Her voice was flat, stripped of hope, edged with something close to contempt. A part of me admired that about her but not enough to be merciful.
“But you know what?” She lifted her chin, blue eyes locking on mine in the lantern’s glow. “I don’t give a shit if he does. Let him come. Let him tear the country apart looking for his little princess. Let him see what it feels like when someone takes what he thought was untouchable.” She leaned forward as far as thechain allowed. It was close enough that I could see how raw her wrists were from pulling at her restraints.
I noticed the faint tremor in her lower lip she was trying to hide.
“I spent my whole life thinking the worst thing about him was the bruises he left on me when he was drunk. I told myself it was just business. Drugs. Guns. Power. I never let myself imagine he was filming people dying. Selling it. Laughing while he did it. So if he comes for me now after everything… I hope he finds you first. I hope he watches you take him apart piece by piece. And I hope I’m still breathing long enough to see it.” Her breath hitched. It was just once, sharp and involuntary, but she didn’t look away. The hate in her eyes wasn’t just for me anymore.
It was for him. For the man who’d raised her on lies and blood and pretty dresses. This disgust for the monster she’d called Papa.
I tilted my head, studying the way her jaw clenched, the way those blue eyes burned even in the near dark. “I know exactly what he’s capable of,” I whispered. “I’ve watched him do it for thirty-eight years. He’ll bargain first. Money, territory, girls, but, most of all, connections and names. When that doesn’t work, he’ll send men. When the men disappear, he’ll start killing anyone he thinks might know where I am. And when he finally tracks this place down…” I leaned in until our faces were inches apart, close enough to smell the faint vanilla still clinging to her skin beneath the sweat and fear. “I’ll be waiting.”
She didn’t flinch, didn’t whisper,“You’re insane.”Zoya just stared back, voice flat and steady. “Good.”
The word hung between us like smoke. No fear. No plea. Just cold, quiet agreement.
And in that moment, something shifted in me. It wasn’t softness toward her, not yet. But the first thin crack in the wall between captor and captive.
She wasn’t begging for rescue anymore. She was waiting for revenge.
As I reached past Zoya’s shoulder, my fingers brushing over the soft skin of her cheek, a flash of electricity trailed up my arm and across my chest. My hands stuttered for a moment from the unfamiliar blooming of something under my skin. Taking a deep breath to clear my senses, I fumbled with the cold steel of the padlock and unlocked it. The chain rattled free from the drainpipe and fell to the concrete with a sharp, metallic clank. Zoya tensed as if I’d raised my fist to her. “Stand up.”
Zoya stayed seated, knees still drawn tight under my coat, chin lifted in that defiant way. I wrapped the chain around my fist twice until the slack pulled taut. “Stand. Up.”
Her eyes flicked to the links coiled in my hand then back to my face. For a second, I thought she’d spit at me. Instead, she rose. Zoya was slow and deliberate, taking her time with the handcuffs still locked around her wrists, like every movement cost her something. The coat slipped off one shoulder, and I stared at how the gown beneath clung to her like wet paper.
Gooseflesh raced across every inch of exposed skin in the unrelenting cold, and before I knew what I was doing, I adjusted my coat, covering her bare skin.
I led her out of the room, chain in hand like a leash. She stumbled twice on bare feet against the rough concrete. I didn’t slow down. Didn’t offer a hand. She caught herself both times.
Upstairs in the old foreman’s office with the concrete walls was a single scarred metal desk, a heater, and one battery lantern casting long shadows across the room. I pushed her down into the chair opposite the desk and leaned against theedge of the desk. She sat rigid, wrists still cuffed, chain coiled on the floor between us like a sleeping snake.
I used my foot to nudge the small propane heater closer to her. The low flame flickered behind the grate, just enough to take the worst edge off the freeze without wasting fuel. It wasn’t a mercy. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
A frozen girl was no good for leverage. But my hand lingered on the edge of the desk a second longer than it needed to, watching the faint warmth hit her skin chasing away the gooseflesh.
I took the thermos off the desk, unscrewed the cap, poured a measure into the lid-cup, and set it on the desk in front of her.
No words. No offer. Just the steam curling up like smoke in the cold air. She stared at it, then at me, but I turned away before her eyes could ask the question I wasn’t ready to answer.
Sitting at the desk, I opened the laptop and pulled up the reply file Andrey had uploaded to the dead-drop an hour ago. It was a grainy audio clip. No video. Just his voice snarling over a static-laced line. I turned the computer toward her.
She stared at the screen and didn’t look away.
His voice came through rough and edged with that familiar guttural rasp. It was the kind of anger that left people buried six feet under.
“Zoya. You listen to me, girl. Whoever this piece of shit is, he’s dead. I don’t care what he thinks he knows or what he has. You stay quiet. You stay alive. You belong to me, and no one touches what’s mine without paying in blood. I’ll find you. And when I find him, I’ll gut him slowly. Keep your mouth shut and your head down, no matter what he does to you. Don’t make this worse for yourself.”
The clip ended with a sharp click. There’d been no tears. No “I love you.” Just the cold promise of violence and control.
Zoya’s face twisted, not with fear but with something darker, like she’d bitten into rotten fruit. No surprise. No softening. She’d heard that tone before, I’m sure, many times when he was laying hands on her. It was the same tone that came right before a locked door or a backhand.
She looked at me instead. “That’s the man who raised me,” she breathed, her voice steady but laced with acid. “The man who locked me in rooms and called it protection. The man who gave me diamonds to shut me up while girls vanished under his orders. The man who smiled over breakfast like the screams I heard from the basement the night before was just a bad dream.” She tipped her chin up in defiance. “You think showing me this will break me?”
I closed the laptop with a soft click.
“No,” I said. “I think it will break him.”
She let out a hollow laugh. It was short, ugly, and edged with something close to hysteria but not quite. “He’ll send men first. Bastards with no morals who follow his orders and carry guns. And if they fail, he’ll come himself. Not for me, not really. For the insult. For the property you stole and the threats you made.”
