Chapter 6 Nikolai
Chapter Six
NIKOLAI
Time has stopped meaning anything. It has dissolved into a fluid state, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of my own suffering.
I won.
That’s what I keep telling myself. I won. I spat in his face. I looked the monster in his pale, dead eyes and I chose my pride over my thirst and I won.
But the darkness doesn’t feel like winning.
It feels like burial.
It’s thicker now. Heavier. The first time they turned off the lights, the darkness was just an absence, a negative space where light used to be.
This darkness has mass. It presses against my skin like cold, wet hands.
It fills my lungs when I breathe, coating the inside of my chest with something that tastes like old iron.
It crawls inside my skull and makes a nest behind my eyes where memories used to live.
I keep slipping in and out. Not sleeping exactly—the cold and the cramps won’t let me really sleep—but drifting into a gray fugue state that blurs the line between waking and dreaming.
Microsleeps. My brain shutting down in fragments, stealing rest in twenty-second intervals, producing visions that feel real until I jerk awake and realize I was never awake to begin with.
I can still taste the water.
The swallows from yesterday—or was it the day before? The timeline is broken. But the taste lingers like a ghost, taunting me with what I could have had if I’d just kept my mouth shut. The cool slide of it over my tongue. The way it eased the burning in my throat for three beautiful seconds.
But I’m a Petrenko.
The voice in my head sounds like my father. It sounds like his belt hitting the floor of his study, the soft leather slap that meant the education was about to begin. It sounds like the heavy oak door of the wine cellar closing, the lock engaging with a metallic finality.
I always thanked him. I always meant it. Thank you for the lesson, Papa. Thank you for making me strong.
I don’t know if I mean it now.
My muscles are cramping. The calves first, seizing into knots that feel like rocks under the skin.
Then the thighs. Then the deep core muscles that I didn’t even know existed until they started screaming.
The cold is doing this, and the stillness, and the way my body has been held in the same position for so long that it’s forgetting how to be a body.
My heart pounds erratically, skipping beats, then racing to catch up, a chaotic rhythm I can feel pulsing in my temples and the hollow of my throat.
I’m in the confusion stage. Maybe past it. The darkness and the sleeplessness are doing something to my brain—crossing wires, bleeding dreams into waking, making it impossible to tell what’s real and what’s just my mind eating itself to survive.
The cold is worse in the darkness. Without light, without any visual anchor, my body loses track of where it ends and the room begins. The temperature hasn’t changed, I know it hasn’t, but the darkness makes everything feel colder. More hostile. More hungry.
I think about the Moscow winters. The way the snow would pile up outside my window at the estate, white and clean and endless.
I used to press my palm against the glass and count how long I could stand the cold before I had to pull away.
Thirty seconds. Forty-five. A minute, once, when I was fifteen and trying to prove something to myself.
I would give anything for that window now. For that cold that I could control. For a cold I could walk away from.
There are footsteps in the corridor.
I hold my breath. I strain against the restraints, tilting my head toward the door, trying to hear past the thunder of my own heartbeat. The footsteps are measured. Precise. The gait of someone who has walked this path a thousand times. I know that rhythm. I’ve been listening for it in my sleep.
He’s coming back. He’s going to open the door and turn on the lights and give me another chance.
The footsteps pass the door. They fade into silence.
I’m alone.
“Fuck.” The word comes out cracked and broken, a pathetic sound in the vast quiet. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
No one answers. Of course no one answers. There’s no one here. Just me and the dark and the drain in the floor and the ghost of water on my tongue.
I hear it then. Water. Running water, somewhere in the walls, the sound of pipes carrying what I need just inches away from where I sit. It starts as a trickle, then grows to a rush. I twist toward the sound, straining against the leather cuffs, my parched throat working convulsively.
I realize I’m crying. The tears are hot on my cold cheeks. They slide down to the corner of my mouth. They taste like salt. I try to catch them with my tongue, desperate for any moisture.
“This is pathetic.” My voice echoes strangely in the darkness, flat and dead. “You’re pathetic, Nikolai. Licking your own tears like a fucking animal.”
“You were always pathetic,” says Dmitri.
I freeze.
The voice came from my left. From the empty air beside my shoulder.
But it sounds wrong—too close, like it’s coming from inside my skull rather than the room.
An echo without an origin. My cousin’s voice, distorted by the darkness and the sleep deprivation, warped into something that might not be a voice at all.
“You’re not here,” I say to the dark.
“Of course I’m here.” The words overlap with the sound of the pipes, the consonants blurring into the rush of water. “Where else would I be? You gave them my name, Kolya. You traded me for a few drops of water. You sold your own blood for a drink.”
“I didn’t trade you. I took the water back. I spat it in his face.”
“After you swallowed. After you let him touch you. After you leaned into his hand like a dog begging for scraps.”
My hands clench into fists. The restraints bite into my wrists, reopening wounds that haven't had a chance to heal. The pain is grounding, but only for a second.
“Shut up.”
“He tilted your head back and you let him. He brought the glass to your lips and you opened for him. You would have done anything he asked in that moment. We both know it.”
“Shut up!”
“Papa always said you were weak.” The voice warps, stretches, becomes something that sounds like Dmitri and the pipes and my own pulse all at once.
“He told me once—that’s why Mama stopped taking her medicine.
Because she couldn’t bear watching you become another him.
Because she looked at you and saw the rot setting in early. ”
The word hits me like a physical blow. Mama.
I haven’t let myself think about her in years. The memory is too sharp, too dangerous, a blade I keep sheathed because I know it will cut me if I touch it.
But the darkness has no sheaths. The darkness strips everything away.
I remember her hands. Small and cool and always gentle.
I remember the way she would sing to me in Ukrainian, the old songs from her village that she wasn't supposed to remember.
I remember the last time I saw her, in her bedroom at the dacha, her face gray against the white pillows, her voice barely a whisper as she told me to be good.
I wasn’t good. I was never good after that.
“She didn’t die because of me.” My voice is shaking, high and thin like a child’s. “She had a heart condition. It was genetic. The doctors said—”
“The doctors said what Papa paid them to say.” Dmitri’s voice is soft now, almost gentle, but it comes from everywhere at once.
“At least, that’s what I heard them arguing about.
Papa screaming at Uncle Mikhail that she’d stopped her medication, that she’d chosen this.
I was only eleven. I didn’t understand what it meant. But you understood, didn't you, Kolya?”
The claim lands differently now—not omniscient truth but overheard fragments, a child’s interpretation of adult conflict. But the possibility is worse than certainty. The not-knowing.
I’m screaming. I don’t remember starting, but my throat is raw and the sound is tearing out of me in waves, wordless and animal.
The darkness swallows it. There’s nothing left but the echo in my own skull and the sound of Dmitri laughing—except the laugh fractures, becomes the gurgle of pipes, becomes silence.
When the scream finally dies, I’m shaking so hard that the chair is rattling against its bolts.
“You’re not real,” I whisper. “You’re not here. This is what happens when the brain is deprived of sleep and light. This is just chemistry. Neurons misfiring. Awake-dreaming.”
The darkness doesn’t answer.
My mother’s face. I try to remember my mother’s face. The way she smiled when she tucked me into bed. The feeling of her hand on my forehead when I was sick, cool and soft and completely safe.
But the face won’t come.
I can see her outline. The dark hair. The curve of her cheek. But where her features should be, there’s just a blur, a smear of memory that won’t resolve no matter how hard I try.
And behind the blur, watching me with patient, colorless eyes: the Monster.
I see his face instead. I see his hand reaching for my chin. I feel the touch of his fingers against my jaw, the way he tilted my head back. His face is clear. His face is perfect. Every line, every angle, every shadow.
I can’t remember my mother. But I can see him.
I leaned into it.
The shame crashes over me like a wave. I leaned into his touch. In the moment when he held my face and brought the water to my lips, I leaned toward him like a flower turning toward the sun, seeking more contact, more sensation.
What does that make me?
My father’s voice answers from the dark: “Weak.”
The cramps are getting worse. I can feel my calves knotting, the muscles contracting in ways that shouldn’t be possible, and I try to stretch against the restraints but there’s nowhere to go.
The pain builds and builds until I’m gasping, and then it releases, leaving me trembling and slick with sweat that immediately turns cold.
I’m dying. The thought arrives with strange clarity. I’m actually dying, right here, in this chair, in this building where no one will find me.
My father isn’t coming. The video they showed me proved that. My father has already replaced me, already moved on to Dmitri. I was never the heir he wanted. I was just the heir he was stuck with.
And I’m going to die in the dark, alone, with nothing but hallucinations of my dead mother and my living cousin for company. The last person who touched me was the man who’s killing me, and the worst part is that I want him to come back.
Not to save me. Not to give me water.
Just to touch me again.
The wanting is unbearable. It burns worse than the thirst. It coils in my chest like a living thing, feeding on my weakness. I hate him. I hate myself. I hate the way my body responds to the memory of his hands.
He mapped me with a scalpel. He traced the lines of my bones like he was charting new territory. And my treacherous, desperate body arched toward the blade and begged for more.
What kind of man does that make me?
I try to remember my mother’s face again. The image flickers, almost coalesces, and then dissolves into pale eyes and still hands.
I can’t remember her anymore.
All I can see is him.
The darkness presses closer. My heart is doing something strange, fluttering instead of beating. This is what dying feels like. The slow shutdown.
I should pray. I should think of something meaningful.
But I can’t think of anything to say.
All I can do is sit in the darkness and wait for the Monster to come back, and hate myself for how desperately I want him to.
The cramps return. I bite through my own lip to keep from screaming. Blood fills my mouth, hot and metallic, and I swallow it because it’s wet and my body doesn’t care where the moisture comes from anymore.
In the darkness, I wait.
In the darkness, I break.
And when the door finally opens, when the light finally returns, I will not remember how to be the man who walked in.
I will only remember how to be his.
The hallucinations come and go. Dmitri’s distorted voice. My father’s belt. My mother’s face that I can no longer see. And behind them all, patient and still, the pale-eyed man who has taken everything from me and somehow made me grateful for the taking.
I don’t know how much time passes. Hours. Days. Forever.
But I know one thing with absolute certainty: when he walks through that door, I will give him whatever he asks.
Not because he broke me.
Because I was already broken. And he’s the only one who seems to know what to do with the pieces.
The darkness hums. Or maybe that’s my blood. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I try to say his name. The Monster. The Accountant. But those aren’t names. Those are titles. Masks.
“Alexei.”
The word scrapes out of my ruined throat. I heard Ivan say it once, before the hood came off. It’s the first time I’ve used his real name.
The darkness swallows it like everything else.
But somewhere in my shattered mind, I realize I’ve crossed a line I didn’t know existed. He’s not the Monster anymore. He’s not a function or a process.
He’s Alexei. And I want him to come back.
The wanting terrifies me more than the dying. I’ve faced death before. Death is simple. Death is just an ending.
This is something else.
This is the beginning of a dependency I don’t understand. A need that has nothing to do with water or warmth or survival. A pull toward a man who has shown me nothing but clinical detachment, who has touched me only to map my weaknesses.
And still I want him.
Still I wait.
Still I whisper his name into the darkness and listen for an answer that never comes.
In the darkness, I become something new.