The Lost Labyrinth

II

A shock of smelling salts beneath her nose startled Nadya back to consciousness. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut, leaving her reliant instead on the sensations flooding in from all across her body. She was sitting in a hard chair, her ankles tied to the legs and her wrists to the struts behind her back, the knots pulled so tight that her fingers and toes were tingling, and stress was building uncomfortably in her joints. A rope gag cut into her lips and gums. She had a crick in her neck. Panic welled suddenly in her; she began struggling and trying to kick out.

'Calm down,' grunted a man in Georgian. 'How can I loosen these damned things if you won't keep still?'

She breathed in deep through her nose, forced herself to stop fighting. There'd be time for that.

'That's better,' said the man, as he picked at the knots and then removed the gag. 'Scream if you want to. No one will hear, and I'll just put it back in.'

She licked the edges of her sore lips, worked her jaw this way and that. 'I won't scream,' she assured him.

'Good.' He picked his fingers at the tape over her eyes next, then pulled it off in one go, leaving her eyebrows raw and stinging. She blinked several times as her vision adjusted. There was no one in front of her, just a plush double bed with a red chintz cover and, on its far side, a mahogany dressing table with a triple mirror on which stood a bottle of water and two glasses, a bowl of pot pourri, a vase of carved and painted wooden lilies.

She glimpsed movement in one of the mirrors. A door opened and then closed behind her, leaving her with the impression she was alone. She craned her head as far as she could, saw an en suite bathroom to her right, French windows to her left, a gap between the curtains through which she glimpsed the iron railings of a balcony, pollarded trees and a night sky unsullied by city lights. Outside Athens, then; presumably in Mikhail Nergadze's house. She remembered Sokratis gloating about how remote it was, how vast.

The door opened and closed again behind her. She heard breathing. Her heart began hammering. 'Who's there?' she asked.

But she already knew.