This is not how I have conducted any of my previous forty-seven sessions.
On the monitor, the subject raises his head. His gaze drifts across the far wall, past the corner where the acoustic panels meet, and settles on the one-way glass. He cannot see me. The design prevents it. But his eyes slide across the surface, lose the spot, return to it—as if tracking some instinct he cannot name.
His mouth moves. The audio feed carries his voice, barely above a whisper.
“I know you’re there.”
My stylus hovers over the tablet.
There is no tactical reason to respond. Protocol does not require response. I am a process and processes do not deviate from their established parameters.
But I do not look away.
And when I finally close the file, the color of his eyes is the last thing I see.
Chapter Two
NIKOLAI
Sometime after midnight,the door closes and the room tries to digest me.
I count to ten. It’s what my father taught me to do when the panic starts. Ten seconds of controlled breathing, then assess, strategize, find the angle.
Except my breath keeps hitching on the inhale. The count resets at six. The gray is everywhere, pressing in from all sides.
“I’m Nikolai Petrenko,” I say out loud.
The words disappear into the acoustic panels without a trace. No echo. No resonance. Nothing bounces back to confirm I exist.
“I’m Nikolai fucking Petrenko and my father will burn this city to the foundations to get me back.”
The silence swallows that too.
How long has he been gone? Twenty minutes? An hour? Time has already started to slip. Without windows, without a clock,without the rhythm of human interaction, the minutes stretch and contract like something living.
My wrists are chafing against the restraints. Skin rubbing raw where the metal meets bone. I force myself to stop pulling. That’s what they want. They want me to exhaust myself fighting the chair so I’m soft when the real work begins.
I know the playbook. I’ve seen it executed on men who owed my family money.
I’ve never been on this side of the chair before.
The cold is the worst part. Or maybe the second worst part after the silence. The temperature has been calibrated to make my muscles cramp and my teeth chatter. My suit jacket is still on, but it’s not doing much against this kind of cold—institutional, intentional freeze that seeps through Italian wool like the fabric isn’t even there.
I think about my apartment in Moscow. The view of the river. The bed that’s too big for one person.
I think about the girl I was supposed to meet for dinner tomorrow. Elena. The curator from the Tretyakov. She’ll wait for me at the restaurant. She’ll check her phone. She’ll assume I’m just another rich asshole who stood her up.
She’ll never know that I’m forty-seven floors underground learning what it feels like to be inventory.
The smell bothers me almost as much as the temperature. Antiseptic and concrete and something underneath that I don’t want to identify—something organic.
The door opens.
My whole body jerks against the restraints before I can stop it. An animal response to sudden stimulus. I hate myself for the display of weakness.
The man from before steps through the doorway. Same unhurried precision. Economical movements. Nothing wasted.
He carries a metal tray. He sets it on the small table against the wall. I crane my neck to see what’s on it, but the angle is wrong.
