Chapter 2
Chapter Two
NIKOLAI
Sometime after midnight, the door closes and the room tries to digest me.
I count to ten. It’s what my father taught me to do when the panic starts. Ten seconds of controlled breathing, then assess, strategize, find the angle.
Except my breath keeps hitching on the inhale. The count resets at six. The gray is everywhere, pressing in from all sides.
“I’m Nikolai Petrenko,” I say out loud.
The words disappear into the acoustic panels without a trace. No echo. No resonance. Nothing bounces back to confirm I exist.
“I’m Nikolai fucking Petrenko and my father will burn this city to the foundations to get me back.”
The silence swallows that too.
How long has he been gone? Twenty minutes? An hour? Time has already started to slip. Without windows, without a clock, without the rhythm of human interaction, the minutes stretch and contract like something living.
My wrists are chafing against the restraints. Skin rubbing raw where the metal meets bone. I force myself to stop pulling. That’s what they want. They want me to exhaust myself fighting the chair so I’m soft when the real work begins.
I know the playbook. I’ve seen it executed on men who owed my family money.
I’ve never been on this side of the chair before.
The cold is the worst part. Or maybe the second worst part after the silence.
The temperature has been calibrated to make my muscles cramp and my teeth chatter.
My suit jacket is still on, but it’s not doing much against this kind of cold—institutional, intentional freeze that seeps through Italian wool like the fabric isn’t even there.
I think about my apartment in Moscow. The view of the river. The bed that’s too big for one person.
I think about the girl I was supposed to meet for dinner tomorrow. Elena. The curator from the Tretyakov. She’ll wait for me at the restaurant. She’ll check her phone. She’ll assume I’m just another rich asshole who stood her up.
She’ll never know that I’m forty-seven floors underground learning what it feels like to be inventory.
The smell bothers me almost as much as the temperature. Antiseptic and concrete and something underneath that I don’t want to identify—something organic.
The door opens.
My whole body jerks against the restraints before I can stop it. An animal response to sudden stimulus. I hate myself for the display of weakness.
The man from before steps through the doorway. Same unhurried precision. Economical movements. Nothing wasted.
He carries a metal tray. He sets it on the small table against the wall. I crane my neck to see what’s on it, but the angle is wrong.
“Back for more conversation?” My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
Good. The Petrenko mask is holding. “I have to say, your interrogation technique is fascinating. Very avant-garde. Most people at least start with a few questions before they leave their prisoners to marinate in existential dread.”
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look at me. He arranges something on the tray with focused attention.
“The silent treatment, then.” I need a different angle. Money didn’t work before. “You know, I’ve met men like you. The ones who think they’re above negotiation. But everyone has a price.”
Nothing. Not a flicker.
“Maybe it’s not money for you. Maybe it’s power. I have connections to half the families in Eastern Europe. Information that could make you invaluable to Ivan, not just useful. I could make you his right hand instead of his attack dog.”
He picks up something from the tray. The light catches it.
Trauma shears. The kind paramedics use to cut through clothing on accident victims.
“Or maybe it’s simpler than that.” My voice is getting faster despite my efforts to control it. “Maybe you want to be the one asking the questions instead of taking orders. I can help with that. I know things about the Baranovs that Ivan wouldn’t want getting out.”
He walks toward me. The shears held loosely in his right hand.
“Things about his son. About the shipments that go through the northern route. About the arrangement with the customs officials in—”
He stops in front of me. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back to see his face. Close enough that I can see the individual threads of his dark sweater and the faint white lines of old scars on his forearms.
“I can make you untouchable,” I say. “Just give me a phone. Five minutes. I’ll—”
He reaches for my tie.
The shears slide beneath the silk. Cold metal touches my throat for half a second before the blades close and the fabric parts.
My father gave me this tie. Hermès. Hand-stitched. A gift for my twenty-fifth birthday presented with the closest thing to affection Viktor Petrenko has ever managed.
The man in front of me drops it on the floor like garbage.
“That tie cost more than most people’s cars,” I hear myself say. Even I can tell my voice is getting thinner.
He doesn’t acknowledge the words. He just keeps working. The shears slide between my skin and the seam of my jacket. The blades whisper through Italian tailoring. The jacket falls away.
He cuts through the buttons of my shirt. The cold hits my bare chest like a slap.
I try a different tactic. Rage.
“Baranov dog.” The insult comes out sharp. “That’s what you are. A trained animal doing tricks for your master. The Kennel—isn’t that what they called it? I’ve heard whispers. They take children and turn them into things that can’t think for themselves.”
His hands pause. Just for a second.
Then they resume cutting, working down to my trousers.
“Is that what happened to you?” I push harder, searching for the crack. “Did they break you so completely that you forgot how to be human? Or were you never human to begin with?”
Still nothing. But I saw the pause. I felt it.
He’s not ignoring me because he’s disciplined. He’s ignoring me because my words are irrelevant to whatever he’s actually doing.
He’s not listening to what I’m saying. He’s watching how I say it.
The realization cuts through my scrambling thoughts. His eyes aren’t on my face. They’re tracking the rapid rise and fall of my chest. The visible tremor in my muscles. He’s reading my body the way scholars read ancient texts.
The shears make quick work of my belt, my trousers, the boxers I put on this morning when I was still a man with a future.
He removes my shoes with clinical efficiency, unlacing them rather than cutting—and I file that detail away, wondering if the preservation means something in his private taxonomy.
He unbuckles my watch last.
A Patek Philippe. My mother gave it to me when I turned eighteen, two months before the cardiac failure that killed her. The metal is warm from my wrist. Warm from twelve years of wearing it through every moment that mattered.
She put it on my arm herself, her fingers thin and cold even then.
“Time is the only thing we can’t buy back, Kolya. Spend it wisely.”
I haven’t spent it wisely. I’ve spent it on champagne and cocaine and women whose names I forgot before morning.
He doesn’t look at the watch before he sets it on the tray with everything else.
I am naked.
I am cold.
He crosses to the corner of the room and retrieves a bundle of gray fabric from a cabinet. He drops it in my lap without ceremony.
A smock. Thin cotton. Institutional. The kind of shapeless garment they give to patients in hospitals and inmates in prisons.
“You expect me to put that on?” My voice cracks on the last word. I hate it. Hate him. Hate this room and this chair and the precise way he’s dismantled every external marker of who I am.
He looks at me.
It’s the first time he’s really looked at me since he entered the room. The weight of his attention is worse than anything that’s come before. His eyes are pale, almost colorless.
There’s nothing behind them. No anger at my insults. No satisfaction at my degradation. No cruelty, even, which might at least be human.
There’s just assessment. Calculation. The cool evaluation of inventory.
He reaches forward. His hands are cold when they touch my shoulders. Before I can process what’s happening, he pulls the smock over my head and threads my restrained arms through the sleeves with practiced efficiency.
He’s done this before. Many times. On many men who thought their names meant something.
The fabric is rough against my skin. The hem falls to mid-thigh. I am covered, technically, but I have never felt more exposed.
Then he turns toward the door.
“Wait.” The word rips out of me. “You can’t just leave me here. You haven’t even asked me anything. What do you want? Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you.”
He pauses at the door. His hand rests on the lock.
For one wild second I think he’s going to speak. Going to finally acknowledge me as a human being. I lean forward against the restraints with something that feels horrifyingly like hope.
His fingers move. The lock disengages. The door swings open.
He walks through without looking back. The door seals behind him with that soft arterial click.
I am alone again in the gray room with the drain in the floor and the thin cotton smock that does nothing against the cold.
I’m not fighting a man.
The thought crystallizes in the silence.
I’m fighting a process. A machine. Something that doesn’t need to speak because it already knows everything my body is telling it.
On the floor, scattered around the drain, lie the ruins of my twelve-thousand-dollar suit.
I close my eyes. I count to ten. I try to breathe.
And then the lights cut out.
The room vanishes. The gray becomes absolute black. The silence that follows is so complete that for one horrible moment I’m not sure I still exist.