I meet her eyes in the mirror. "I'm fine."
"You're not." She doesn't look away. "You haven't been fine since he showed up."
I want to deny it. Want to laugh and change the subject, redirect with some joke or observation that will let us both pretend everything's normal. Instead, I stay silent, remove my false lashes with fingers that have forgotten how to stay steady.
"Just..." She trails off, then starts again, "Be careful, Sofiya. Whatever you have going on with him, just be careful."
If she only knew.
Everything feels uncertain. The ground shifts beneath my feet like I'm standing on sand instead of concrete, like the desert followed me here after all these years, waiting to swallow me whole.
Volk's absence so conspicuous it might as well be a presence. I sit alone in the dressing room after closing. The other girls have scattered to their lives beyond these walls. Even Angel gave up trying to coax me out for breakfast, took one look at my face and squeezed my shoulder instead. A small gesture that makes my throat tight.
The club is quiet except for the distant sound of Brad doing final checks, and Jack counting the registers. The fluorescent lights make everything harsh and unforgiving, show all the cracks in the faux marble, the stains on the carpet.
Show all the cracks in me.
I let my mind wander–can I really follow through?
Father, yes. My hatred for him remains crystalline, uncompromised , pure. He murderedMomochka. Put a bullet between her eyes while I watched, orchestrated every moment of my torture, gave the order that sent me into the desert to die. He deserves everything I have planned for him and more. Deserves to feel every ounce of pain he's inflicted, multiplied by the years I've spent learning exactly how to deliver it.
But Volk?
Every touch, every charged moment we shared rewires something in me. Nerves I believed were dead spark back to painful life.
What if the hate I've so carefully cultivated isn't enough when the moment comes?
What if I want to choose something else? Someone else? What if I want to choose being alive for something other than vengeance?
These thoughts terrify me more than Igor's hands or Anatoly's laugh or the memory of sand in my wounds. Because if I have a choice, then everything—ten years of training, planning, suffering, denying myself any pleasure or connection—becomesoptional. Something I chose to endure rather than something that must be done.
That realization keeps me awake through the morning. The one person in this world I'm beginning to care about is the very obstacle standing between me and vengeance. I don't know which will win—my need for revenge or whatever fragile humanity still flickers inside me like a candle in a storm.
I don't even know which one I want to win anymore.
And that terrifies me most of all.
Another night with no Volk. I arrive home at 3:00 a.m. The apartment greets me with cold silence, as familiar as a lover's touch I never wanted to know. Darkness wraps around me like a second skin as I move without lights, muscle memory guiding me past furniture, around corners, through doorways I could navigate blind and have, more than once, after particularly brutal training sessions.
Usually, I head straight to the training room , letting violence and sweat burn away whatever emotions accumulated during my shift—the disgust at hands on my body, the rage at having to smile through it, the exhaustion of maintaining the performance. Tonight, exhaustion roots me in place. Physical, yes—my feet ache from the heels, my back protests from the pole work—but something deeper. Soul-deep. The kind of tired sleep won't fix.
I bypass the training room and stand in my bedroom doorway for a long moment, staring at the bed I rarely use for actual rest. The apartment is small—one bedroom, barely functional kitchen, bathroom with water pressure that's moresuggestion than reality. But it's mine. Paid for with cash hard earned. No one knows this address.
I retrieve the wooden box from its hiding spot behind the false panel in my closet that I installed myself, from watching YouTube videos. Protected by layers of plastic it crinkles, and dust falls as I pick it up. Inside, a single newspaper clipping, yellowed despite my efforts, threatening to crumble.
The only tangible proof that Yelena existed. ThatMomochkaexisted. That once, before pain became my first language, I lived in a world that held space for softness. For love. For the kind of innocence that seems mythical now, something from a fairy tale I half-remember.
I carry it to my bed, sitting on the edge with the box in my lap, unable to open it yet. My hands rest on the lid, fingers tracing the wood grain like braille, like I'm reading a story I've memorized but still need to touch to believe.
Five minutes pass. Ten. The digital clock on my nightstand marks time in red numbers.
Finally, I lift the lid.
The photograph shows two people.Momochkaand Father, though I obliterated his face with black ink years ago. I refuse to look at him. Refuse to let his image live in my safe spaces. I'll see his face again when I'm ending his life, his blood on my hands, his last breath rattling in his chest.
Momochka'sengagement photo, taken at seventeen. She looks like a girl playing at being a woman. Her hair is in an updo with intricate braids, and she's smiling at the camera with genuine happiness, the kind that only exists before the world teaches you what it's capable of taking. Father stands beside her, hand on her shoulder like a brand of ownership. Like she's already his and he's making sure everyone knows. Even in what should be a happy moment, there's something predatory in his posture.
She's beautiful in the way Slavic women are—high cheekbones, sharp features, porcelain skin. But her eyes betray her. Even frozen in this single moment, her eyes carry the smallest trace of fear. Her eyes know something dark is waiting just beyond the frame of this photograph, patient and inevitable.
