“Bad judgment.”
We kiss again anyway.
We’re in his bed by the end of that week. It feels inevitable, and it feels wrong, and I do it anyway. His hands on my skin, his weight over me, his voice in my ear. The nights blur. Work, food, sex, sleep. The house folds around us. The guards look past us. Anastasia’s eyes stay flat, but even she moves with a little more care when I pass.
I tell myself I can handle it. That I’m useful enough that it balances out. That I always have an exit plan.
I’m still telling myself that when the Courier starts to step directly into my life.
The night he takes me,the house is under renovation in one wing. Plastic sheets. Exposed beams. New wiring on the walls.
I wake with tape over my mouth and rope cutting into my wrists.
The room is small. Bare concrete. One metal chair. One exposed bulb. Cold air through a high vent. I test the ropes. They bite in deeper.
A man stands in front of me. Mask. Gloves. Clean boots. Modulated voice. No name at first.
He walks around me once. Twice. His steps are calm. Not rushed. He doesn’t ask real questions. He doesn’t hurt me to get something. He only threatens in clean, measured lines.
He says he wants to know how long it takes Sergei to notice I’m gone.
He says he’s already inside the walls.
He says my name like he’s weighing it in his palm.
When he finally gives his own, it lands softly.
“Courier,” he says.
He takes a photo. My body tied to the chair. Rope at my throat. Eyes wild. Then he leaves me there with the sound of my own breath and the thud of my own heart.
I cut myself free on a sharp strip of metal under the chair. The rope slices my wrist on the way out, but I don’t care. I run. Theplastic sheets crackle under my feet. The smells of paint and dust fill my lungs.
I rush through corridors I know by heart now. Past staff kitchens. Past closed doors. Toward Sergei’s office.
When I reach the doorway, he’s there. Alive. Calm. Focused on a call, on a ledger, on something that isn’t me.
He doesn’t look up.
A guard in the corner glances once, then looks away again when he sees I’m standing and not bleeding out.
For a full ten seconds, I stand in his doorway, rope marks on my throat, wrist bleeding, knees shaking, and I watch him not see me.
Something inside me shifts.
Not the part that loves his hands, his bed, his voice. The part that understands systems. The part that reads gaps. The part that knows what it means when a ghost walks through your house and you miss it.
I clean myself. I hide the worst of the marks. I tell no one. Not yet. Shame and anger fight in my chest. Fear runs under both.
Days later, when my period doesn’t come, I stare at the stick in the bathroom and feel the floor tilt.
Pregnant.
His child. In my body. In this house with its doors cut and its cameras bent and a ghost who tied me to a chair for sport.
I should tell Sergei. We share a bed. We share codes and food and silence. I know his breathing in his sleep and the shape of his hand when he reaches for me without waking.
Instead, I go to his vault.
