He watches through them. He must. He is probably watching right now, documenting my deterioration, noting the infection rate in his file.
I find myself looking up at them. I find myself speaking to the glass.
“I know you can hear me.”
My voice sounds strange in the silence. Hoarse. Too loud. I haven’t spoken to anyone in days.
“I know you’re watching. You’re always watching. That’s what you do. You watch and you wait and you document and you decide when to intervene.”
The cameras don’t respond. Of course they don’t respond. But I can feel him behind them, his pale eyes fixed on my face. I can feel his attention like a physical weight pressing down on me.
“I’m not angry anymore,” I say. “I was angry. I wanted to be angry. But I can’t make it stick. I keep trying to hate you and my brain keeps remembering your hands on my face and I can’t?—”
I’m crying.
When did I start crying? The tears feel foreign, hot and stinging on my cheeks. My dehydrated body reluctantly producing moisture it can’t afford to waste.
“Please come back,” I whisper. “I’ll give you more names. I’ll give you anything you want. The Washington senator. The Delaware law firm. The recordings my father keeps in his private vault. I know things I haven’t told you yet. Valuable things.”
The cameras stare. Unblinking. Indifferent.
“But I don’t care about being valuable anymore. I just want you to come back. I want to hear your footsteps. I want you to touch me, even if it hurts. I don’t care what you do to me as long as you’re here while you’re doing it.”
My voice breaks on the last word. The sobs come then, ugly and uncontrolled, racking my chest. I am begging. I am begging my torturer to return and torture me some more, because his torture is better than this absence.
What has he made me?
What have I let him make me?
The questions don’t matter. Nothing matters except the door and the footsteps and the possibility that he might still come.
“Alexei.” His name is a prayer in my mouth. “Alexei, please. I’m sorry I asked you to leave. I’m sorry I made you go. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t understand what it would feel like without you.”
The silence stretches.
The IV drips. One drop. Two.
He’s not coming.
The realization settles over me like a shroud. He’s not coming back. He’s done with me. I provided valuable intelligence duringmy fever, and now I’m just another processed asset. The file is closed. The mission is complete.
The Monster has moved on.
I should feel relief. Without him, I might be able to reconstruct some version of myself. I might be able to find the edges of my own mind again.
I feel nothing like relief.
I feel like I’m drowning in air. Like my lungs are filling with something that isn’t oxygen.
Being ignored by him is worse than being broken by him.
The truth is so obvious that I laugh, a broken, jagged sound that echoes off the acoustic panels. Of course it’s worse. The breaking was connection. The breaking was his attention, his focus, his hands on my body. The breaking was proof that I existed, that I mattered enough to destroy.
This is nothing. This is the void.
My father’s house was never home. It was a battlefield, every meal a negotiation, every conversation a test I was destined to fail. My penthouse was a showcase, a stage set for performances I gave to audiences who never saw the real me. The clubs and the parties and the women were distractions, noise to drown out the silence inside me.
But when Alexei knelt at my feet and wiped my face with cool water, something in me recognized the gesture. Something in me understood that I was being seen—not as a Petrenko, not as a resource, not as a symbol of wealth or power. Just as a person who was suffering and needed help.
