Free Blood Trust by Eric Van Lustbader

fire, and was now a heart in name only, a hollow vessel, useless as a desert in which nothing could live.
    She tried to think of incidents in the past—her time with Emma, Jack’s daughter, and more recently, her adventures with Jack himself in Moscow and the Ukraine. All of it felt like a dream, or a film she was watching without becoming fully engaged. Briefly she tried to fight her way out of the disassociation, but it was too difficult for her to defeat. There was a good reason for that, too. Without being aware of it, she had developed a mechanism for keeping her distance from the week of terror when she had been imprisoned in the small, lightless room and subjected to …
    She was still in a prison, one of her own making.
    A barrier came up, like a wall of lead stopping Superman’s X-ray vision. Her own X-ray vision—her habit of peering backward into that one section of her past, examining that week, picking at it as if it were a scab that wouldn’t heal—had to be thwarted at all costs, even to the loss of feeling in the present.
    She made a little inchoate sound in the back of her throat, as a fox will when caught in a spring-loaded trap, when it is about to gnaw off its paw to regain its freedom. The truth was she longed to talk with Annika, though this was the one thing she must always keep from Jack. It was Annika who had convinced Jack to let her go see the mistress Milla Tamirova, who had taken Alli into her BDSM dungeon and made her confront her terror at being tied into a chair. Why had Annika done this? Because she, too, had been held hostage. She knew the hell into which Alli had descended because she had inhabited that very same hell. Unlike Alli, however, she had managed to escape. If only she could meet with her again, but neither she nor Jack knew where she was.
    Despair took her up and shook her as a terrier will shake a rat it has caught. She wanted to cry, but her eyes remained dry. She took up a Frederic Remington bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a horse rearing up at the sight of a rattlesnake, and raised it over her head. She felt a burning desire to smash it into a glass vase, but lowered it back onto the shelf.
    She knew the noise would bring Rudy, who might decide to stay in order to ensure she didn’t commit more acts of vandalism. Being imprisoned again, even in her uncle’s study, was making her nuts. An icy ball of panic had sprung up in her gut, and with each rotation was increasing in size. She had to get out of here, and soon. She needed to find Jack, but she had no way of contacting him. There must be some kind of way out, said the joker to the priest. She laughed silently and grimly. Jack had told her there was always a way.
    She looked around the study, inhaled the familiar scents of leather, her uncle’s cologne, the remnants of cigar smoke floating like dust motes in the air. Closing her eyes, she tried to recall afternoons when she was a little girl, curled up in this very chair, inhaling the same scents. She had often been left alone while the grown-ups had conversed as only grown-ups can. She couldn’t remember how that had occupied her time. Despite the changes in seasons and times of day, all the afternoons blended one into the other.
    Abruptly, her eyes popped open. She had spent her alone hours exploring the nooks and crannies, drawers and shelves of Uncle Hank’s domain. Unfurling her legs, she rose from the chair and, taking small, silent steps, she approached the huge burl walnut desk. As a child, it had seemed as enormous as a battleship or a castle, and filled with as many secrets.
    But what had seemed like treasures to a little girl—a box of matches, a handsome humidor, a photo of a little girl—didn’t now. She no longer played with the brief and tiny flames, the odors of cigars repulsed her, and the little girl in the photo was Caroline, Uncle Hank’s daughter from his first marriage, who was now either dead or alive, but was, in any event, as lost to