??????
They came. They talked and they went away again. I didn’t acknowledge them or their platitudes. Or their food.
I waited until the house was still. Until I was certain. When the first light began to creep through my old bedroom window I took my heavy blanket and crept downstairs.
The old brass lock was still the same. I had turned it a million times. My fingers knew it before my mind did. I wasn’t the same—my heart and soul hollowed out, the person who had last turned this key a stranger to the one turning it now. I held my breath as the loud click rang out into the silence.
No one came.
I left.
The familiar street in the grey early morning. The neighbours I had forgotten about—the same way Runa would forget me if I let this go on long enough. The thought arrived like a fist and I walked faster, pulling the blanket tighter, the cold finding every gap.
I wasn’t going to let it go on long enough.
??????
When the police car rolled to a stop I didn’t move.
The first man climbed out—bought and paid for, almost certainly, the Pakhan’s reach extending as far as it always had. I watched the second one follow, the radio crackling briefly before he shut the door behind him.
“We’ve had a complaint. You’re going to have to move on.”
“This is my marital home,” I said, jerking my thumb toward the gates.“He has my daughter in there.”
“That’s a matter for the courts. It has nothing to do with the complaint we received,” the second one said, his voice carrying the flat indifference of a man reading from a script someone else had written.
“How much is the Pakhan paying you,musor?” I spat, calling him the garbage that he was.
The word landed. Their demeanour shifted—the professional neutrality dropping, something harder replacing it—and they moved toward me in unison. I gripped the iron bars. It was useless with both of them. One pried my fingers away while the other yanked at my arms. I kicked out, trying to find purchase, until one of them grabbed my legs and pulled hard enough that my head came down against the brick driveway.
“Blyad.”
I lay there for a moment, the cold of the ground against my cheek, the throb of it spreading across my skull.
“What should we do?”
I groaned and tried to push myself up.
“Take her in.”
Someone crouched over my back and tugged the blanket away to get to my wrists. The handcuffs clicked into place. I could feel the burn where my skin had been scraped raw against the brick. My lip was swollen. I could taste blood.
“That wasn’t what we were supposed—”
“Shut up, fool.”
They hauled me up by my arms. My legs wouldn’t hold and they dragged me to the car.
I began to laugh.
Even as the tears ran down my grimy face—the blood and the cold and the three days of it all mixed together—I laughed. Because this was only day three. Because I would never stop. Because he could buy the police and close the gates and drag me away from the bars and it would not matter.
I stared at the gates as one of them reached across to secure my seatbelt with the bizarre courtesy of a man who had just bounced a woman’s head off a driveway.
Doors slammed.
Engine started.
