Chapter 4
Chapter Four
NIKOLAI
The water is still there.
My throat has closed to a raw tunnel that screams with every swallow.
My tongue is thick, a foreign object stuffed into my mouth.
The glass sits on the table, catching the fluorescent light in small dancing refractions.
I’ve memorized the way the light moves, the condensation forming on the outside, the way the surface trembles when the ventilation system cycles on.
Just out of reach.
I’ve measured the distance against my own straining fingers a hundred times, pulling against the restraints until my wrists bleed.
How long has it been? A day? Two? Time has become unreliable. My lips are cracked and bleeding in the corners. When I run my tongue across them to check the damage, the motion produces no moisture at all.
I would kill for that glass of water. I would tell them anything.
That thought scares me more than the thirst.
My mind keeps sliding away from the present. Moscow in the summer. The rooftop bar at the Ritz. Elena—the curator I was supposed to meet for dinner. She drank champagne with her eyes closed on the first sip, like she was praying.
I would close my eyes for water. I would pray for it if I thought anyone was listening.
The memory shifts. I am seventeen, locked in my father’s wine cellar for the third time that year. What I remember is the cold and the dark and the way I pressed my back against the stone wall.
The cellar had a wine rack along one wall. I remember thinking about breaking a bottle open just to have something liquid on my tongue. I didn’t do it. I knew what would happen if I damaged his collection.
He always came back.
The door opens.
My body reacts before my mind catches up—muscles tensing, heart rate spiking. He steps through the doorway carrying something new. A black case about the size of a tackle box.
He sets the case on the table next to the water. The click of the latches opening sounds impossibly loud.
I crane my neck. All I catch is a glimpse of metal and sterile white packaging.
“Look,” I say. My voice comes out as a croak. “Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. Just tell me what you want. I’ll sign over accounts. I’ll give you names. Just stop with the mind games.”
He doesn’t respond. He is arranging something inside the case, his movements precise and unhurried. I hate him for his calm. I hate him for standing there in his clean dark sweater while I sit here in a thin gray smock with my tongue turning to leather.
“Please.” The word escapes. “Please. I’ll do anything. Just give me the water.”
He turns toward me.
In his hand is a scalpel. The blade catches the light the same way the water does.
“What are you going to do with that?”
He approaches the chair. His footsteps are measured. I find myself cataloging details because focusing on details is easier than focusing on the blade. The faint white lines of old scars on his forearms. The absolute blankness in his pale eyes.
He stops beside the chair. His free hand reaches for something at the side of the headrest. A mechanism clicks. The restraint around my skull tightens, locking my head in place.
“Wait.” My voice is thin. “Wait, please, you don’t have to do this. Whatever they’re paying you, I can triple it.”
He adjusts the restraints on my arms, pulling them tighter until my hands are immobile. The scalpel rests on the tray beside my head.
“Don’t.”
He picks up the scalpel.
My whole body goes rigid. I squeeze my eyes shut.
Cold metal touches my collarbone.
Not cutting. Tracing.
The edge of the scalpel follows the line of my clavicle from the hollow of my throat to the point of my shoulder. Pressure without penetration. A ghost of sensation that leaves no wound but feels more invasive than any cut. My skin shivers in its wake.
He moves to the other side. Same path. Same pressure. Mapping my bones through the thin layer of skin.
I open my eyes.
He’s not looking at the scalpel. He’s looking at my face. Those pale eyes tracking every micro-expression, reading my responses the way scientists read data. I am a specimen.
And yet—the intensity of his attention makes me feel more seen than I have ever felt in my life.
The blade moves lower. It traces the ridge of my sternum, the valley between my pectorals, the faint ladder of my ribs. Every line of my body recorded in the negative space between cutting and not cutting.
“Stop.” The word has no strength behind it. “Please stop.”
He doesn’t stop. The blade continues its inventory, moving to my left side. When it traces the lower edge of my ribs, I feel my body flinch away involuntarily.
He noticed. Of course he noticed.
The scalpel returns to my left side. It traces the same line again, slower this time. The flinch. The tension. The way my breath catches when the blade approaches a specific point along my lower ribs.
The place where my father’s belt buckle caught me wrong when I was fourteen. The place where the bone never quite reformed right.
He traces that spot again. And again. Each pass slower than the last.
My body is doing something I don’t understand.
The fear is still there, thick and choking, but underneath it something else is building. Something electric. My skin feels hypersensitive everywhere the blade has touched.
When his free hand presses flat against my chest to steady me for another pass—
My heartbeat stutters.
Heat blooms in my stomach. My breath is coming faster now but the rhythm is wrong. Not the gasping pattern of panic but something deeper. I can feel my pulse in places I don’t want to think about. My body is responding to the pressure of his palm against my sternum.
The blade traces the line of my hip bone, just above the hem of the smock.
My body arches toward it.
No. No no no no.
This isn’t happening. This cannot be happening. This is survival instinct. Crossed wires. The body doesn’t discriminate between threat and touch.
But my cock doesn’t care about the distinction. It’s hardening beneath the thin cotton of the smock.
I am Nikolai Petrenko. I have bedded women who grace magazine covers. I am not this desperate creature trembling under a stranger’s hands, getting hard because a man with a scalpel is touching me in a room designed to break my mind.
My body doesn’t listen to what Nikolai Petrenko wants.
The blade pauses at the highest point of my hip. His hand is still pressed against my chest, fingers splayed across my sternum. I can feel him counting my heartbeats.
He knows. He has to know. And the shame of that knowledge is worse than anything the blade could do.
“Why do you protect your left side?”
His voice startles me so badly that I jerk against the restraints. It’s the first thing he’s said since he entered the room.
“What?”
“In your sleep, you curl to protect your left side. When you’re conscious, you angle your body to shield the same area.” The scalpel traces my damaged ribs one more time, feather-light. “The injury is old. Childhood. Who hurt you?”
I stare at him. My brain is trying to process the question while simultaneously dealing with the arousal pulsing through my system.
“I don’t—it was—an accident. I fell.”
“You didn’t fall.” His eyes meet mine. “Injuries from falls present differently. This was repetitive trauma. Concentrated impact.”
My father’s belt. The heavy silver buckle with the Petrenko crest.
“It doesn’t matter who did it.” The words come out ragged. “It was a long time ago.”
He holds my gaze. Something shifts in his expression—not softening, but a micro-adjustment.
Then he steps back.
He reaches for the glass of water.
My heart stops. My whole body strains forward.
He brings it to my lips.
“One swallow,” he says. “Answer another question truthfully, and you get one more.”
The water touches my mouth and I almost sob. I take the swallow—one measured mouthful that spreads across my cracked tongue like heaven. The relief is so intense it’s almost painful.
“The shipping routes,” he says. “The ones your father uses for the Baltic transit. How many vessels?”
I should resist. I should refuse. But the water is still wet on my tongue and my body has already decided that pride is a luxury I can no longer afford.
“Seven,” I whisper. “Seven regular vessels. Three backups.”
He tilts the glass again. Another swallow.
“Names?”
I give him two names. He gives me two more swallows.
Then he steps back. Sets the glass on the tray—still a quarter full, still visible, still just out of reach.
“Tomorrow,” he says, “we continue.”
He doesn't turn toward the door immediately. He pauses, looking at me with an expression I can't read.
“The arousal response,” he says quietly. “It’s physiological. A common reaction to threat-based stimulation. It does not indicate desire.”
I stare at him. He’s giving me an explanation. A clinical out. Telling me that what happened wasn’t about want, wasn’t about him.
He’s being kind. In his own strange way.
“I know,” I manage. “I know what it was.”
He nods once. Then he turns toward the door.
“Wait. Just a little more. I’ll tell you anything—”
“Tomorrow.” He pauses on the threshold. “Rest if you can.”
The door seals. The lock engages.
I am alone with the water I cannot reach and the ghost of relief still echoing in my throat.
Four names. Three ships. For eight swallows of water.
And the memory of his hand on my chest. He explained it away—physiological—but I can still feel where the blade traced my skin. I can still feel the heat that pooled in my stomach when he touched me.
It was fear. It had to be fear.
But when I close my eyes, I can still feel his palm against my sternum, counting my heartbeats.
And some part of me—the part I’m trying desperately to silence—wanted him to keep counting.