Chapter 3
MARGOT
The handcuff bites into my left wrist before I open my eyes.
I know what metal on bone means before the rest of my brain catches up.
I know the weight, the angle, the cold circle pressing into the knob of my wrist where Grant used to squeeze when he wanted me to stop talking.
I understand the restraint before I understand the room, and for three full seconds, I’m back in our kitchen in DuPage County with his hand locked around my arm and the dishwater still running.
Then I open my eyes, and the kitchen disappears.
The room is clean, windowless, and lit by a flat panel overhead that gives everything the same washed-out look.
The concrete walls are painted gray. A steel table is bolted to the floor in front of me.
A camera is mounted in the upper corner with a small red light that doesn’t blink.
It just burns steadily. The chair I’m sitting in is bolted too.
I test it to be sure, pulling once with my free hand and pressing both feet against the base, but it doesn’t move.
The air smells like disinfectant and cold concrete.
I’m still wearing my jeans, black thermal, and boots. Nobody changed my clothes. I check that the way I used to check it after Grant’s worst nights, running a quick internal inventory from collar to waistband to make sure everything is where I left it. Everything is.
The man by the door is the one from the bottom of the stairs.
He is tall, with a black coat, dark gloves, and the same restrained stillness I saw in the alley.
He stands with his hands behind his back and watches me without interest, the way a building security guard watches a lobby.
I’m a task, not a person. I’ve been looked at like that before.
It isn’t the worst way a man can look at you, so I count myself lucky.
He isn’t the one running this. I figured that out on the stairs when he called me Katya and then waited for someone else’s order to take me.
He moved like a lieutenant following instructions, not like someone making decisions.
Whoever sent men in matching SUVs with coordinated timing is somewhere else in this building, and I’m about to meet him.
The door opens.
A different man walks in carrying my go-bag in one hand and a manila envelope in the other. He sets both on the steel table, adjusts the chair, and sits across from me without rushing. He looks to the man by the door for confirmation.
He’s not what I expected.
I expected louder. Bigger. More obviously dangerous in the way Grant was dangerous, where the threat lived in the size of his hands, the volume of his voice, and the speed at which calm turned into contact.
This man is tall and lean, dark-haired, maybe mid-thirties, dressed in a black shirt with the sleeves turned back to the forearm.
No jewelry or visible weapon. No aftershave strong enough to fill a room the way Grant filled rooms, marking territory with cologne the way a dog marks a fence.
He sits the way the chair was designed to be sat in, straight and still, and looks at me like I’m a document he hasn’t finished reading.
I don’t know his name yet, but I recognize three things about him already. He didn’t raise his voice when he sat down. He chose the chair across the table instead of the chair beside me. He hasn’t looked at my body once. He looked at me, then at the bag, then at the envelope, then back at me.
Grant would have started differently. Grant liked proximity. He liked leaning into my air and watching me decide how far back I could press before I hit a wall. This man left four feet of steel table between us and doesn’t seem interested in closing the gap.
That doesn’t make him safe. It simply makes him a different kind of problem. The quiet ones aren’t necessarily better. They’re just harder to predict.
He unzips the go-bag and takes out each item without comment.
He lines them up on the table in a neat row.
Cash in the rolled sock, burner phone, charger, and my real ID copy.
The fake ID Kimberly told me not to keep in the same bag as the real one comes out next.
I shoved it in because I didn’t have anywhere else to store it.
He pauses at the box cutter wrapped in its washcloth, arching a brow, but doesn’t comment. He unwraps the cloth, looks at the blade, wraps it again, and moves on to the ID. He seems accustomed to handling weapons.
“Your name.” His voice is low, even, and completely free of urgency.
Facts are safer than feelings. I learned that from Grant too.
Crying made him impatient and more prone to physically striking me.
Begging gave him a script to follow, because once I asked for something, he had the power to deny it.
Facts gave him nothing to work with. He got bored faster when I was boring.
“Margot Carlstrom. Born in Lake Forest, Illinois. I live at the Starlight Motor Lodge on Western Avenue, Room 214. I work the swing and night shifts.” I keep my voice flat and informational, the way I talk to police officers who have already decided I’m wasting their time.
“The man who is stalking me is Grant Winters. That’s his legal name. ”
He doesn’t react to any of it. He picks up my ID copy and studies it for long enough that I can tell he’s comparing the photo to my face, then sets it down and pushes it to the side.
“Why do you have Katya Vasilieva’s face?”
I flinch and frown at him. “I don’t know who that is.”
He watches me for a beat longer than the question requires, then moves on.
“Kirill Antonov?”
“No.”
Nothing registers. “Bykov Syndicate.”
I’ve never heard the name. I don’t know if it’s a company, a family, or something worse. “No.”
He tries another set. “Courier drops. Hotel codes. River routes.”
Each phrase sounds like a door he’s testing, and every door opens on the same empty room. I have nothing to give him because I don’t know anything. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
His mouth tightens slightly. “What about contact protocols for dead drops on the south branch of the Chicago River?”
“I don’t know what a dead drop is.”
He watches me through each answer like he’s a human polygraph, not looking for truth exactly but for the small involuntary movements that accompany lying.
I’ve seen that look before. The detective who took my statement after Mara died had the same one, like my grief might be an act, and he needed to catch the slip.
The difference is that detective leaned forward when he pressed.
He crowded the desk. He tapped his pen on the table between questions, a steady irritating rhythm that was designed to make me rush.
This man stays perfectly still. He doesn’t lean.
He doesn’t tap. He asks his questions and leaves silence after like he’s setting a trap and waiting to see what walks into it.
I don’t walk into it. I sit in the silence and let it be empty because there’s nothing to fill it with.
He picks up the manila envelope.
Dread hits me before he opens it.
I know what’s inside because I packed most of it myself over the past four months, and Kimberly organized the rest. He found the envelope in my room.
He searched it after his men took me, or he sent someone back to do it.
Either way, he has Mara’s file now, and I can’t do anything about that except watch him open it.
He slides the contents onto the table. The transcript packet comes out first, then the bond paperwork, then the pages from the prosecutor’s file with the blue-ink edits.
He reads the way a lawyer reads, not scanning but tracking, moving through each page like he’s looking for a thread he hasn’t found yet.
He gets to the photos.
I try to keep my breathing even. I try to stay professional, detached, and cooperative. I try to do everything Grant taught me works when a man has power over you and you don’t yet know what he wants.
He stills for a moment when he sees the pictures Mara took of me from two of Grant’s worst assaults. His expression is blank, but he grips the pictures a bit tighter before calmly setting down each one in a neat stack until he runs out of those.
He turns to the photo of Mara under fluorescent light, bruising around her throat, split lip, and her silver oval pendant still visible at her collarbone because whoever photographed her didn’t remove the necklace first. Mara wore that pendant every day after our grandmother died.
She said it was the only piece of jewelry she owned that didn’t come with a man attached.
The last time I saw her wearing it, she was standing in her apartment doorway laughing about a bad date, twisting the chain between her fingers while she told me the guy had ordered for her at dinner like she didn’t have a mouth.
“Don’t let a man pick your food or your future,” she’d said.
Then she’d tucked the pendant inside her collar and grinned at me.
“Grandma told me that. I’m passing it down. ”
She was dead eleven days later.
“Grant Winters strangled my sister.” My voice cracks on the second word, and I hate it. I didn’t plan to break here. I planned to stay flat and factual and get through this by being boring enough that the powerful person in the room loses interest.
He looks up from the photo. He doesn’t lean forward or reach for me. He doesn’t soften his expression into pity or harden it into suspicion. He just looks at me and waits. I don’t know what to do with a man who treats my grief like information instead of leverage.
“He strangled her in her apartment in DuPage County. He was arrested. He was charged. He made bond. The case fell apart because witness statements were softened, evidence went missing, and the prosecutor’s notes were rewritten to turn my sister’s murder into a domestic incident with credibility concerns. ”