Chapter 23
MARGOT
The hood comes off. I’m sitting on concrete.
The room is lit by a single fluorescent strip that buzzes at a frequency I can feel behind my teeth.
My wrists are bound in front of me with a zip tie, snug enough that I can feel my pulse against the plastic but loose enough that my fingers haven’t gone numb.
Kolya knows I need to look unharmed. Marks on my wrists would tell Kirill’s people the asset was mishandled.
He’s hedging his bets in case Kirill cares about my physical condition beyond whether I’m alive or dead.
My stomach turns over once, hard, and I swallow back the nausea. The anti-nausea medication I took this morning has worn off, and the stress hormones from the abduction are metabolizing into the persistent queasiness that’s been living in my gut for weeks.
I force air through my nose slowly and exhale through my mouth. It doesn’t really help, but I pretend it does as I look around.
The room is a storage facility. Metal shelves line three walls from the concrete floor to the overhead pipes, and every shelf is loaded with sealed cardboard boxes, manila envelopes, and stacked file folders with color-coded tabs.
Each box carries a case number, a date range, and a handling code I don’t recognize.
Sealed phones sit in clear plastic bags on the middle shelf.
Stacked court files fill the upper shelves with the careful organization of a system designed to hold evidence that was never meant to be found again.
This is private evidence storage, but it isn’t official.
That makes it worse. It’s the kind of shadow archive a business could hide, built from copied files, stolen originals, and transfer receipts no one was supposed to trace.
The sealed boxes and case-numbered shelves tell me what this room was built to do.
I don’t know anything about the building I’m in, but I understand the purpose of this room.
My stomach turns over again. The nausea is worse without medication, and the stress isn’t helping.
I press my hand flat against my abdomen and focus on slow breathing.
It helps about as much as before, but I manage to sit up.
My back is against the far wall, and the door is eight feet in front of me.
It’s steel and closed with a deadbolt that has no latch I can see from here.
It reminds me of the one Grant used on our apartment that could only be unlocked with the key.
A small security camera is mounted in the upper right corner, the red LED blinking in a three-second cycle that I count automatically. They don’t make any effort to hide it. A speaker mounted beside the camera crackles once. Then a voice, filtered and calm, comes through. “Katya.”
I don’t answer.
He chuckles. “Perhaps you prefer Margot?”
I stiffen involuntarily when he says my name. I still don’t speak, but that response revealed everything.
“I’ve watched you perform for my couriers for two months.
You’re very good.” The voice is unhurried but carries authority.
He’s used to being listened to. This must be Kirill.
He’s watching me through the camera rather than entering the room, testing from a distance.
“Dmitri said you were convincing. His replacement agreed. I wanted to see for myself.”
I keep my expression neutral. I give him Katya’s stillness, not because he deserves it but because giving him Margot’s fear would tell him more than he’s earned.
“You can beg. You can bargain. You can offer information in exchange for comfort or medical access or a phone call.” The speaker crackles again. “Most people in your position start with bargaining. The interesting ones start with silence.”
I stay silent.
Silence stretches.
“Interesting.” The speaker clicks off.
I wait for it to click back on. It doesn’t. Kirill wanted to see whether I’d perform under pressure, and my silence gave him data he’ll use later. Silence is its own kind of intelligence when you’re watching for cracks.
I count the camera cycles and any movement I hear in the corridor, trying to use all the lessons from everyone who tried to keep me alive to escape a room built by the man who betrayed the organization that tried to protect me.
The camera light is definitely three seconds on, one second off, and repeat.
I don’t know what it means, but anything that feels like data is something to note right now.
The guard outside the door shifts position every twelve minutes.
I hear the shuffle of boots and the creak of a chair through the steel each time.
When the guard changes at what I estimate is the forty-minute mark, there’s a gap.
There are twenty seconds of transition where the outgoing guard walks toward the corridor junction and the incoming guard hasn’t reached the door yet.
Twenty seconds. I can work with twenty seconds.
I’ve been in rooms like this before. Not this specific room, but rooms where men decided how much of my space I could control and how much of my time belonged to me.
Grant’s kitchen had the same logic, with one exit, one window too small to climb through, and a man who controlled the lock.
I survived Grant’s kitchen for three years by watching patterns, documenting exits, and waiting for the moments when his control slipped.
That’s not true, but I cling to it for a moment until I accept it’s better not to lie to myself. He never lost control. He just waited until I surrendered.
I square my shoulders. I can’t afford to surrender this time. Kolya’s control is more professional than Grant’s, but the structure is the same. There’s a locked door, a camera, and a man who believes he’s accounted for every variable.
I look at my bound wrists. The zip tie seems like a standard one to me.
I don’t know if it’s different from the kind I use to zip tie cables.
Standard zip ties have a locking mechanism that can be defeated with a thin, flat object inserted into the ratchet teeth.
I learned that in my training. I just don’t have anything flat or thin on me right now. I’m surrounded by items, though.
I look around slowly, taking more time with the items on the shelves this time.
The metal shelves beside me hold evidence bags, file folders, and sealed boxes.
The nearest box is labeled with a case number and a date from eight months ago.
The file clip holding the folder tab to the box edge is a thin metal strip that might be flat enough to fit between the zip tie ratchet and the plastic strap if I can bend it out of shape and straighten it.
I count the camera cycle three more times to confirm the timing.
Three on, one off. On what I hope really is the next reset, I reach for the file clip.
It comes free without sound. I stare at the camera and work on my lap, stripping off the plastic section and slowly bending the wire part to the shape I need.
It’s slow, since I have to work by feel.
Looking down more than once or twice will change my posture and maybe alert someone watching me that I’m doing something they won’t like.
Finally, it feels like the right shape, and I insert it into the zip tie mechanism using my thumb and forefinger to find the right position.
It’s incredibly difficult, and the angle I have to bend one wrist is excruciating, but the ratchet releases on the second try.
The zip tie loosens. I slide it off my wrists and set it on the floor beside me without moving my body position.
I wait for the next camera reset. One second of blind time.
I stand.
The shelves are my cover. I move along the wall, staying below the camera’s primary angle, using the shelved boxes as a visual barrier between me and the lens.
The door is locked from the outside, but the storage room connects to a side office through an internal door that I can see through a gap between two shelf units.
I slide through the gap. The side office is small, dark, and filled with filing cabinets and a desk covered in transfer receipts and processing forms. The door to the exterior corridor is closed but not locked. They’re relying on the camera and the zip tie rather than physical barriers.
I scan the desk, seeing transfer receipts, processing codes, and routing numbers. My hands are shaking, and I grip the desk edge to steady them because shaking costs time and time is the only resource I can’t afford to waste.
A name on one of the receipts stops me. I shouldn’t be wasting time here, because they’ve already noticed I’ve moved away from the camera, but I can’t move on once I see Carlstrom, Mara.
It’s an evidence transfer receipt, and the case number matches the sealing order Mabel Jimenez helped obtain eight months ago.
I’ve memorized that case number from hours of staring at it.
The receipt shows a chain of custody for evidence collected from the Cook County medical examiner’s office, transferred to this facility through a shell processing company, and logged under a handling code that means restricted access, indefinite hold.
Mara’s evidence was moved through this building.
The ligature analysis, the sealed autopsy findings, and the physical evidence purporting to show that Mara was strangled by someone right-handed—or manipulated to create that impression.
All of it was transferred here, to this private storage facility beneath a shuttered fugitive-recovery office, where it could sit on a metal shelf in a labeled box and never be found by anyone who wasn’t already part of the network that put it there.