The guard station sits halfway back to the basement. Through the doorway, I see my delivery boy from earlier slumped in his chair, soft snores disturbing the silence. His phone rests on the desk beside him, screen dark.
I hold my breath, step inside. He doesn't stir. The phone unlocks at my touch. No passcode. Rookie mistake that would get him killed in my family's organization.
I open the messaging app, type quickly to Nico's burner number that I memorized:
Alive. Volkov compound. Gathering intel. Don't extract. I'm close to something. Will contact when I can. S
Send. Delete the message. Clear the recently deleted folder. Close the app. Return the phone to exactly where it was, at the same angle, screen facing the same direction.
The guard snores on, oblivious.
Back through corridors that feel more familiar now, though every shadow could hide him, and my body responds to the possibility with shameful anticipation. Into the basement that's become my temporary kingdom. I relock the door from inside, a trick that took years to master but pays off in moments like this.
I settle into the chair where he left me, not bound but waiting. Composed. Arranged like I never left, if someone only glances. But the transformed nightdress tells a different story, fitted now where it was shapeless, deliberate where it was degrading.
My thoughts circle back to that photo. Mikhail's laugh frozen in time, so different from the blood and screaming in my nightmares. He looked happy. Young. Alive. And Alexei beside him, unguarded and genuine in a way that makes my chest ache.
Why do I dream about you?I ask the ghost in my memory.Why does your name feel like home in my mouth?
The basement offers no answers, just the echo of my own breathing and the distant hum of ventilation systems. The cold presses against my bare legs, but I'm burning from the inside. Guilt, desire, confusion all tangled together.
I think about Alexei's face when he talked about his brother. The grief there was real, raw, eleven years old but still bleeding. He's a monster who keeps torture rooms and makes his men too afraid to look at me. But he loved Mikhail. And somehow, I think I did too.
The dress feels like armor now. I smooth the rough cotton over my thighs, admiring my handiwork in the harsh fluorescent light, though I'm hyperaware of how it clings, how much leg it reveals, how he'll look at me when he sees it. This is what I do. Take what's given and make it mine. He wanted to break me down to nothing. Instead I redesigned myself into something harder, sharper.
Something he won't be able to look away from, and I hate how much that matters.
I sit in the chair and wait, spine straight, hands folded in my lap, perfectly composed for whatever comes next. My body hums with anticipation I refuse to acknowledge.
Let him come. I'm ready.
Or I tell myself I am.
Footsteps on the stairs. Fast, heavy, taking them two at a time. Not the measured pace of a guard or the careful tread of someone trying to stay quiet. This is someone in a hurry.
My pulse kicks into overdrive.
The door flies open hard enough to bang against the concrete wall.
Alexei stands in the doorway, chest heaving like he's been running. His white shirt is untucked, sleeves rolled up revealing those forearms that held me down, hair disheveled like he's been running his hands through it. But it's his eyes that stop me cold. Wild, furious, and something else I can't name. Something that looks like barely restrained hunger.
His gaze rakes over me, taking in everything at once. The empty restraints dangling from the chair arms. My knife resting across my lap. The nightdress that was supposed to humiliate me transformed into something that hugs every curve I shouldn't want him to notice.
The air between us crackles, electric and dangerous. I can smell him from here, amber and smoke and male fury, and my body responds like he's already touching me.
I stay perfectly still, hands folded over the blade, meeting his stare with calm even as heat floods through me.
"What the fuck," he breathes, voice rough like gravel and sin, "have you done?"
7 - Alexei
“What the fuck have you done?”
She looks up from the chair, and Christ, she's sitting there like she owns the place. Unbound. The restraints dangle empty from the chair arms. The knife, her knife that I'd tossed across the floor, now rests across her lap, retrieved despite my careful placement.
I've barely slept. When I finally gave up on trying, I went to my study to pour myself a vodka. That's when I saw it. The fountain pen sat two inches to the left of where it should be. I keep it precisely parallel to the desk edge. Always. A habit from childhood, when knowing if something had been disturbed meant the difference between safety and a knife in the dark. My father beat that paranoia into me until it became as natural as breathing.
So I knew for a fact the pen had been moved.
