“You jumped to conclusions!”
“They are Russians, you are Russian,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Yes, I jumped to a conclusion.”
“Yet anyone who knows me would have known that I would never do anything for Russia!” She spat on the floor, such vehemence she felt at being associated with her country of birth. “I would never do anything for the country that executed my father!”
“That’s just the thing Nadia,” Raine shot back. “Nobody does know you! You never let anybody get close enough to know you!”
She put her hands on her hips and stared back at him, her beautiful features contorted by anger. Her long hair was loose and fell in waves over her smooth shoulders, visible through the narrow straps of a black vest-top which clung to her frame. Raine himself was similarly attired in a black T-shirt and cargo-pants.
“You want to know me, Nate?” she said, her tone shifting to one of angry suspicion. “You want to know what makes me tick? What makes me the way that I am? The Ice Queen?” She scoffed, her lips twisted in hate but Raine realised it wasn’t hate directed at him anymore. “You want to hear all about how I was a perfectly normal young lady once, working with my father, one of the greatest minds in all of Russia, to create and harness the power of the tachyon?” Her gaze seemed to drift off into her distant past and Raine allowed her to follow her thoughts wherever they were going to lead.
“It was to be the greatest discovery of mankind,” she said. “A source of unlimited power, a way to save the fossil fuels, the natural resources of this planet. You want to hear about how my government wanted to harness this power and turn it into a bomb?” she demanded. “About how my father, not just the greatest man but the bravest,” her voice cracked, her face twitched with emotion which she ordinarily did not reveal. “You want to hear about the night they came for him? The way the soldiers broke into our house? My father destroyed all the research we had spent years compiling so that he didn’t become another ‘destroyer of worlds’.”
Voicing the memories was too much for her. The dam, holding back half a lifetime of pent-up emotions, finally cracked. A racking sob erupted from her mouth and tears, the first shed since that terrible night, began to stream from her eyes. Unabashed. Unashamedly.
“You want to hear about how, as punishment, they tied him to a chair and stripped me naked!?”
“Nadia, I—” Raine tried to cut in, suddenly feeling exposed, as though he was trespassing into a part of her mind, a part of her soul which he wasn’t allowed to see. But the distraught woman couldn’t hear him now. She lived once again in that moment.
“You want to hear about how, after beating me and burning me with their cigarettes, they made my father watch as they raped me?! And not just one of them, but all of them!” Her voice was hoarse, trembling. Her entire body shook. “One by one. And all my father could do was sit there and watch and plead with them to stop.” She coughed suddenly, her throat raw.
Is this the first time she’s ever spoken about this? Raine wondered.
“You want to hear about how, after witnessing all this, they shot my father between the eyes? You know how that looks, Nathan!” she accused. “You’ve shot men between the eyes before. You’ve assassinated nameless, faceless individuals, for no good reason other than ‘simply following orders! You know how the skull erupts, bursting apart like a melon dropped from a height! Well that is the last image I have of my father! Every time I think of him, I picture that moment!”
“Nadia,” he tried to say again but in truth he had no idea what he could say. Truly now, his pathetic apology did seem pitiful. His accusation was greater and shot far deeper than he could ever have imagined.
“They left me then, alone in the house, lying in a pool of blood — some mine, some my fathers. Our neighbours found us the next day. The authorities blamed it on militants! They accused my father of selling his tachyon technology to Abdul Madzhid, the leader of Shariat Jamaat, a militant organisation fighting for Dagestan’s independence. They said that he was trying to double cross everyone and Madzhid killed him for it. They called him a traitor! But it wasn’t militants that killed him. It was the soldiers of the Motherland! Of great and powerful Russia!” Then her gaze shifted back to Raine, her eyes smouldering. “And then you come along and accuse me of helping them?!” She practically screamed the words at him. “I would never help them! Never! Even if all of Russian was in flames I would not lift a finger to help them!” She fought for control again.
“Now, do you know me Nathan?” she asked quietly. “Now do you see who I am? Does it give you pleasure to know that you have cracked the Ice Queen?”
“No, of course—”
“Is that what you came here for?” she demanded. “To see my scars! Huh? Well here they are, Nate! Take a good look! Here is your proof that I’m not working for the Russians! Right here!” She ripped her vest top up over her head and stood there topless before him!
Scarring her perfect figure, where once virgin-pure, smooth skin had been, were dozens of angry scars. Knife wounds, some of them, but most, he realised, were small and circular: the legacy of burning cigarette-ends searing into her flesh; her back, her rib cage, her stomach and breasts.
“Sexy, aren’t I?” She asked sarcastically. The anger seemed to subside slightly in her but it only swelled in Raine. His own thoughts turned dark, his own memories consuming him. He had seen acts of brutality the likes of which Nadia had survived. He had seen soldiers, U.S. soldiers, run amok through houses and villages, consumed in bloodlust, perpetuating an orgy of murder, mayhem and rape. He had been in the midst of it all. It had sickened him then, and it sickened him now. But what sickened him even more was that he had allowed it to happen, he had allowed the perpetrators to get away with it.
“As they violated me,” she said tightly, totally uncaring about her state of undress, “I shut myself off. I disengaged my emotions. I became hard, cold.” She sneered at him. “Your Ice Queen was born.”
What could he say? Tell her about his own past, his own demons? Tell her about the monsters that kept him awake at night, the screams that still echoed in his head, the faces that haunted his dreams? Words were meaningless he knew.
Instead, slowly, he removed his own t-shirt and stood bare-chested before her. Her eyes roamed his body, but not focussing on the firmness of the muscle or his well-toned abdomen. Instead, she focussed on the hideous scars that marked his chest also — slashes, tears, burns and bullet-wounds. A living testament to a lifetime of violence.
“I have scars too,” he said, his voice low, husky, wrought with emotion.
Slowly, gently, they stepped together, as though pulled by the magnetism of the revelation of their pain, the imperfections inflicted upon their otherwise flawless bodies. Both were coldly calculating, shut off from their emotions, devoid of feeling to the outside world. Nadia hid her pain behind a mask of cold detachment; Raine hid his behind a veil of cool indifference. But now, for tonight, without uttering another word, they both conceded to reveal their scars to one another. Scars that ran far deeper than the flesh.
With a terrified quiver, her lips brushed his. He let her take control, somehow aware that this was the first time in a very long time for her. They were like opposites driven by the same source. She had broken away from human contact; he had immersed himself in it, finding brief moments of salvation in the delights of the female flesh.