The IV port Alexei installed is getting infected.
I can feel the heat spreading from the insertion point, a low-grade fever radiating up my forearm. The flesh around the needle is tender and swollen, turning a dark, angry red.
No one notices. No one cares.
I should be using this solitude to mourn.
Mikhail Gorev and Yuri Federov are dead because of me. Their blood is on my hands—my unconscious, fever-dreaming hands that kept talking while I burned. Dima Sorokin is being interrogated somewhere in this building. I heard a scream down the corridor yesterday, faint through the soundproofing, muffled by distance and concrete. It sounded like him. It sounded like the boy who used to let me win at chess because he knew my father was watching.
I tried to build the rage. I assembled it piece by piece, laying foundation stones of fact: Alexei recorded my fever-dreams. He transmitted the coordinates while I was still burning. He sent a kill team to murder men who trusted my family.
The structure won’t hold.
Every time I think I have constructed something solid, something that could sustain hatred, the memory of his hands undoes it. The way he stayed all night. The way he treated the infection himself, his fingers cool against my burning skin. The way he saidI’m sorrywhen he thought I couldn’t hear, his voice stripped of its clinical armor.
The guilt is easier to hold than the anger. It settles into my chest like a stone, heavy and cold. This is what I deserve.
But even the guilt keeps getting interrupted. Even the self-flagellation keeps fracturing against the memory of pale eyes and still hands and the promise that he would not leave.
He left.
I stare at the amber light above me until it burns an afterimage onto my retinas. The room is quiet. Too quiet. Without his footsteps to structure it, the silence feels vast and predatory.
The broth on the tray is the same temperature, the same salinity as before. But it tastes like nothing. It tastes like being inventory again. A number on a manifest. A problem to be managed until it expires.
This is what it was like before him. I had forgotten. Or maybe I never really knew.
No. That’s not right. It was never like this before him, because before him I didn’t know what I was missing. The early days were brutal, yes—pain and deprivation and the systematic dismantling of my identity. I understood that. I could fight that. I could wrap my pride around me like armor and endure.
This is something else. This is absence.
Somewhere in the walls, an elevator cable groans under distant weight. I find myself listening for it, straining against the silence, counting the sounds the way I used to count his footsteps.
I am going insane.
I can feel it happening. The slow dissolution of the boundaries that separate thought from thought, memory from present. The room is too quiet. The light is too flat. My mind is starting to eat itself to survive.
I try to remember what life was like before this room.
Moscow in the winter. The way the snow muffled the city. Nightclubs with bass so heavy it rattled your teeth. Champagne and cocaine and women whose names I never learned, whose faces blur into a composite of beauty and boredom. The penthouse apartment with its view of the river, empty and cold. The Mercedes my father gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday—a bribe to keep me loyal.
I try to remember the faces of friends. Konstantin, who I used to drink with at the Ritz. Natasha, who I dated for three months before she realized I was never going to love her because I didn't know how. The endless parade of people who smiled at me because of my last name.
The memories feel like they belong to someone else. A character in a story I read once. A man who died a long time ago.
None of them are looking for me. None of them wondered where I went. My father held a funeral, and they attended, and they drank the vodka and ate the food, and then they went back to their lives and forgot that Nikolai Petrenko ever existed.
Alexei is the only person who remembers me.
The IV site throbs. A sharp spike of pain that travels up my arm to my shoulder. The infection is definitely spreading now—I can see the red lines tracking up my forearm, the early signs of something systemic.
He would notice.
He would notice immediately. He would produce medical supplies from that cabinet of his—antiseptic, fresh gauze, antibiotics. He would address the problem with hischaracteristic precision. He would touch my arm with his gloved fingers, and I would feel his attention like sunlight on my skin.
But he’s not here. And the infection spreads.
The cameras watch me. Black glass eyes embedded in the ceiling, recording everything.
