The morning starts at the townhouse.
I wake up slow and confused, warm sheets and gray light and Maksim already awake beside me, his hand at my hip checking the plastic over the tattoo with the kind of care that still doesn’t make sense in my head. Later he tends to my face in the bathroom, quiet and precise, pressing cold against the swelling and studying the split in my lip like he’s memorizing damage he plans to answer for.
By the time I get dressed, I’m back in the clothes he bought me.
Boots.
Leather jacket.
Dark clothes that fit right and smell faintly like his house.
I shouldn’t feel relief pulling them on.
I do anyway.
It feels too much like myself.
Too much like the version of me that existed before yesterday cracked everything open.
And that should be strange, feeling normal in things he chose for me, but it isn’t. It steadies something in me I don’t want to look at too closely.
He takes me to the compound after that.
The drive is quiet. Not tense, exactly. Just full. Like there are too many things in the car with us that neither of us feels like naming.
I’ve only ever seen the compound like this in pieces before—coming in for meetings, leaving after, always with my nerves sharp and my focus somewhere else. In and out. Fast. Functional.
Morning changes it.
In daylight, it doesn’t feel like a fortress first.
It feels lived in.
A child darts across the street ahead of us chasing something bright and shrieking with laughter, and I blink before it even registers properly.
A child.
Then I notice more. Women on porches. A man carrying boxes while another holds a toddler on one hip.
Someone unloading groceries.
Two guards talking beside a gate like it’s just another workday, rifles slung over shoulders while life keeps moving around them.
Families.
The thought lands slowly.
I knew some of these men were married. I knew there were wives. I know, somewhere in the abstract way people know things that don’t touch them directly, that families have to exist around power like this.
But seeing it is different.
Seeing it in daylight is different.
The compound isn’t just where men come to make decisions and leave blood in the room behind them.
People live here.
Children run here.
