Standard observation intervals during darkness cycles are fifteen minutes maximum. I should be rotating between monitoring feeds, checking physiological indicators. Instead I have been watching his face for fifty-three minutes.
He is waiting for me to return. Even in his suffering, even in his fear, some part of him wants me to come back.
I should not find this information relevant. The psychological dependency of subjects on their interrogators is a well-documented phenomenon, a predictable byproduct of isolation and controlled interaction.
And yet.
The still frame I deleted is gone. But I can see it now, superimposed over the infrared feed, his face at the moment of his betrayal by his own body. The curve of his spine. The part of his lips.
I close the monitoring software.
I do not trust myself to keep watching.
Chapter Six
NIKOLAI
Time has stopped meaning anything.It has dissolved into a fluid state, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of my own suffering.
I won.
That’s what I keep telling myself. I won. I spat in his face. I looked the monster in his pale, dead eyes and I chose my pride over my thirst and I won.
But the darkness doesn’t feel like winning.
It feels like burial.
It’s thicker now. Heavier. The first time they turned off the lights, the darkness was just an absence, a negative space where light used to be. This darkness has mass. It presses against my skin like cold, wet hands. It fills my lungs when I breathe, coating the inside of my chest with something that tastes like old iron. It crawls inside my skull and makes a nest behind my eyes where memories used to live.
I keep slipping in and out. Not sleeping exactly—the cold and the cramps won’t let me really sleep—but drifting into a gray fugue state that blurs the line between waking and dreaming. Microsleeps. My brain shutting down in fragments, stealing rest in twenty-second intervals, producing visions that feel real until I jerk awake and realize I was never awake to begin with.
I can still taste the water.
The swallows from yesterday—or was it the day before? The timeline is broken. But the taste lingers like a ghost, taunting me with what I could have had if I’d just kept my mouth shut. The cool slide of it over my tongue. The way it eased the burning in my throat for three beautiful seconds.
But I’m a Petrenko.
The voice in my head sounds like my father. It sounds like his belt hitting the floor of his study, the soft leather slap that meant the education was about to begin. It sounds like the heavy oak door of the wine cellar closing, the lock engaging with a metallic finality.
I always thanked him. I always meant it.Thank you for the lesson, Papa. Thank you for making me strong.
I don’t know if I mean it now.
My muscles are cramping. The calves first, seizing into knots that feel like rocks under the skin. Then the thighs. Then the deep core muscles that I didn’t even know existed until they started screaming. The cold is doing this, and the stillness, and the way my body has been held in the same position for so long that it’s forgetting how to be a body. My heart pounds erratically, skipping beats, then racing to catch up, a chaoticrhythm I can feel pulsing in my temples and the hollow of my throat.
I’m in the confusion stage. Maybe past it. The darkness and the sleeplessness are doing something to my brain—crossing wires, bleeding dreams into waking, making it impossible to tell what’s real and what’s just my mind eating itself to survive.
The cold is worse in the darkness. Without light, without any visual anchor, my body loses track of where it ends and the room begins. The temperature hasn’t changed, I know it hasn’t, but the darkness makes everything feel colder. More hostile. More hungry.
I think about the Moscow winters. The way the snow would pile up outside my window at the estate, white and clean and endless. I used to press my palm against the glass and count how long I could stand the cold before I had to pull away. Thirty seconds. Forty-five. A minute, once, when I was fifteen and trying to prove something to myself.
I would give anything for that window now. For that cold that I could control. For a cold I could walk away from.
There are footsteps in the corridor.
I hold my breath. I strain against the restraints, tilting my head toward the door, trying to hear past the thunder of my own heartbeat. The footsteps are measured. Precise. The gait of someone who has walked this path a thousand times. I know that rhythm. I’ve been listening for it in my sleep.
He’s coming back. He’s going to open the door and turn on the lights and give me another chance.
