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But that exhale. That one sound she didn’t mean to make. I’m going to be thinking about that all fucking night.

Breakfast tomorrow. I want to see what her face does when she hasn’t had time to put it back together yet.

I’m already looking forward to it.

5

Evelina

I don’t sleep.

But this isn’t a problem. I’ve gone without sleep before, pulled all-nighters through law school finals, through bar prep, through the three weeks after my father died, and I was finding out things I wish I never laid eyes on. I know how to function on nothing. I know how to make the nothing useful.

Volkov doesn’t come back. True to his word, which tells me something about who he is, because a man who does what he says he’ll do is either trustworthy or running a very long con.

The room is his, which means I spend the first hour learning it before I open my laptop. I go through everything without touching what I don’t need to touch. His side of the wardrobe, the books on the nightstand, the drawer he left unlocked that contains nothing interesting and might be a test. The window with the drop to the garden. The camera angle covering the east face of the house that I clocked during the tour.

I sit at the small desk by the window, open my laptop, and start a new document. Everything from the tour, written out in the order I observed it. Guards’ positions, the rotation I estimated from the ones I saw switch during dinner, which I ate alone in the dining room with the wall on my left that he said he’d fuck me against.

Camera positions: front gate, garden facing east, garden facing west, side access.

Blind spots: the space directly below the kitchen window, the gap between the east wing and the garden wall.

Staff: a woman who brought dinner and cleared it without speaking to me, a man in the kitchen I heard but didn’t see, and whatever security rotation runs overnight on the ground floor. Three that I know of. Probably more.

I close the document and open the drive.

The encryption is a problem. Three weeks of YouTube tutorials and a Reddit thread about cryptographic methods I half understand at best, and I’m still picking at the edges of it. I open the tutorial I paused last night, some man explaining symmetric key encryption. I follow the steps, apply them, and get exactly as far as I always get. Far enough to see that there’s something there. Not far enough to read it.

A partial string. Numbers and what might be a date, though I can’t be certain yet. I copy it into my notes and stare at it for longer than is probably productive, then go back to the tutorial. There’s another method I haven’t tried. The man is already explaining it.

I’m three steps in when the door opens.

I close the laptop. Fast, clean, and done before he’s fully through the door. He doesn’t comment on it.

Volkov walks into the room in yesterday’s pants and nothing else.

I keep my eyes on my closed laptop, but I get him in my peripheral vision whether I want to or not. The tattoo catches me first, a wolf’s head over his heart, black ink on scarred skin. The rest of him is just as bad. Defined in a way that isn’t accidental, every muscle earned, and the scars only make it worse somehow. I look at the wall above the wardrobe, force myself to think about encryption methods. My body has other ideas, and I tell it firmly to stop having them.

He opens the wardrobe, pulls out a shirt.

“Sleep?” he asks.

“Sufficiently,” I say.

“Liar.” He pulls the shirt on, buttons it without looking at his hands. “Next time I’ll give you something to do with all that energy. Breakfast in ten.”

“I’ll be down in twenty.”

“Ten,” he says. “And don’t make me come back up here for you, Zayka. Or do.” He smiles. “My punishments aren’t always the kind you’d complain about.” He walks out.

I look at where he was standing for three seconds. Then I put the drive in my jacket pocket and go downstairs.

The dining room is the one with the wall. I sit with my back to it on principle.

Volkov is already at the table with coffee and enough food for four people, eating fast and focused, head down. He doesn’t look up when I sit. It’s as if he expected me to be on time.

“Coffee?” he asks.