I stay in the shadows across the corridor where the faint red emergency lights don’t reach, leaning against the reinforced door frame, arms crossed, trying not to feel anything. Guilt’s auseless emotion here. It doesn’t open locks, it doesn’t buy time, and it sure as hell doesn’t keep Roman’s eyes off me. Still, it creeps in like frost under a door. No matter how many times I tell myself I’m doing this for survival, my chest keeps tightening every time she shifts just enough for me to see her face.
Her eyes open. Green. Clear. Sharp even after the stun charge. They go straight to the darkest corner of the cell and find me like she’s been waiting for me all along.
“You can come out,” she says, voice raw but steady. “I can smell you.”
I push off the wall and step forward slowly, boots echoing against the concrete. The overhead lights catch me full in the face, and she sits up a little, chains rattling faintly, gaze hardening.
“You look like shit,” she says flatly.
“I’ve had better nights.” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to, but that’s fine. “So have you.”
She shifts, drawing her knees up, arms locked in front of her, shoulders squared like she’s trying to make the chains feel less like chains. “You brought me here,” she says, not a question. “You.”
“I had my orders.”
“You always do.”
I pull the chair from the corner and drag it across the floor until it’s a few feet from her, the sound a long scrape like a blade being drawn. I sit, elbows on my knees, leaning forward just enough to put my face level with hers. “I didn’t want you hurt,” I say quietly.
She laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound. “You think that matters?”
“It does to me.”
Her eyes narrow and she spits, the arc landing on the floor between us. “Keep your conscience,” she says. “You’ll need it more than I will.”
I let the silence settle for a beat. The old me would have snapped back or tried to turn the moment into a power play. Roman taught me early how to use words like blades, how to cut someone open without leaving a visible wound. But with her, the scripts fall apart. I rub a hand over my jaw and try again.
“You’re not going to die here,” I tell her.
“That’s not up to you,” she replies.
I swallow whatever I was about to say and lean back, looking at the ceiling where the pipes sweat condensation. The hiss of the vents fills the space between us. She shifts again, the sound of the chain grinding in its bolt.
I drift for a moment into memory.
It was twelve years ago, before the Syndicate had fully shown its teeth. I was stationed in the eastern cells back then too, but for a different reason—tracking a defector Roman wanted silenced. I had my exit planned. Passport, cash, a safe house outside Tallinn where no one knew my name. I was three days from freedom. And then Roman found out.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t beat me. He sat me down at his desk with a glass of brandy and said my name like a prayer. He told me how much he needed me, how everything he was building would collapse without me. He put a file in front of me—photographs of the men who had killed our father, lists of the Syndicate officers who had laughed about it—and promised me revenge, justice, power, all of it. He told me I was the only one he could trust. And like a fool, I stayed. I told myself I had no choice. I told myself blood mattered more than conscience.
I blink back to the present. Her eyes are still on me, steady and unflinching.
“Roman will come,” she says. “He’ll ask you what you know. He’ll tell you what to do. And you’ll do it.”
“You think you’ve got me figured out?”
She tilts her head, a faint, humorless smile ghosting over her lips. “I know your kind. I’ve been cleaning up your kind for a century.”
Something dark twists under my ribs at that. I lean forward, voice low. “Don’t confuse me with him.”
She shrugs as much as the chains allow. “Show me I shouldn’t.”
The words hit harder than they should. I look at her for a long moment, at the set of her jaw, the bruises already blooming along her collarbone where the stun charge caught her, the steadiness in her eyes that hasn’t cracked even now. She’s not begging. She’s not pleading. She’s daring me.
I stand and turn toward the door, pressing my thumb to the panel to lock the cell again. “You’ll get food in an hour,” I say without looking back.
“That’s supposed to make me grateful?”
“No,” I say quietly. “It’s supposed to make you stronger.”
