15. LEO
FIFTEEN
LEO
The dentist, a man named Dr. Alistair who looked perpetually terrified, had fixed my molar. He had to numb my entire jaw, and the process was a blur of drills, lights, and the sickly sweet smell of antiseptic.
I replayed that kiss in my head all night. It made me miss the pain. The anesthesia turned it into a dull ache. A cruel kindness. I wanted the searing, sharp throb, to remind me of him, not this anesthetic's phantom limb.
I kept replaying it. Dante shouting about a fern and a girlfriend .
Nicole, I suppose—although I never told Luca about any relationship, he probably presumed we had one.
It was absurd. And it made me feel warm.
Dante was thinking about me, even when he was away.
He wasn't mad about a security breach or a stupid song; he was mad about a plant.
My mundane life. I had a life he couldn't touch.
And that fucking kiss—the one that wasn't a fight. His hands in my hair. Gentle, as I'd never dare to imagine Dante's touch. It scared him. I saw it in his eyes.
He didn't come back.
My routine, far from Dante, began with Luca knocking on my door the next morning.
"Hays," he calls. "Mrs. Volkov asked you to solve a problem with IT."
I'm escorted out of my room, no longer blindfolded, and led through the labyrinthine corridors of the mansion.
During those days, my escort would change.
Sometimes it was Luca; other times, a different guard, but equally stoic.
They treat me now with a strange mix of caution and respect—the boss's new pet who earned the right to roam the house.
The first destination is always the main control room. Sal and his team of nerds huddle in a panic probably caused by their own incompetence. Everyone looks at me when I walk in. Those who don't know me have already heard of me.
Sal approaches with more caution than necessary. "Nyx?" His question sounds like some kind of request for permission to call me Nyx. He is too nervous to wait for me to answer. "We have a problem with the communication network. We're trying to update it to a quantum communication system..."
I sit at a terminal and type my magic. Their "problems," I find out, are usually simple glitches I can fix in minutes. It's like going back to Chad's cubicle, but with higher stakes. I fix, I write reports, and I go back to digging into the lives of a list of strangers in a gray room.
My usefulness is my currency. They need me. I need them to need me. It's symbiotic.
The favors start small. A nervous junior programmer approaches me in the middle of the hallway while I'm being escorted, and seems more nervous around me than with the seven-foot-tall guards.
"Mr. Hays," he whispers, without looking me in the eyes. "Could you... could you help me with a subroutine? It's a personal project, nothing... nothing big..."
Luca shrugs. He doesn't care what I do as long as it doesn't irritate the Volkovs, and my status is a strange and fluid thing. I am both a prisoner and an asset. And assets are treated well.
So I help. And soon, the requests become a constant flood, from the IT geeks to the capos.
"Leonel, can you check this cargo tracking system that the Venice police are using?"
"Mr. Hays, we're having trouble with the new casino accounting software. Can you take a look?"
"Mr. Nyx, the surveillance system we use for our vehicle fleet has a hole. Can you fix the code?"
I'm escorted to a dozen different rooms in the mansion. The main ops room, a sterile server room, a smaller office for financial analysts, even a large, empty conference room where a half-dozen men with tired eyes wait for me to explain a bug in their code.
I'm no longer just a ghost in the machine. I'm part of it. An essential cog in the Volkov empire.
Even Luca, my silent guard, approaches me now. He stopped calling me sir . He says, "Can you... can you check some footage for me? The warehouse cameras went blank… I don't want to bother Mr. Volkov."
And, of course, I check the footage.
I am everywhere. I am in every department. I am a part of their lives, being absorbed into their routine, into their monotony.
And then I realized. The true torture.
It starts with a slow, creeping fear. No one wants to bother the bosses—I understand.
The Volkovs can be scary. So it quickly becomes a good practice that problems, before they get bigger and reach the Volkovs' ears, pass through me.
The boss' pet. My service is basically trafficked among those who have access to the mansion—a select group of trusted people of the Volkovs.
I would appreciate that. But things that should be directed to Sal's team start to come directly at me, and I deal with it, because—let's be honest—Sal would waste at least two hours on things that'd take me minutes.
Then the requests never stop. The problems are endless. The faces change, but the work is the same. It's all a new cubicle, a bigger gray box.
I sit at a terminal, numb with data. My retinas burn because of the bright lights and my body aches with a familiar pain—not Dante's, but complaints of untreated hyperkyphosis and muscle cramps.
I look at the lines of code and there is no adrenaline there.
Just the same devastating boredom that led me to hack the Volkovs in the first place.
I go back to my room with my head spinning. I traded my cubicle for a mansion and my fern for a family of mobsters, but the excitement is already fading.
I lean my head on the keyboard and let the plastic keys mark my face. Favors that don't reach the boss don't make me gain Dante's attention, and, in this endless weekend, he doesn't come back.
It's just me, favors, and a fading ache from a recently fixed molar for Svetlana's endless list of collaborators—recovering emails, locations, logs, calls, and hacking into personal accounts without being detected.
The rest of my sick leave—and all the available time off I accumulated in a few years of uninterrupted monotonous work—is spent entirely in this mansion.
Luca accompanies me back to my room. I don't have much sense of time while working for the Volkovs, so my only clue that it's already evening is the dark windows and the silence throughout most of the rooms. It's this silence that makes me notice a growing buzz as we approach the corridor outside my room.
We pass a large game room with a polished ebony poker table—a path that is now familiar—and all the buzzing comes from there.
This room, which used to smell of cigars and whiskey, is now almost unbreathable.
I see tobacco smoke and some men I recognize from the hallways—men who look like they've stepped out of a cliché gangster movie, all in suits with visible scars—sitting around the poker table.
They are names I've heard whispered in the control room: Marco, Grigory, Ruslan. They're capos.
"Full house," says a man I now recognize as Marco—he has a burn scar on his neck, exactly like the rumors—pointing to his cards. "Pure skill, my friend. Pure skill."
"Bullshit," grumbles Grigory, the tallest one, throwing his cards on the table. "You just got lucky."
The man sitting in a corner looks up. That must be Ruslan. I heard he collects knives—he's the only one with one tucked into his waistband.
He stares at me. I'd ignore him if he didn't talk about me.
"Hey, Luca," he calls out. "Is that the one who fixes everything?"
Marco stares at me. "Is that the IT kid? The one who looks at a screen and money appears?"
Ruslan laughs. It's an unpleasant sound.
"The one and only. Damn, Dante did a number on you, huh?
" He says to me, jeering, though it doesn't sound as venomous as I'd imagined it would.
The bruises are still apparent on me. "I heard you liked it.
Got a hard-on. Is that true?" He winks at me. It's true.
I feel Luca tense up beside me. He doesn't think this is a good idea.
"Leave him be, Ruslan," Luca says.
"Oh, come on, Luca. He's brave, isn't he?" Ruslan pushes a chair back with his foot, inviting me to sit. "Can you count cards, or are all IT nerds chickenshits like Sal?"
Brave? What a joke. I'm bored. The thought of another night staring at a glowing monitor and sifting through random lives is a form of torture I can no longer endure today. This, at least, is new.
"Sure," I say.
Luca looks at me, looks at Ruslan, then back at me.
I bet he's wondering if he should call Dante (I almost hope he does).
I don't wait for him to release me to go to the table and sit down, but at some point, he nods.
He stays near the door, staring at me as if I'm throwing myself in front of three hungry tigers. That option would be more fun.
It's a bit ridiculous. I'm the youngest in the room by at least ten years—not that that's anything new since I stepped into this mansion. The capos think I'm practically a civilian in their world. The disdain is obvious, mixed with curiosity, as the game begins.
I'm dealt a hand. A pair of tens. It's a solid start. But I don't play. I fold, with a silent click of my chips on the table. The others look at me with a certain contempt for not surprising anyone. I just watch them play the hand.
I don't pay much attention to the cards. I'd rather watch them.
Marco, with his neck scar, has a tell: a quick blink of his left eye whenever he's bluffing.
It's a tic, a nervous spasm he can't control.
Grigory, the likely oldest man with a perpetually grumpy face, scratches his chin with his index finger when he has a strong hand, and has a nervous tremor in his hand when he feels pressured—which happens often.
It's almost imperceptible, but it makes his chips rattle against the felt.
Ruslan, on the other hand, is the most obvious.
He can't stop looking at his own hand when it's bad, thinking about how he could make it good. It's just code. A human algorithm.