The accusation should hurt. Should make me defend myself, explain that he has it backward, that Mikhail taught me Russian in secret gardens while I fell in love with his gentle soul. That I was the one who betrayed my family for him, not the other way around.
But what's the point? My real crimes are so much worse. The memory of my father's last smile cuts through the numbness. Warm, trusting, completely unaware his daughter was sending him to die.
"Then," Kaz continues, warming to his prosecutorial performance, "you spent weeks whoring yourself to my cousin. Weakening him from inside. Destroying this family's foundations with your—"
He goes on. I stop listening. The words wash over me like white noise while my body betrays me with sense memory. Alexei's hands gentle on my face at the lakehouse, teaching me to tend the bonsai. Before I remembered I'm poison. The phantom touch makes something crack in my chest.
"Nothing to say?" Kaz grabs my chin, forces my face up. His fingers are cold. Everything here is cold except the places where I remember being warm. "No defense? No begging?"
"No."
He slaps me. Hard. My head snaps sideways, copper flooding my mouth where my teeth cut into my cheek. The chair rocks but doesn't tip. Sofia the Weapon notes the angle, the force, files it away despite my trying to stay empty.
I turn my face back to center. Stare through him.
"Don't you have anything to say?" Frustration bleeds into his voice. He wants the show. The tears, the pleading, the bargaining. Every condemned prisoner's final performance.
"Would it matter?"
"No." His smile sharpens. "But I'd enjoy watching you try."
"Then I won't give you the satisfaction."
Another slap. The other cheek this time. Blood drips from my split lip onto the concrete between us. One drop. Two. The warmth of it contrasts with the cold air, and I think absurdly of how Alexei kissed me at the lakehouse, so gentle after breaking down about his mother. Just hours ago. Might as well be a lifetime.
Still I give him nothing. Just empty eyes in an empty face, waiting for an ending that might be the only justice left.
They leave me alone eventually. Three guards visible from my position. One by the door, one pacing the far wall, one leaning against a support beam playing with his phone. The Weapon starts calculating before I can stop her, that trained part of me that never truly sleeps.
Guard One by the door: knife on his belt, left side. He favors his right leg when he shifts weight. Old injury, maybe his knee. Vulnerable to a sweep. Three seconds to take him down, two more to have his knife. I know exactly how his body would fall.
Guard Two pacing: amateur. Gun holstered wrong, safety probably still on. He keeps checking his phone every thirty seconds, distracted. The smell of his cheap cigarettes drifts over, making my nose wrinkle. I could have his weapon before he knew I'd moved.
Guard Three against the beam: the only real threat. Actually watching me despite the phone, using it as cover while his eyes track the room. But he's standing too close to that support beam. THere's a blind spot directly behind him if I could get there.
Three paths to escape flash through my mind unbidden, each one efficient and lethal. Even exhausted, even with this nothingness eating me from inside, that part of me never stops calculating survival.
But the woman inside the Weapon doesn't want to survive.
Why escape? To go where?
Marco's voice echoes in my head: "Get out of my house." The shatter of crystal against his study wall still rings in my ears. My brother who held me after nightmares, who gave up his youth to raise us, who thinks I'm complicit in our father's death. He's not wrong. The memory of his face, love curdling into disgust, makes me close my eyes.
Alexei's lakehouse isn't home anymore. Can't be, not when I'd have to tell him the truth. That I chose Mikhail over my own blood. That every death that night traces back to my silence. He's grieving his mother, still raw from showing me his broken pieces. How can I tell him I'm the sharp edge that cuts anyone who gets close?
There's nowhere to go. No one left who'd want me once they knew.
Kaz wants to execute me for crimes against the Volkovs. He doesn't even know the real crime. Letting dozens of people die to protect a boy who died anyway. My father's blood on my hands because I loved a Russian boy more than my own family.
The woman thinks: maybe this is justice.
The Weapon thinks: forty-five seconds to freedom.
The woman wins.
So I sit still, letting the restraints bite deeper into my wrists, red grooves that will scar. Stop calculating escape routes and start accepting that maybe some people deserve their endings.
Guard Three watches me not trying to escape and frowns, probably wondering why I'm so still. Why the infamous SofiaRosetti, with God-only-knows-how-many confirmed kills, sits quiet as a lamb for slaughter.
