#im sick that her destiny is clearly never ever being free of him

[robertsugden]

[dissonancedance]

Chapter 96

Her barriers were thinning dangerously, sweat starting to slick her palms and douse the nape of her neck, but she had to play this through.

Content warning: Graphic descriptions of violence, references to sexual violence, medical horror, incest, cults, and forced captivity.

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Closing the Distance

Chapter 96

Simone’s words died on the breath that shock had stolen from her as Vidar crushed the breath from Maier. Black lines marred the concrete floor with each scrape of Maier’s shoes as he kicked in inept attempts at traction, his white skin shifting red to blue in a smear of pain. Unable to look away from the pale-knuckled grip around Maier’s neck, she watched her uncle strangle a man with the same quiet placidity as when he lied in a drug-induced delirium. The strength in those long fingers echoed memories of terror and helplessness around her own neck, but the terror and helplessness she felt now was wrapped in defeat.

After all the horror, secrecy, and guilt of turning to these experiments and participating in the irrevocable destruction of the person her uncle once was, they still couldn’t carve the monster out of the man.

“Vidar,” she said, watching his clamping hands grow still at the sound of her voice. “Off.”

Like the loyal doll she’d reduced him to, he backed away from the battered, coughing Maier and turned to her with the same eerie calm that never left him. Before, she could fool herself into thinking that placid lack of expression was peacefulness, maybe even contentment, but what remained behind his blue eye was just as empty as the hollow socket next to it. Having that empty eye trained on her now, alone but for the hacking lunatic on the floor, reminded her too well of the monster still clinging to the cavity of his mind.

The long, puckered scar curled up Maier’s cheek as he laughed between heaving coughs, "Tha-... he-heh, that could have gone better."

“Sick son of a fuck…” Simone muttered, helplessness and frustration transmuting fluidly into rage at the slick drone of that voice. Maier’s shirt ripped when she yanked him up by his collar and snarled into his gasping face, “You stay the hell away from us! If I see you around here again, I'll fucking peel the rest of your face off!"

The corners of his mutilated mouth twitched and writhed into a smile.

“Pretty promises, but not the one I want,” he grinned, the injury to his throat breaking his monotone up into a more human sound. “The deal I had made with you, Ms. Valstad, was to experience the glory of Leif Valstad’s specialty firsthand after helping to free him.”

“You lost that deal when you sold my family out to Aguiyi,” she hissed.

A sharp agony shot up from her wrists as Maier’s hands grasped them, shocking her into losing her grip, and he yanked her down in a swirl of motion. Her rage made her sloppy, gave him the split second of advantage to slam her under him. Her vision flashed white from the force of her skull slapping the concrete. There would be no help coming; Maier’s methodical nature alone had assured her that he had cut off the security cameras before ever entering the lab to indulge his desires in private.

Below the ringing that muffled her hearing, Maier's words came through distant and flat, “The deal still stands, but I have since concluded that this institution is not what he needs to be freed of. The factor that has been preventing Leif Valstad from achieving his full potential is you, Ms. Valstad. We need to discuss your role in the family.”

The fuzzy stirrings of a concussion made her tongue thick, her words slurring as she ground out, “Yeah, well, last time I took your advice, I got fucked in the ass.”

“I would wager that has also occurred since you stopped taking my advice, therefore the consequence is no fault of mine,” he responded in that flat, emotionless drone that enraged her more than the spitefulness of his meaning.

Simone twisted to drag Maier’s grasp to the side and destabilize him enough to shove her hip up and roll him. The maneuver she'd recited a hundred times under her father's training paid off, only for her to be wrenched back before she could clamber away. His grip on her dress stopped her short, the expensive muslin finally tearing loudly when she jerked free from his grabbing hands. The cold, sterile air of the lab plastered itself to her sweat-slicked skin as she rushed to put as much distance and obstacles between herself and the man crawling after her.

“The path Bjørn had left for Leif Valstad did not contend with the possibility that he might reject it,” Maier said, ragged with the effort of dragging his lower half. “So long as you remain alive, his attachment to you will prevent him from embracing his destiny.”

The medical tools laid out on a tray near the sensory deprivation tank caught Simone’s eye as she registered the threat Maier had made. In his state, it would not be difficult to pin him down and drive a scalpel along his arteries until his broken body finally quit. No, not difficult, but it would be risky. She’d underestimated him once before to know that he would not be deterred from his task by mere pain. Her move had to be precise.

"Aside from that being none of your fucking business,” she frowned, trying to hide the wooziness that wobbled her gait as she started towards the tray, "you should know better than to think that killing me would make Leif more cooperative."

“And you should know better than to come into this lab alone. Vidar Valstad is an unstable patient, after all. You see now how the seed of violence still germinates within him.”

She snatched up the scalpel as she circled the back of the lab to stay out of his path, distancing herself from him as well as keeping him far from Vidar. Her uncle’s vacant stare followed her, unaware or unalarmed at what was happening around him, and she shuddered at what was so obvious to both her and Maier. Dangerous or not, she couldn't leave her uncle with this snake. She couldn't surrender to fear again.

“Even if you framed Vidar for my murder, Leif would blame Ouroboros for putting him close enough to get to me,” she said. The scalpel was light in her hand as she held it out of his line of sight and stepped slow enough to goad him into maintaining his pursuit. "He’d rather burn in the fire he lights under Ouroboros’s ass than have vengeance go unfulfilled.”

“Like father, like daughter.”

The exit was past Maier, no safe route out of that room without leaving her uncle there with him. All her weaving and maneuvering hadn't tricked him into giving her an opening to grab Vidar and escape. He had her backed up into an ultimatum: kill or be killed. Even without full use of his legs and caught off guard, Maier had still forced her to play by his rules. More than the fear of what consequences awaited her for killing Aguiyi's right hand man, more than the risk of injury or death in the tussle, it was the bitterness of being forced into this standoff that made her pause.

Simone rubbed the smooth handle of the scalpel restlessly, letting a decision weigh against her hesitation before carefully saying, "There's an unfinished remodel in an attic space that some of the men climb through to get to the roof. It's out of view from the rest of the building, with a clear jump into the trees on the street outside. Someone should seal that off before Leif finds out and gets any ideas of leaving with me."

The length of Maier's silence told her enough for her to confidently lower her scalpel, but his knife did not falter.

"You won't leave without Vidar Valstad," he said, more as a statement of fact than calling her bluff.

Simone looked past him to her uncle, meeting his remaining eye directly before turning her attention back to Maier.

"I won't leave him," she admitted, keeping his focus on her as she laid the scalpel on the edge of the sensory deprivation tank. "Vidar is safe here. We all are. Everyone here acts on behalf of the interests of Ouroboros, and we are Ouroboros."

He didn't detect Vidar coming up behind him with steps as slow and quiet as a phantom's. Simone kept her eyes locked with Maier's as her uncle's shadow loomed over him.

"Everyone except my father, Aguiyi… and you, Maier," she said as Vidar's open hands reached for him.

--

Simone leaned against the wall as she watched Liu, the nearest member with crime scene forensic experience, assess the smears and splatters on the floor. She was careful not to let her gaze linger in any one place for too long as Aguiyi shifted his attention between them. The smooth concrete obscured the stains in darker shades of gray, but the reek of what they were wrinkled her nose with a horrible familiarity. The good ventilation in the labs had granted these cramped corridors a false sense of openness and had blunted much of the sharpness of the solutions used to keep them sterile, but she could still smell the blood oxidizing steadily into rot. Her uncle’s blood, and not a drop of anyone else’s. She had been careful to assure that. Her frantic scrubbing had eaten through the nitrile gloves she’d used, the cleaning solution stinging the blisters from her father’s training.

“The patterns from the lab to the hall clearly indicate a struggle,” Liu said, mostly to herself while she photographed the mess, although the halted lilt to her tone suggested she only spoke in English for their benefit. Simone moved closer to show she was still listening despite the fatigue and nervousness that weighed her steps into a shuffle. “I only see one set of footprints, so he was maybe carrying something... something that threw off his balance.”

“Couldn’t’ve had much balance,” Dr. Wallis muttered rapidly. He shrunk a little more into himself when they looked his way, but continued, “... kept ‘im sedated near constantly for over two months. Wouldn’t’ve been able to walk straight, haul things about.”

“Never underestimate a Valstad,” Aguiyi warned.

Dr. Wallis choked back a whimper as he nodded, cowering even further into his hunch under the attention of the old man. Simone looked away from him; that would likely be the limit of what he could say for the next few hours at least and it hurt to see what had become of the once-confident, witty neuropsychologist. It was a cold reminder of what she risked in this subterfuge. Aguiyi had allowed her to be punished for running from him before; she could not imagine what penalty might await her for taking Vidar away from him.

“Maybe he had a weird reaction to the drugs?” she suggested.

“A severe reaction from sedation explains it until we reach here,” Liu said as she gestured with her camera to where the bloody path ended in the middle of the hall. “It also doesn’t explain how or why the video feed was interrupted and the lab was unsecured.”

Simone pursed her lips against the urge to frown. “So someone cut the cameras and opened the door for my uncle to slip out like a loose housecat… and then simply vanished?”

“Any ideas, Liu?” Aguiyi asked.

The expert shook her head. “All my ideas are in the evidence. How many others knew Vidar Valstad was down here?”

“No one I wouldn’t trust.”

“Apparently at least one you shouldn’t,” Simone muttered.

A resounding silence brought her to look around. Aguiyi’s wrinkles deepened into a gnarl of a scowl, Dr. Wallis’ pallor turned a sickly shade of buttermilk, and Liu watched her with curious surprise. She wasn’t aware she’d said that out loud until Aguiyi announced, “There are none within these walls who do not live to serve our shared cause.”

The shadow of a scold in his tone raised Simone’s suspicion enough for her to follow where that statement had stung him, chasing that hunch with, “Not everyone here is sharing the same cause, doc. You made Leif their leader, don’t act surprised when they follow his will.”

“You know too little of how Ouroboros operates to be making those kinds of assessments, Little Scratch.”

The ire that fueled his defensiveness spilled over the deepening furrow of his brow and infected her with a corrosive, unyielding frustration. Or maybe it was her own frustration rising to meet his. Her barriers were thinning dangerously, sweat starting to slick her palms and douse the nape of her neck, but she had to play this through.

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” she sneered. “Maybe someone left the door unlocked. Maybe he hurt himself stumbling out of here. Maybe the cameras glitched. Any of these alone are generous assumptions, but all of that together is quite a fucking coincidence.”

“We don’t yet know what happened and neither do you.”

“I know my father wants his corpse displayed in the yard. I know that’s a lot of my uncle’s blood on the floor for anyone who could care to keep him alive to have spilled. Why isn’t anyone asking Leif?”

“Leif doesn’t know about this project.”

“He doesn’t need to know, what he needs is Vidar’s head delivered to him. And all you care about are your fucking projects. Is twenty years all it takes for you to-” Simone snapped, her teeth clicking shut to bite off the rest of what had slipped between the cracks of her composure.

If she didn’t have Aguiyi’s attention before, she clearly had it now. Those broad, sagging, leonine features turned fully to her, eyes now alight with a deadly intent behind thick cataracts as he waited for her to continue. Somewhere on the boundaries of her focus, she knew Dr. Wallis was curling into himself in an attempt to disappear and Liu was watching with wide-eyed wary interest, but all she could see were the decades carved into that face falling away. The cataracts sank back until fiery brown irises glared at her from a face nearly unrecognizable yet too familiar for her to not know.

“All it takes for me to… what?” he prompted, slick with venom.

Simone swallowed the self-consciousness that stalled her tongue before doing her best not to spit out, “Forget your word to Bjørn.”

The fire in his glare receded to a smoulder, but his tone was no less hard as he responded, “We’ll find Vidar Valstad. He’ll need you when we do.”

She held his clouded stare until the buzzing, burning sensation of direct eye contact frothed just below her tolerance and she let her sight drop to his cheek. That roving anger seeped out of her, all the bluster it had garnered departing with it in a sigh that left her feeling deflated, tired, but good.

They hadn't suspected her involvement in Vidar’s disappearance, hadn’t kept her there to watch her sweat and squirm despite her not needing to be there at all. Aguiyi had summoned her to the scene to include her and the gratitude that gesture had implanted in her was inescapable. She was among the first to be alerted to the disappearance of her uncle. She was also brought because Aguiyi correctly guessed how important it would be to her to be included. It was almost easy to believe that he did all of this out of respect and courtesy to her.

Aguiyi reached out to give her shoulder a firm, fraternal squeeze. She did not try to dodge it and the lack of revulsion at his touch burned her all the worse. Such grand gestures of courtesy and respect still felt odd despite the annoying compulsion to appreciate it.

“We’ve got everyone on the lookout, Scratch,” he said, warm and assuring, welcoming her trust with the patience and wisdom of a leader steeped in experience. “You have my word on that, too. If you think disclosing this project to Leif is necessary to help find your uncle, then I won't hold you back.”

The tug of a bond she did not want and was not hers to begin with grated against what she had set into motion. She could see why Bjørn had saddled Aguiyi with his legacy. Bjørn may have been insane, but he could see the inner workings of people as clearly as the movements in his skeleton watch. Through the same pale gray eyes as his, Simone could see Aguiyi as she imagined Bjørn may have seen him: a man with a knack for leadership and devotion that ran so deep it pulled those around him under his wing. It would have been easy to fall into where Aguiyi had attempted to manipulate her if she had let him.

The watch ticked steadily at her wrist as she clasped her hand over his and said, “I'm counting on you, doc.”

--

“Never thought a French summer would be so warm. Do you want a shorter taper?”

Leif glanced over the document in his hands, considered the clippers the barber held, and answered, "No, let's keep it a scissor cut. Can't go changing my image without consulting the committee first."

The barber let out a chuckle as he traded the clippers for shears. "I thought being on top would give a guy more freedom, Scratch. Doesn't seem all bad, though. Least you got the best barber in the complex to keep your image sharp."

Leif smiled at his easy humor. Only a few months ago, this same man could barely hold a comb steady in his presence. Leif was pleased that his penchant for violence against his fellow Ouroboros members hadn't affected the reproitoir he'd built with the barber.

"You're the best of the best, Athanasios."

Leif turned his attention back to the stack of reports, eager to assess the situation on the Mozambique Channel, but both his and Athanasios's attention turned to the sound of shouting outside the makeshift barbershop.

"What the hell-"

"Stay here," Leif commanded as he pulled the sheet off his shoulders and rushed out of the makeshift barbershop.

Casual though their reproitoir might be, Athanasios obeyed orders as well as anyone among their ranks. Or, at least as well as most. The guards assigned to ensure that Leif was where he was supposed to be were not where they were supposed to be. Instead, the hallway was only filled with the sounds of shouting and scuffling echoing from around the corner.

There were few opportunities that afforded Leif a moment outside of constant supervision. He could use this moment to run, hide among the estate's many forgotten passages, find a way to get him and his daughter out somehow. This was ahead of his plan, but he didn't know when a moment like this would present itself again. Before hesitation let this opportunity slip by, he turned in the opposite direction of the clamour only to be stopped by a woman's voice among the shouting. Leif was rushing towards it before he fully recognized it as his daughter's, his heart hammering and throat tight in a single-minded panic to reach her.

"Simone!" he cried, his voice lost among the many as he rounded the corner and pushed into the tight crowd of men.

A path cleared quickly as they realized who was now among them, but not quick enough as he shoved his way through the throng. His mind raced with a thousand fears only to be confronted with one of the worst when at last he pushed his way to the clearing at the center of the crowd. There, his daughter stood before a man with a knife gripped in both of his hands, her blood oozing around the tip of the blade held against her chest. The urge to rush in and kill this man had him lunging forward, but the grasping hands of those around him held him back in time for him to assess the situation. The blind panic in the man's eyes was zeroed in on Simone's grim stare, the knife seemingly frozen in time. Any interference could kill her.

"What's happening here?" Leif demanded of the men next to him.

"Apologies, sir," the man to his right spoke up above the din. "It's Deleon. He was sparring and started to panic, pulled a knife on his partner. Little Scratch intervened, stopped him from killing."

Leif whipped around and snarled, "And you let her?"

The thin stream of red blooming under the fabric of her bodice made him jerk against the hands holding him back. He had to deescalate this situation somehow; going in hotheaded and half-cocked could easily get her killed. His mind raced with a dozen useless ideas leaping out of the panic that gripped him while he forced himself to watch and wait as Simone slowly reached up to the Deleon's shaking hands.

Leif couldn't hear what she said, only see her lips form the words, "Don't be afraid. You're safe. You're with family now. Understand? You're with family."

Deleon, a man three times her size, trembled and muttered rapidly as her tiny hands slowly pushed the knife away. Leif stood frozen, his breath burning in his chest while she continued to hold Deleon's wild stare as she loosened his trembling hold on the handle. Then, bafflingly, she wiped the blood off on her dress and slid it in the sheath at his thigh.

"We take care of each other," she said, placing her hands on Deleon's slumped shoulders. "That's what family does. No matter what, we take care of each other."

Sensing the threat was low, Leif jerked again to be released to run to her only for those hands to hold fast. He turned to the men to order them, the order dying on his tongue when he saw how they watched his Simone. He knew that look, that stalwart stillness and attentive stare. They looked to Simone and saw a leader.