17. LEO #5
I stare at the ceiling. The room is poorly lit by the crack under the door, with the broken lamp now gone.
With the adrenaline fading, the marks begin to ache.
The wound I inflicted on my own palm, the bite on my neck, the bruises on my hips, the fissure between my legs.
That doesn't stop my exhaustion. The throbbing of that molar was much more potent than this.
What's truly keeping me from closing my eyes and blacking out is the crash.
The dopamine is gone. All that's left is a chronic serotonergic dysfunction.
That, and him. Watching me exist. He is the anchor in my fucked-up chemistry.
The only thing tethering me to the moment.
It's enough to hold on.
I turn over in bed. Towards him. I could get used to this, to this view. To admiring him with no filter at all.
"You know, no one ever cared if I ate," I say. "If I slept, if I'd jump off a fucking overpass. Only you. A little scary, don't you think?"
A grunt. "Don't start."
He thinks I'm provoking him. How funny. "It's true. My mother thought I was a biological mistake. She was afraid of me. But you make it seem like I have some value."
His face isn't so tense. He's listening to me, and I recognize the Don in a slight furrow of his brow. Always serious, always authoritarian.
"You talk too much shit."
I smile. It's true.
Indifference is my normal. My mother looked at me like someone staring at a sick animal in the middle of the road.
With care, with loathe, with pity. Sometimes fear.
She wasn't a bad mother. But a child who doesn't play with others, who doesn't cry at funerals, who expresses nothing when hit scared her.
She saw the aberration that Dante sees. An incurable disease.
I don't show this side to others. Classmates, coworkers—Nicole, Chad. They'd be afraid. I spare them. I pretend. I have to.
But Dante doesn't pull away. He touches me. He invades me. He gives me what I need to know that I'm real, that I exist. The disgust is, too, a form of recognition. And this. Concern .
I slide a hand over the new bruises. His signature.
"Mister," I call out, and repeat, teasing him with a formality that never existed between us, " Mr. Volkov. "
A low growl from the chair. He's beautiful when he's impatient.
"If you're not going to come to bed with me, will you give me a goodnight kiss?" I provoke. "Or I won't be able to sleep."
He shakes his head. The words are a tired reflex. "Shut the fuck up, Nyx."
I laugh. "Anything for you."
He glares at me. The sudden intensity sends a shiver down my spine. Then, he grips the arms of the chair and stands up. He, massive, approaches me in his damp clothes, in his visible muscles.
Instead of clenching his fists, gritting his teeth, hurting me, he leans in. He bends down toward me, and my smile dies at his proximity. It's intimate, seeing him like this, in a dark room, in the dim light. It's intimate that he looks at me this way.
He kisses me. No tongue, no biting. Just a kiss, a lingering press of his lips that erases any logical thought that dares to cross my mind.
"Now sleep," he orders softly.
I don't let him go. My hand fists in his damp shirt, pulling him back. I want the real thing.
This time, he gives it.
I hold the back of his neck, running my fingers through his hair, and he slides a hand over the outline of my body over the blanket. He touches my jaw, holds my face, ruins me all over again.
I'm breathless when we separate. I trace my fingers down, from his neck to the defined line of his collarbone. He watches me, torn between curiosity, irritation, and that softness that hides where it can.
"Thank you," I whisper.
I take my hands off him, and he takes his off me. He straightens up, smoothing his wet shirt.
My head hasn't been this silent in years. Tonight, the silence is the color of Dante's eyes.
I wake up and Dante is gone.
I wish he wasn't. Wish I could start my day with him. Every day. But he's Dante Volkov. Empires don't run themselves.
A guard I don't know knocks on the door. He tells me that Mr. Volkov's orders are for me to eat.
Being his property doesn't sound bad.
The cooks lay out a feast. Eggs, fruit, bread, oatmeal. All of it cut into small, manageable bites. For my newly restored tooth. A detail. He thinks of the details. And for that, I want to repay him.
A crescendo of high-heeled footsteps draws my attention to the hallways. The cooks tense up, though the guards remain motionless, and Svetlana appears in a beige blazer and a high ponytail.
She looks at me. At my plate, at the guards. And says, specifically to the cooks, "Out."
She doesn't have to say it twice. It's an almost visible relief for them to leave Svetlana's clinical scrutiny. Dante is an eruption. Svetlana is a surgical frost. You fear them both.
She glides to the table. I watch the cooks vanish down the hall. "You must have had fun yesterday," I say to the space they left behind. "I heard the fixture break from my room."
She assesses me in silence. I eat my scrambled eggs.
She rests a hand on a chair back, a staccato tap of red nails on wood. Ignoring the bait. "My brother informed me of your lack of rest. An exhausted asset is prone to errors."
So that was his angle—functionality. An exhausted asset makes mistakes. Pragmatism. The language she understands.
"But that's not what I came to talk about," she continues. "I heard about your atypical reactions to pain. But you're black and blue, Leonel. As I assumed, you acquire mysterious fresh wounds each time my brother comes to you. That can't be sustainable."
And she sees the wounds. Of course she does. I forgot to cover my neck. A map of his ownership—the hickeys, the red band where his hand squeezed the air from my lungs, the blossoming constellation of teeth marks. All on display.
I shrug. I don't care that she sees. Not really.
"What can I say? He has a strong hand."
She doesn't find that amusing. "Are you being forced? I need to understand the nature of this relationship, and there are places where this family draws the line."
The word "relationship" is amusing. There is no relationship, no rules, and certainly no lines to draw. Yet, he cares. He orders me to stay alive.
"Mrs. Volkov, your brother is the sole reason I haven't jumped off a bridge. He can do whatever he pleases—I won't stop him."
She stares. The gears are turning, but the math isn't working for her. No one would get the math. "Dante has a temper, Leo. His urges are unpredictable."
"So, it's better that they're with me instead of out there. Don't you think?"
Her lips twitch, and her jaw tightens. I see the resemblance to Dante. She's tense, angry. "I'm trying to understand what kind of person you are."
I give her a smile. "What do you think, Mrs. Volkov?"
"I think," she says, leaning in, "you're a self-destructive idiot."
She looks like Dante. She has the same harshness, the same authoritarian stance. The same aura, even with the sharp, professional tone of voice. Dante Volkov's sister. They share the same DNA.
Of course, she's tense. The rat hunt was delayed in eight hours. Because Dante was concerned.
I give her what she wants. Reassurance. "You'll have your rat today, miss. Give me a few hours after my shift. It's done."
The anger in her face— Dante's anger—recedes. The ice queen returns. "Don't be late."
"Of course not."
She doesn't have the same sadistic tendencies—Svetlana is just professional. She just wants the job done. This is her problem; Dante's unpredictability and my reactions to it.
"Good," she says. "I expect results."
She turns, pausing by the motionless guards at the door.
"East Wing. Double the security detail. Immediately."
"Yes, ma'am," says one the guards.
Of course. We're getting close. A cornered rat might get desperate, might bite back. She's not taking chances.
With a rustle of her blazer, Svetlana is gone.
I finish my eggs. The taste of real food, of Dante's concern and Svetlana's pragmatism. Two sides of the same coin. The equation is simple: They need me. And as long as they need me, I exist.
Later, the office. I steal Chad's headphones when he's not looking.
Nicole is there. Messy bun. She doesn't notice.
Her smile is genuine as she tries to pull me into conversation.
Weekend plans. The new coffee machine. Anything and nothing.
I offer her a practiced smile—my shield—and she's disappointed, thinking the mass layoff got to me. It's a cruel game. I play it. For him.
After, I walk straight to my room, escorted by more guards than usual. Luca tells me Dante is out. The corridor, too, has more guards than usual.
I ignore them. If Dante's not home, then I go directly to my purpose: the list.
I start with the obvious ones, just as Svetlana ordered. The likely rats.
Target one: Eleanor Vance. Senior accountant. Meticulous records. I dig for some time—finances, online book club, shopping habits. Nothing. Just the tedious life of a woman obsessed with budgets and historical romance. Dead end.
Target two: Marcus Thorne. Head of logistics. Secret high-stakes card addiction. Expensive. Lonely. But no treason. Dead end.
Target three: Sofia Diaz. Network architect. Young. Bright. Her digital footprint is a ghost town. Too clean. Frighteningly clean. It doesn't fit the profile. Dead end.
The list goes on. Project managers. Data analysts. More dead ends. I dismantle them digitally and find nothing but banality.
Then my eyes land on the next name.
This one I know.
Only two names left— the ones Svetlana placed as least likely—and one of them is Salinger Coleman. Sal.
Head of Volkov cybersecurity.
I'd seen him tremble in Dante's presence, a human-shaped flak jacket sweating through his shirt. A coward. He can't even look me in the eye, let alone a Volkov .
This is useless, I think, for a second. This asshole can't even talk to Dante without stammering, let alone betray him. He'd faint just from the thought.
But a job is a job. So I check.
Rutgers degree. An impeccable corporate resume before he took the mob's dirty money. Years in the Volkov orbit. Reliable. I dive into his digital life; not just the company logs, everything . Personal emails, browser history, encrypted calls, crypto wallets.
And there's the first weirdness.
His digital hygiene is immaculate. Annoyingly so. It looks like he knew someone would come looking one day, like the obsessive tidiness of a man pissing his pants in terror.
I move past his robust security protocols, the standard encryption.
Ignoring the facade. I cross-reference the login records from his less-monitored servers.
The archives. I compare the timestamps on data packets sent from his personal machine after hours.
Looking for a nanosecond discrepancy. A retroactive edit.
I analyze the metadata of seemingly harmless images in his emails.
Looking for hidden messages, for steganography.
The tactic of an amateur who thinks he's smart.
It's with my eyes fixed on a line of hexadecimal code representing Sal's mouse movement—consistently, irritatingly human—that the low hum of the air conditioner falters. A light in the hall, visible through the crack in the door, blinks once. A nervous tic in the mansion's wiring.
I ignore it. Probably a faulty sensor the local IT team never bothered to fix.
I get into the debug logs of his home server. A small NAS. The place where a normal person gets sloppy. But not Sal. The logs are sterile. Not a single error flag. I run a checksum on the older media files, hunting for the ghost of a single altered bit. Nothing.
The light in the hall blinks. Again.
No. This house is a fortress. Redundant power, cascading firewalls, automated failovers. A power dip is impossible. It would trigger alarms.
But the only thing coming from the hall is silence.
I refuse to be sidetracked. If Sal is the rat, he's buried deep. I pivot to the reverse proxies he uses for external access. I analyze the packet latency to domains outside the Volkov circle.
A tiny, almost imperceptible flutter in the timing. A detour. Not random. Intentional.
I follow the trail. It leads to encrypted traffic with a known hub for digital mercenaries.
My kind of people. And there, buried in thousands of seemingly innocuous data packets, is a whisper.
A fragmented text. Obfuscated. Hidden in the data stream of a burner messaging app I know by heart.
The kind you use when you're out of time.
I open a deobfuscation script. The letters flash on the screen. The words solidify.
They're going to find out at any moment. You'll have a five-minute window.
Sal. The coward. Gnawing at the walls of his cage to warn his contacts.
I check the time logs.
…Two minutes ago.
A heavy, unmistakable thump echoes from outside the room. The sound of meat hitting meat.
I rip off the headphones. The ones I stole from Chad, in silence, just to have something blocking the real world. The flickering lights, the humming AC—all gone.
Dead silence.
A creak. A hurried whisper. Muffled sounds of a struggle.
Those aren't Volkov guards.
The door to my room splinters inward. A breaching charge. Thick smoke, stinking of gunpowder and burnt metal, pours through the gaps. Instinctively, I duck down in the chair, covering my face. The smoke burns my eyes, my throat.
Through the haze, I see silhouettes. Men in black. They're not Volkov muscles, they're not Dante's brutes.
In the same instant, the mansion's alarms shriek to life in a deafening wail. Shouts from the guards, gunfire, the eruption of automatic weapons.
Fuck, Sal, you screwed me.
The silhouettes cut through the smoke. Two of them. They move low and fast against the red strobe of the emergency lights, ignoring the firefight tearing up the hall.
One of them is on me before I can process a single thought.
The stranger presses his black glove against my mouth. It's impersonal. Another arm pins me, dragging me with a black open cylinder to take cover behind the desk. The substance is on the glove. I try to hold my breath. It doesn't matter. A sweet, acrid smell floods me.
My muscles go slack. My vision tunnels. The shrieking alarms, the gunshots, the screams—it all fades into a distant, muffled dream.
The last thing I see is the masked man, a captor doing his job. No malice. No anger. A gray fucking job .
The world turns black.
And I think of him.