She didn’t have to wait long. Soon, his deep, rumbling snores filled the room. The noise would disguise the sound of the blade working the latch bolt. She pushed it in slowly, but the sharp tip wouldn’t release the latch. The curved edge faced away. There was no handle on the inside to work.

She imagined “Henry” was already back at the Eagle, the name of the smoke shop he said was connected to Sparrow’s. She’d never heard these names and she had no idea if what he was saying was true. But he told her where he’d be waiting for her. In that parking lot, at the back, near the trees. She wanted nothing more than to be on a plane heading over the ocean to home, but the more she went over the details in her mind, the more she realized there were things to be accomplished first. Housekeeping. Bookkeeping.

Cherry had told her that there was a market for their passports. A real passport could bring many thousands of dollars on the black market. But, she told Kitty, what she’d heard was that some of the men who patronized Bochko actually bought the passports as souvenirs. It was less risky for Bochko that way. You didn’t want the passport of a missing woman floating out there in the world. It was better off in someone’s underwear drawer, a fond memory.

Maybe Henry was the sickest one of the lot. Not only did he have the passport already, he was indulging himself in being a part of her further corruption. If Bochko could use Henry to help her escape, then Henry could use Bochko to torture her at a remove. Maybe that was the source of his apparent disgust when she had been brought to him in one of the rooms. He did not want to touch her, but he would be pleased if Bochko did.

The door’s strike plate had been screwed into a flimsy frame. She could feel its wood splintering under the blade. If she could pry the plate out, she’d be able to carve under the hole that had been chiselled out for the latch bolt. It took fifteen more minutes to jimmy the plate loose, and another fifteen to get the tip of the knife under the end of the bolt. She leaned on the door and levered the bolt open and then she was free. She stood silently in the cold, open space. The other two girls had stirred and Star had whispered to her, but Larysa did not answer. She crept over the dirt floor to the couch where Bobby was sleeping and neatly sliced his jugular open. Her anatomy classes had come in handy after all. A geyser of blood burst from his throat with a sudden gush, and the big man lurched upright, grasping his throat and making a high squealing sound. He lunged off the couch instinctively, reaching for her in the near dark, and she snatched the weapon he kept in his belt from him before he crashed to the floor. The space came alive with sounds: Cherry and Star calling out in Ukrainian and Russian in panicked voices. Larysa did not answer them. She pounded on the outer door with the handle of the knife, knowing that Gene was taking his turn sleeping in one of the real beds upstairs. She didn’t know how the gun she’d taken from Bobby worked. It had a handle like a gun, but the barrel was a square plate made out of plastic and metal. A cartridge of some kind was stuck into the end of it. She’d never seen a gun like it before. There was the sound of rushing treads outside and then a key turning an outer lock. She stood five feet back from the door and kept the gun at arm’s length, her finger on the trigger. The door opened and she flexed her finger. A pair of wires shot out of the end of the gun and suddenly Gene was standing taller. His hands opened and the keys as well as a gun, identical to the one she was holding, dropped to the ground. He fell in a heap on top of them.

“Shut up!” she called out in Russian to the girls in their cubicles, and silence fell. Larysa stood, listening to the dark. No one else was out there.

The spent cartridge had ejected from the mouth of the weapon. A new cartridge had chunked into place. Gene lay on his back at her feet, but he was breathing. Nice weapon, she thought. Not lethal but effective.

She stepped over the man’s insensate form and looked back at Bobby’s. He wasn’t dead yet, but to judge from the bubbles subsiding against the dark earth, it wouldn’t be long before he died with his sins on him.

From there, it was easy to find her way out of the house. The front rooms were completely vacant. Bochko must have purchased the property and left it empty except for the spaces they needed for their activities. She had to break a couple of locked doors on her way to the front hallway, but then she simply unlocked the front door from inside and stepped out into the night.

It had been two months and nine days since she’d last stood alone and free in the night air. Their meeting place, according to Henry’s map, was six kilometres away. At a good walking pace, it would take her just over an hour to make it. She stepped away from the house and began walking with long, strong strides south from where she stood. It was dark enough to walk between the fields of soy. Even at night, the peace of the deep green fields overwhelmed her with their beauty and the secret they held. She dropped to her knees and wept. But only for a minute. Then she stood straight and high and continued walking. Henry’s map showed her how to avoid the main road on the way to where they would meet. She kept to the inside of the treelines along various sideroads that led in a disconnected, jagged line to her destination. A sign announced that she was entering Queesik Bay Reserve, a native territory. She heard the traffic for the first time.

Henry had told her to keep her eye out for a big red neon sign – THE EAGLE – that would be close to the main road. Now she saw it, and she crept toward it, still staying within cover, and keeping her eye out for her supposed saviour. He was at the back of the parking lot, standing beside a red pickup, waiting just as he said he would be. She emerged from the woods and he immediately dropped his arms and came toward her.

“Oh god! You made it … do they know you’re gone?’

“I am sure everything is going as you have planned,” she said, and the expression on his face changed.

“I don’t know what you mean –”

“When you wake up,” she said, and now he stepped away from her, seeing the gun raised before him, “tell Bochko I am not such a good girl as he was hoping. No, in the truth, I am very bad.”

She fired at his face and he crumpled to the ground beside his truck.

“Am not stupid,” she said to his quaking form. She was still holding the trigger down. Larysa yanked the leads out of his face and crumpled them up around the spent cartridge and stuck it all into her pocket. He had brought her a change of clothes, as he’d promised. It was all in a plastic bag on the front seat. Nothing too fancy. What did he care, when he was planning on having her out of them for most of the time anyway?

She dug in his pocket for his wallet. She rifled through his ID. One of the cards had the name of Doug-Ray Finch, but the rest gave his name as Henry Wiest. So he had told her his real name. Not worried, since she was never going to be able to use it against him, if he’d gotten his way. Sly fox. His home address was on one of the cards. She memorized it. She would have to see what he really was.

Now Mr. Sugar was sitting on a couch just a few feet away from her, utterly unprepared for what was about to happen to him. She took a deep breath. Then she turned into the room and faced Carl Duffy.

Bochko was sitting at the other end of the couch. He was wearing a suit jacket with a white silk T-shirt under it. She could see a wall of muscle beneath the shirt.

“Hello, Kitty,” he said. “You almost missed pizza.”

She realized that Duffy’s head was smoking.

“Say hello, Carl.” He waited and then leaned over and knocked on the man’s forehead. Larysa saw the tidy black hole there. That’s where the smoke was coming from. “You didn’t hear the shot?”