do you kill women?” I asked, my voice shaking.

  He didn’t even blink. “I don’t distinguish contracts between sex, race or religion.”

  I let out a sound that was almost a snort, the peace I had with his profession shattering with such a dispassionate description of human life. “Oh, so you’re a liberal hit man.”

  “And what is so much more abhorrent, taking contracts out on women in regard to men?” he asked, sounding generally interested. “Because women are weaker?” He shook his head. “I know you don’t believe that, because you’re sitting here in front of me. A man who had been through everything you had would’ve likely swallowed a bullet long ago. So that’s not your argument.”

  I blinked at the almost compliment. At the inkling he didn’t consider me weak, pathetic, like I had been so sure of minutes ago when he’d asked me why I didn’t run.

  “Are they—were they—” I choked on my words. Lukyan waited. “Were they beautiful?”

  He raised his brow. “Some. Most. Almost all of them were reprehensible human beings. Well, what your society would consider reprehensible. I’m not a judge or a jury, just the executioner.” His eyes never left mine. “And they were the most beautiful, the ones with the most marks against their souls. If they had them at all in the first place.” He sipped his drink. “But like I said, that’s not my area of expertise, which way the scales lean to.” He set his tumbler on the table so he could stand and stalk toward me. “And why do their physical attributes make a difference, solnyshko?” No one else would’ve noticed the miniscule softening in his tone—I barely did—but it was there.

  He yanked my chair backward roughly, turning it so he was standing in front of me.

  “Because,” I whispered, “you collect beautiful dead things. They’re important to you.”

  His hands went to my knees, pushing them apart with force. With a barely restrained intensity. For Lukyan, anyway. “No, I collect unique dead things,” he murmured. “More recently, one absolutely priceless thing. Not quite alive, but…”

  “Not quite dead either,” I rasped.

  “Exactly.”

  He seemed to sense I was still troubled because he didn’t claim my mouth, claim me like I knew he wanted to, like his arousal pressing from his slacks told me he wanted to.

  I wanted to. I really wanted to. My blood sang for him, pleaded for him.

  “There is still a problem,” he observed.

  “What about… children?” I choked out. The words sobered me from the bloodlust. The thought of innocent pure beings being degraded to a contract, a dollar amount high enough to buy their future. Destroy it.

  His eyes hardened slightly, a flicker of something resembling anger in them. “I don’t kill people until they turn into people,” he said by answer. “Children are not people until they make the decision that turns them into an adult.”

  “And what decision would that be?” I asked, challenging him for his word play. Children made adult decisions all the time, but that didn’t mean they deserved to die like adults. That also didn’t mean it didn’t happen in this cruel and cold world.

  I just found myself praying it didn’t happen in Lukyan’s cold and cruel world.

  Lukyan gave me a strong look. “I don’t kill children,” he repeated. “I wait until they turn into adults.”

  His fingers pressed into my kneecaps in a way I knew would bruise. I was grotesquely happy about this. His previous marks had been fading into nothingness and it had panicked me, not knowing if he’d be back to replace them with others.

  “Not that many contracts come in for children, anyway,” he continued. “I take the ones that do, trace the IP address and then usually go and exterminate the people who take them out.”

  He must’ve seen something in the way I looked at him, in the slight softening of my gaze.

  “Don’t let that cast any shadow on the truth of what I really am. Don’t let it give you the hope of redemption. That there’s goodness somewhere in me. That would be foolish.”

  He leaned forward, close enough for me to taste the truth in his words. Truth coated in danger. His woodsy scent wrapped around me, and I catalogued every inch of his chiseled face as he came in close, until his lips brushed mine.

  “Foolish, and fatal,” he whispered.

  And then he was gone.

  I blinked at his back as he left the room.

  It was getting far too common, this storming off business.

  I sensed it was because this was getting far too real. Far too dangerous.

  I followed him anyway.

  I knew I’d find him in the dead room.

  We were both attracted to it now. Surrounded by the beautiful corpses to distract us from our mutual ugliness. We’d never be that beautiful, even in death. I’d spent hours in here in the days he’d been gone, marveling at the peace it offered me. At the fact that I felt so at home here.

  Never once had I had that feeling. I’d never even known such a feeling existed.

  And here, in the place that was meant to hold my death, I found home.

  Even though his back was to me, I knew he heard me come in. He knew that kind of thing. It was the difference between life and death for hi
m. He was standing in front of another frame. My position meant I got a view over his shoulder at a bird with feathers so shiny they looked to be spun from silk. Its head was iridescent, almost holographic blue-green with flecks of purple. Its tail was two very long dark violet feathers.

  “Princess Stephanie’s astrapia,” he said, not turning or moving. “Endemic to mountain forests in Papua New Guinea. This one is male.” He nodded toward the frame. “Discovered by a man named Carl Hunstein in 1884. Named in honor of Princess Stephanie of Belgium.”

  I waited for more. Because with Lukyan, there was always more.

  But this time, there wasn’t any more.

  “Do you think the only way you can possess beautiful things is to kill them?” I whispered to his back.

  He turned, eyes latching onto mine the moment he did so. “I don’t think it. I know it. A monster can never touch beauty, stroke it like a man does. He can only crush it. Destroy it. The only way to possess it is first to preserve it in its beautiful splendor. To kill it. You can’t hurt a dead thing.”

  The words sank in, hanging in the air like mist after rain.

  “It can’t hurt you either,” I whispered, meeting the eyes I was beginning to realize weren’t empty, merely too full to recognize at first.

  The blue irises turned to marble. “Things don’t hurt me, Elizabeth. I hurt things that once were people.” The threat was apparent, visceral, but it didn’t scare me off the way I was sure he intended it to.

  “You saved my life,” I said, glancing down and picking at the fabric of my pants with unease. “More than once.”

  He regarded me, then the hand picking at the loose thread I’d created. His eyes stayed there. I knew it bothered him, the act in itself and what it represented.

  My weakness.

  He didn’t like being presented with it, weakness. It was now inescapable because he had to witness not only mine but his. Me. I was his weakness. Because I was sitting here picking at my pants. Because I was here. Not wherever it was I would’ve gone after the bullet implanted itself into my skull and my blood poured all over my white rug if he’d done what he’d been contracted to do.