Page 182 of The Harbinger
“Takehertothecatacombs. She can’t be trusted.”
Dmitri nodded and picked her up, avoiding her bandaged arm.
“Where am I going?” she whimpered, her body cowering, unlike moments earlier, where it’d melted under my touch. But it was only a ploy to get me to lower my guard.
“Some place where you can’t hurt anyone.”
“But I…”
Dmitri pulled her from the room, and I glanced at the tea, my muscles stiffening with putrid rage.
Was this what she’d been planning all day? Staying up with tea, waiting for me to come home, seduce me, knowing I’d say yes, then die as though we were Profiry and Zinaida? Had she translated another one of Nikolai Gogol’s novels? Although they’d both killed themselves after being separated, had it given her the idea?
Her screams echoed down my silent halls and filtered into her room, where I stood motionless, yet vibrating. Without a second thought, I moved down the stairs, coming for her.
She fought Dmitri, her hands slapping at his face, her knees dragging along the floor as he fumbled with her. His cheek had three long red marks, the tail-end bubbling with blood.
“Wait.”
Her eyes brightened as she saw me. Dmitri released her, and she scrambled across the floor, dropping herself at my feet and kissed my shoes, her hands wrapping around my ankles. “It wasn’t me. You have to believe me.”
Blood emerged from her hair, trailing down her neck and shoulders, soaking into the jade nightgown I’d shoved over her hips earlier.
“If not you, then who?”
She sobbed, her shoulders trembling as she lay on the floor, her knees tucked beneath her. Mia’s fingers dug into my ankles, holding on tight as if it’d stop her from rotting in the catacombs until Ruslan’s results came through.
“Who, Mia? Save us this grief and give me an answer.”
She sniffled, her hands reaffirming her grip, yet she didn’t answer.
“Take her,” I said in English, and Dmitri shoved forward.
“No. Sacha, please. I’m telling the truth. It wasn’t me.” He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her as though she were merely a feather. Mia flailed, slapping and biting, her screams and cries grating on my last nerve.
“It was Catherine.”
Her words stilled the blood in my veins, and my body ran cold. I was on her in two long strides, my fingers digging into her cheeks as I forced her traitorous gaze upon me. “What a vile thing to say.”
“It’s true,” she mumbled.
My lips curled. “You expect me to believe she’d try to have me killed? She knows it wouldn’t have gotten by me.”
“She…” Mia sobbed, her eyes red, her tears slicking my fingertips. “She made it for me.”
“So you asked Catherine to help you?”
“No.” She shook her head with such vigor my wet fingers slipped off her face.
“Speak clearly, Mia, or I’ll make your final days on this earth far worse than any earthly definition of Hell.”
“I asked Catherine to make me some tea so I could sleep.” She covered her mouth and fell through Dmitri’s grasp, collapsing to the floor as if uttering Catherine’s name was such a betrayal. “She told me to go back upstairs, and then she brought it up to me.”
My skin itched, and the need to lash out had my hands shifting into tight balls. “Catherine made it?”
She nodded. “I was about to drink it when I heard something in the closet. You have to believe me. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
I scoffed, recounting the knife she’d buried in a box made for cat feces, the same place Catherine told me it would be. I never questioned how she’d known at the time, only that Mia had hidden a knife.