Chapter 7
MARGOT
It’s been seven days since they took me off the stairwell, and I’m sitting across from the man who ordered it while he corrects every wrong answer I give about someone else’s life.
Supervised calls to Kimberly every other morning have kept her forty-eight-hour deadline from detonating, but they haven’t made either of us feel safe.
Nadia sent the first false message through Katya’s channel at dawn.
Now we wait for a response, and while we wait, Valentin drills me like the reply is already on its way.
“Katya’s third contact point was the alley behind the Bridgeport warehouse. What time?”
I straighten in the chair. “Two a.m. She never arrived earlier than two or later than two fifteen. She parked on Thirty-fifth, walked the alley from the east side, and carried the package in her left coat pocket.”
He flips to the next question without pausing. “Which pocket did she use for the confirmation receipt?”
“Right inner pocket. She handed it over folded twice with the crease facing out.”
He sets that page aside. “Where did she go after the drop?”
“Back to the car. She sat for six minutes monitoring the alley exit before driving north toward the Stevenson.”
“How do you know it was six minutes?”
I don’t look away. “Because Nadia’s surveillance logs show six minutes on every confirmed drop, and Katya was consistent enough that any deviation would’ve flagged Kirill’s people.”
Valentin sets the printout on the desk. My coffee is cold.
My heels are under the chair because wearing them for nine hours makes my ankles throb, and nobody told me spies were expected to hurt the entire time they worked.
He looks at me the same way he has all week, measuring, adjusting, and sorting.
I’m a product he’s building to a tolerance he hasn’t shared with me.
“Your answers are correct.” He picks up the next page. “Your delivery is wrong.”
I lean back in the chair. “What’s wrong with my delivery?”
He doesn’t look up from the page. “You’re too fast. Katya spoke slowly because she never had to prove she belonged. You’re rushing because you’re afraid of getting caught, and that fear is audible.”
I push my chair back from the desk. The legs scrape against the concrete floor, and the sound fills the room louder than I intended. “I’m afraid of getting caught because getting caught means getting killed. That seems like a reasonable speed adjustment.”
“It’s a reasonable reaction and a fatal mistake. Kirill’s people don’t parse correctness. They parse confidence. If you sound like you’re reciting, they’ll know.”
“Then stop drilling me like a test proctor and let me sound like a person.”
He sets the page down. “You sound like a person. You don’t sound like Katya.”
I stand up because I’m done sitting across from him while he tells me all the ways I’m failing at being someone I never asked to become.
Seven days of scripted phrases, walk-throughs, coded greetings, and correction after correction, and every session ends the same way.
Close, but wrong. Almost there, but never enough.
He’s building a copy of a woman he lost, and I’m the material he’s working with.
The gap between what I am and what he needs sits in every pause and every correction like a judgment I didn’t earn.
“You enjoy this.” The words come out before I can stop them, and I don’t want to stop them.
“You enjoy the control. You enjoy sitting in that chair and telling me how to walk, how to talk, and how to hold a receipt with the crease facing out. You like having a woman in this building who does exactly what you tell her because it lets you pretend you’re not afraid. ”
He stays exactly where he is, forearms on the desk, watching me.
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of losing anything else.” I take a step toward the desk.
“You lost Katya. You lost someone before her, someone close enough that it changed how you run everything. I see it in the way you check cameras after meetings, count steps between rooms, and put a woman in a bedroom fourteen steps from your office so you can monitor the door without leaving your chair.”
He presses his palms against the desk. “You’re making assumptions.”
“I’m making observations. I spent years married to a man who controlled everything in his environment because he was terrified of what would happen if anything moved without his permission. I know what control looks like when it’s running on fear.”
“Grant controlled you because he enjoyed owning you.”
I don’t let the sentence go unchallenged.
“He controlled me because losing things made him dangerous, and the only way he knew how to stop losing was to grip harder.” I’m close to the desk now, close enough that I can see the muscle in his forearm tense where he presses down.
“You’re doing the same thing with better justification and more people.
You lost someone important to you before you lost Katya.
Now you’re rebuilding Katya out of someone you found in a motel because losing another person without trying to prevent it is worse than anything you’d have to do to me. ”
Neither of us speaks. The ventilation hums. Nadia’s equipment drones through the wall. My pulse is loud in my own ears.
“I lost my sister.” His voice roughens on the second syllable. “My sister’s name was Daria. She died because I trusted a man who sold her location, and I’ve spent six years making sure I don’t repeat that mistake.”
“Then you understand why Katya is missing.” I don’t soften it. “She’s missing because your organization failed one woman, and now you’re asking another woman to take her place.”
He stands up so fast that the chair rolls back and hits the wall.
For one second, I see Grant in the speed of it, in the sudden upward motion that changes the room from conversation to confrontation.
My pulse spikes. My feet adjust. Every survival instinct I built over three years tells me to step back, find the door, and run.
Somehow, I find the courage not to step back.
He doesn’t come around the desk. He stands behind it, gripping the surface, shoulders rigid. His face is open in a way I haven’t seen before, not anger but grief he hasn’t dealt with. It could be for Daria, Katya, or both.
“The first rule is survival.” His voice drops, unguarded.
“Everything else—the operation, the network, the bargain I made with you—all of it serves survival. If you don’t believe that, you’ll die in that room with Kirill’s people because you’ll hesitate, and hesitation kills faster than a bad accent. ”
“You don’t get to lecture me about survival.
” I close the last distance between me and the desk to grip the surface across from his.
“I survived Grant Winters for three years without a team, cameras, or a building full of people who follow my orders. I survived on instinct and packing a bag and learning to read the temperature of a room before I walked into it. Don’t tell me what survival looks like.
I’ve been living inside it longer than you’ve been watching it on a screen. ”
The ventilation hums. Neither of us blinks. His hands lift off the desk.
He comes around the desk. Three steps, no hesitation, and suddenly, there is no furniture between us, only the two feet of air separating his chest from mine.
I shove him. Both hands against his sternum, hard enough that he steps back one pace and stops.
He catches my wrists. His grip is firm, not hard, nothing like Grant’s intention to leave marks. Controlled, fast, and exactly as much force as necessary.
I freeze. Every muscle locks before the thought catches up. My lungs stop.
He sees it. The recognition moves across his face like a door opening onto guilt. He releases my wrists, steps back, and puts his hands behind him on the desk edge, visibly away from me.
Two feet of air between us again. Mine.
The door is six steps behind me. I know because I counted when I walked in. I can reach it. I can leave. He let go. His hands are behind him, on the desk, nowhere near me. I can stop this.
I close the distance.
I kiss him.
The kiss is fury, pure and simple, seven days of being rebuilt into someone I’m not compressed into the space between his mouth and mine.
I hate how much it matters that he’s the first man in three years who caught my wrists and let go before I had to fight free.
I pull him down by the collar of his shirt with both hands because he’s taller than me even without the heels, and when his mouth opens against mine, the anger doesn’t disappear. It just finds a new place to go.
He lifts me onto the desk. The printouts scatter under my thighs and Katya’s route maps crumple beneath us but neither of us cares.
He puts his hands on my waist, then my hips, then the back of my thighs, and every touch is a question he doesn’t ask out loud.
I answer by pulling him closer, by wrapping my legs around his hips, and by biting his lower lip hard enough that he makes a sound against my mouth that isn’t pain or permission but lives somewhere between the two.
“We shouldn’t.” His mouth is against my throat, and he doesn’t stop touching me.
“I know.” I pull him closer instead of pushing him away. “I don’t want you to stop.”
He pushes the skirt up my thighs while I unbutton his shirt steadier than I should be.
I’ve been shaking for seven days straight, and now, with his mouth on my neck and his fingers pressing into the skin above my knee, the shaking stops.
I pull his shirt off his shoulders and press my hands against his chest to feel the muscle underneath the heat, and his breathing, no longer controlled, is ragged now.
“Look at me.” He does.
I need to see that his focus is on me and not on Katya. I need to know I’m not a substitute for a woman he lost. If he looks at me and sees her, I’ll stop, walk out of this room, and never let him touch me again.