The silence stretches between us. I stare at him, processing what he’s telling me. He’s lying to Ivan. He’s claiming I stillhave value when we both know I’ve given him everything. He’s constructing a justification for keeping me alive.
“Why?” The question emerges barely above a whisper.
He doesn’t answer directly. Instead, he reaches for me, sliding his arms beneath my body with a clinical efficiency that is undermined by the gentleness of his grip. One arm beneath my shoulders. One beneath my knees. He lifts me from the chair I was propped on, and I have no choice but to let him. My muscles refuse to cooperate. My limbs hang limp and useless. My head falls against his shoulder, and I feel the warmth of his body through the dark fabric of his sweater.
He carries me like something fragile. Something worth preserving. Something that might shatter if handled too roughly.
I have been carried before. As a child, when I fell asleep in the car and my mother would bring me to bed. Once, after a car accident in Belgrade, when strangers pulled me from the wreckage before the fire spread. But this is different. This carrying has intention behind it. This carrying says:you are mine, and I am not finished with you.
He carries me to the cot. He releases the catches and lowers me onto a surface that is softer than anything I’ve felt in weeks. The padding gives beneath my weight. The pillow cradles my head. After the rigid metal of the chair, it feels almost obscenely comfortable.
It feels like mercy. It feels like a trap. It feels like both at once.
He pulls a thin blanket over my body, covering the smock that is the only clothing I’ve worn since he stripped me of my Hermèssuit. The fabric is rough but warm, and I clutch at it with fingers that barely function.
“You’re protecting me,” I say. “From disposal. That’s what happens to assets who have given up all their intelligence. They get disposed.”
He doesn’t confirm or deny. He just stands there beside the cot, looking down at me with an expression I cannot read.
“If Ivan finds out you’re lying, you’ll be disposed too.”
“That is a possibility.”
“Then we’re both traitors now.” I let the words settle between us, feeling their weight. “You betrayed me with the fever. I betrayed my family with the codes. And now you’re betraying Ivan by keeping me alive.”
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. The reaction tells me everything his words do not.
We are bound now. Not by restraints or walls or the architecture of this room, but by shared treason. He cannot give me up without explaining why he lied. I cannot exist without his protection. The power dynamic has shifted into something more complex than captive and captor.
We are conspirators. Accomplices. Two people whose survival has become entangled in ways that cannot be easily severed.
There is a strange comfort in this. A dark kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with touch or affection. We have each other’s destruction in our hands. We have each other’s survival in our keeping.
“I need to transmit the codes,” he says. “The delay has already exceeded optimal parameters.”
I nod. My chest is tight with something that might be panic. He’s leaving. He’s walking away.
“Come back,” I say. The words come out desperate, pleading. I hate how they sound. I don’t care how they sound. “Please. When you’re done. Come back.”
He pauses at the door. His bare hand rests on the frame.
“The analysis of your intelligence will require continued supervision,” he says. The words are formal, professional. The words are also a promise.
“The light,” I whisper. “Don’t turn off the light.”
He reaches for the panel beside the door. His fingers move across it, adjusting something I cannot see.
“Ten percent,” he says. “Warm spectrum. I will return.”
The door opens. He steps through. The door closes.
The warm glow still filters through my closed eyelids. Ten percent. The settings he chose specifically for me, calibrated to provide comfort instead of clinical illumination. Every detail of this room has been shaped by his decisions. The temperature. The light. The cot that appeared when the chair was no longer necessary.
Somewhere in this building, the Monster is lying to his masters to keep me alive. The Monster is risking his own destruction for something he cannot explain.
I close my eyes. My body sinks into the cot, exhausted beyond measure, drained of every secret and every defense. The blanketis rough against my skin. The pillow is thin beneath my head. But these small discomforts feel like luxuries after the chair.
I count the seconds until the footsteps return.
