Chapter 8 #2
I could have refused. Could have maintained the distance I'd been desperately building. Instead, my hands moved without permission, extending across the desk toward him.
He took them gently, his massive palms swallowing mine completely.
His thumbs tracked across my knuckles, found the raw spot where I'd been picking at the skin around my thumbnail.
The nail beds that were bitten down to nothing.
The small cuts from where I'd been pressing my nails into my palms hard enough to break skin.
"You're falling apart," he said quietly. Not an accusation. Just an observation, clinical and careful.
"I'm fine."
"You're not." His thumbs kept moving, soothing even as they cataloged damage. "You're destroying yourself in small ways because you think that's better than breaking completely. It's not."
I tried to pull my hands back. He held on, gentle but immovable.
"Eat," he said.
"I'm not—"
"Eat." Harder this time, that command voice that bypassed my brain and went straight to my nervous system. "Three bites. Now."
My hands were still trapped in his, so he released one, keeping the other. Like I might run if he let go completely. Like he knew I was that close to bolting.
I picked up the fork with my free hand, took three bites of what turned out to be stroganoff, rich and warm and almost painful in how good it tasted after days of eating cold sandwiches alone. He watched each bite, counted them, then nodded.
"Good girl."
Two words. That's all. But they went through me like lightning, set every nerve ending on fire, made something low in my stomach clench with want so intense it bordered on pain.
My face burned. He had to see it—the flush spreading down my neck, the way my breathing changed, the way my thighs pressed together under the desk. His eyes darkened, and his grip on my hand tightened fractionally.
"If you don’t want to talk to me—if it’s too weird or painful than promise me this. You’ll finish the file you're working on," he said, releasing my hand with obvious reluctance. "Then eat the rest. Then go to bed. Actual sleep, not staring at the ceiling cataloging all the ways you're failing."
He stood, that massive frame unfolding from the chair, and moved toward the door. At the threshold, he paused.
"The sweater looks better on you than it ever did on Sophie," he said without turning around. "She won't mind about the hole. She understands what it's like to need something to hold onto."
Then he was gone, leaving me alone with a plate of warm food and a body that was vibrating with need I didn't want to acknowledge.
I finished the file. Ate the stroganoff even though each bite reminded me of his eyes tracking the movement of my throat. Walked back to my room on legs that felt disconnected from my body.
But once the door was closed, once I was alone in the dark, my hand slipped between my thighs without permission. I was soaked, had been since he'd said "good girl" in that voice that promised rewards for obedience and consequences for defiance.
I pressed my fingers against myself through the thin fabric of my underwear and bit my lip hard enough to hurt, trying not to make a sound.
But in my head, I heard his voice again—"Eat.
Then finish."—and came so hard my knees buckled, my free hand pressed over my mouth to muffle the whimper that escaped.
This was bad. This was dangerous. This was my body recognizing something my mind didn't want to admit—that I didn't just want to be held or comforted or protected.
I wanted to be owned. Commanded. Taken apart by someone strong enough to put me back together better.
I wanted Konstantin Besharov to tell me what to do, and I wanted to be good for him, and that want was going to destroy every wall I'd built if I let it.
I curled into bed wearing the sweater with its chewed hole, thumb pressed against my lips but not between them, and tried very hard not to think about what would happen when I finally, inevitably, gave in.
Sixty-three. That's how many people Brand had harvested while I'd been hiding in basements, pretending stolen antibiotics and veterinary sutures could save anyone.
Their names blurred together on the screen.
Maria Gonzalez, who I'd failed to save. Kateryna Bondarenko, whose kidney I'd discovered missing too late.
Chen Wei, thirty-four, father of two, partial liver.
Ashley Morrison, nineteen, both corneas taken during wisdom tooth extraction.
Teenage girls who'd gone in for birth control implants and come out missing reproductive tissue for some billionaire's fertility treatments.
Each file was meticulously documented. Brand's surgical notes read like love letters to his own precision.
"Extracted right kidney with minimal vascular disruption.
Excellent specimen. Estimated value: $175,000.
" He'd written that about a twenty-three-year-old kindergarten teacher who'd been told she had endometriosis.
My vision started to blur around case fifty-eight—a seven-year-old whose bone marrow had been harvested during a tonsillectomy.
Seven years old. Someone's baby had been opened up and emptied out while their parent sat in the waiting room reading magazines, trusting the doctors to fix their child's sore throat.
The screen wouldn't focus anymore. The letters swan together, medical terminology becoming incomprehensible static. My hands had stopped responding to commands from my brain, fingers stuttering over keys, typing the same word three times before deleting it.
"I need a break." The words came out strange, like my mouth had forgotten how to shape them properly.
Maks looked up from his bank of monitors, concern flickering across his features. "You okay?"
No. I was sixty-three stolen lives past okay. I was drowning in other people's violations while my own pressed against my ribs like broken glass. But I couldn't say that. Couldn't say anything past the white noise filling my head.
"Just tired," I managed, pushing back from the desk on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
The walk to my room was both endless and instant. One moment I was in the hallway, the next my door was closing behind me, and I had no memory of the steps between. My body was moving without me, a flesh puppet with cut strings, stumbling toward the bed.
The crack started in my chest—a physical sensation like ice breaking on a frozen lake. Then it spread, fracturing outward through ribs and spine and skull until everything that held Dr. Maya Cross together shattered.
I didn't decide to regress. The same way you don't decide to bleed when cut, don't decide to breathe when drowning. My body simply stopped being big. Stopped being capable. Stopped being anything but small and scared and desperately needing someone to make it better.
My knees hit the mattress, then my whole body, curling into the tightest ball physics would allow. The sweater—Sophie's sweater with its chewed hole—swallowed me, and I pulled it over my knees, making myself smaller still. A creature made of cashmere and collapse.
My thumb found my mouth without permission or shame. Just need, pure and simple, the pressure against my palate releasing something that had been wound too tight for too long. The relief was immediate and devastating. Four days of walls crumbling in an instant.
But I needed more. Needed something to fill the silence that wasn't my own heartbeat or the echo of sixty-three names I'd failed to save.
The tablet was on the nightstand where Sophie had left it, already logged into someone's Netflix account. My fingers—clumsy now, uncoordinated in that way that meant I was deep into Little space—fumbled with the screen until I found it.
Bluey.
The theme music washed over me like warm water, bright and cheerful and promising that everything could be solved in seven minutes if you just had imagination and parents who loved you.
This episode was about camping, the dad pretending to be scared of everything while the kids protected him.
Simple. Sweet. Nobody was being harvested for parts.
I pulled the tablet close, holding it like a talisman while my thumb stayed firmly in my mouth. The animated dogs ran around their cartoon backyard, and I let myself sink completely.
Little Maya didn't know about organ trafficking. Little Maya didn't have to be brilliant or brave or broken in useful ways. Little Maya just existed, soft and small, watching blue dogs solve problems with kindness while the real world dissolved into background static.
My body relaxed incrementally with each minute of cartoon chaos. Muscles I didn't know were clenched released. The vice around my chest loosened enough to breathe normally. The sixty-three names stopped screaming in my head, replaced by Australian accents and gentle humor.
Bluey's mom was explaining something about growing up, how sometimes you had to be big but it was okay to be small sometimes too. I sucked harder on my thumb, a tiny sound escaping that might have been agreement or just relief.
This was what I'd been fighting for four days. This soft space where nothing hurt and no one expected anything and I could just exist without having to be Dr. Maya Cross, failed surgeon, failed whistleblower, failed everything.
Here in the blue light of the tablet, curled small enough to disappear, thumb in my mouth and tears sliding silently down my cheeks, I was just Maya. Little Maya. Four years old, maybe five, watching dogs play while somewhere outside this room the world continued its horror show without me.
The episode ended and another started automatically.
Something about feelings and how to handle them when they got too big.
I watched without really seeing, floating in that disassociated space where time meant nothing and the only real thing was the pressure of my thumb and the sound of cartoon voices saying everything would be okay.