He has not had water since before his extraction. Thirst will be significant.
I position my chair three meters from his. I sit.
And I wait to see if he has learned anything.
He has.
The silence stretches. Ten seconds. Twenty.
His jaw tightens. His hands grip the armrests. I can see the effort it costs him—the words building behind his teeth, the almost physical need to fill the void pressing against his self-control.
But he does not speak.
Thirty seconds. Forty.
His eyes flicker to the water, then back to my face. He is trying to read me the way I read him, searching for some crack in the facade. The attempt is clumsy—his tells are too obvious, his attention too scattered—but it is an attempt. He is no longer simply reacting. He is trying to think.
Fifty seconds. A minute.
His breathing becomes ragged. A muscle in his cheek twitches. The silence is a living thing pressing against his skull. His fingernails dig crescents into the leather of the armrests. His throat bobs with swallowed words.
At seventy-three seconds, he breaks.
“Back again.” His voice is rough from disuse and dehydration, but there’s something different in it now. Calculation beneath the bravado. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”
His first words are not a desperate rush to fill silence—they are a controlled release of pressure. He is rationing his speech now.
“The darkness was a nice touch, by the way. Very atmospheric.” The humor is still there, but it tastes different—bitter, weaponized. “Though I have to say, I’ve been to enough interrogation seminars to know the playbook. Sensory deprivation, temperature manipulation. It’s all very standard.”
He stops. Deliberately.
His eyes move to the water. The movement is involuntary. I observe the way his throat works as his body registers the proximity of what it needs.
But he does not ask for it.
He has learned that asking gives me power. So he is trying something new: strategic silence.
“My father used to do something similar, you know. When I disappointed him.” His voice drops into something more controlled. “He had a wine cellar at our dacha outside Moscow. No windows. Stone walls. He’d lock me in there for days sometimes. Said it built character.”
He is selecting his disclosures now rather than hemorrhaging them.
“The worst part wasn’t the dark. It was the cold. Stone holds cold like nothing else.” He pauses. Watches my face. “But I’msure you know that already. I’m sure you know exactly what temperature this room is set to and why.”
He is attempting to regain control by demonstrating awareness. By showing me that he understands the game.
“You mentioned Dmitri during the first session,” I say.
The controlled facade cracks, just for a moment—a flicker of something raw crossing his features before the mask reassembles. His hands clench on the armrests.
“Everyone mentions Dmitri eventually.” His voice has thinned. “He’s my cousin. We grew up together. He’s not particularly interesting.”
“You mentioned him twice. Both times in the context of envy.” I keep my tone level. “You said he was never as strong. Never as favored.”
His jaw tightens. He is thinking now, trying to remember what else he said.
“You also mentioned your father’s wine cellar, his methods of education, a horse named Zima that was sold after an unspecified failure, and several account numbers during your sleep cycles.” I pause, letting each item land. “You named shipping captains who work the Baltic routes. You described the location of a warehouse in Odessa where your family stores product during transit delays.”
His face has gone white. Not just pale—white. The color of shock.
