Chapter 12 Nikolai
Chapter Twelve
NIKOLAI
Approximately two days without contact.
I know you can hear me.
I know you are watching.
The IV drip counts time now. One drop. Two drops.
Three. A rhythmic, unrelenting metronome that measures the silence in seconds.
I have watched enough of them fall to know it has been almost forty-eight hours since I asked to be alone.
Since I told the only person keeping me alive to leave me in the dark.
He didn’t come back.
The door opens at irregular intervals now, but it isn’t him.
The footsteps are wrong—heavy, indifferent, lacking the precise cadence I memorized.
The person who brings the broth wears a generic gray uniform and avoids looking at my face.
They check the restraints with mechanical efficiency, ignoring the way the leather chafes my wrists raw.
They don’t adjust the angle of my headrest. They don’t touch my skin unless absolutely necessary.
The IV port Alexei installed is getting infected.
I can feel the heat spreading from the insertion point, a low-grade fever radiating up my forearm. The flesh around the needle is tender and swollen, turning a dark, angry red.
No one notices. No one cares.
I should be using this solitude to mourn.
Mikhail Gorev and Yuri Federov are dead because of me.
Their blood is on my hands—my unconscious, fever-dreaming hands that kept talking while I burned.
Dima Sorokin is being interrogated somewhere in this building.
I heard a scream down the corridor yesterday, faint through the soundproofing, muffled by distance and concrete.
It sounded like him. It sounded like the boy who used to let me win at chess because he knew my father was watching.
I tried to build the rage. I assembled it piece by piece, laying foundation stones of fact: Alexei recorded my fever-dreams. He transmitted the coordinates while I was still burning. He sent a kill team to murder men who trusted my family.
The structure won’t hold.
Every time I think I have constructed something solid, something that could sustain hatred, the memory of his hands undoes it.
The way he stayed all night. The way he treated the infection himself, his fingers cool against my burning skin.
The way he said I’m sorry when he thought I couldn’t hear, his voice stripped of its clinical armor.
The guilt is easier to hold than the anger. It settles into my chest like a stone, heavy and cold. This is what I deserve.
But even the guilt keeps getting interrupted. Even the self-flagellation keeps fracturing against the memory of pale eyes and still hands and the promise that he would not leave.
He left.
I stare at the amber light above me until it burns an afterimage onto my retinas. The room is quiet. Too quiet. Without his footsteps to structure it, the silence feels vast and predatory.
The broth on the tray is the same temperature, the same salinity as before. But it tastes like nothing. It tastes like being inventory again. A number on a manifest. A problem to be managed until it expires.
This is what it was like before him. I had forgotten. Or maybe I never really knew.
No. That’s not right. It was never like this before him, because before him I didn’t know what I was missing.
The early days were brutal, yes—pain and deprivation and the systematic dismantling of my identity.
I understood that. I could fight that. I could wrap my pride around me like armor and endure.
This is something else. This is absence.
Somewhere in the walls, an elevator cable groans under distant weight. I find myself listening for it, straining against the silence, counting the sounds the way I used to count his footsteps.
I am going insane.
I can feel it happening. The slow dissolution of the boundaries that separate thought from thought, memory from present. The room is too quiet. The light is too flat. My mind is starting to eat itself to survive.
I try to remember what life was like before this room.
Moscow in the winter. The way the snow muffled the city.
Nightclubs with bass so heavy it rattled your teeth.
Champagne and cocaine and women whose names I never learned, whose faces blur into a composite of beauty and boredom.
The penthouse apartment with its view of the river, empty and cold.
The Mercedes my father gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday—a bribe to keep me loyal.
I try to remember the faces of friends. Konstantin, who I used to drink with at the Ritz. Natasha, who I dated for three months before she realized I was never going to love her because I didn't know how. The endless parade of people who smiled at me because of my last name.
The memories feel like they belong to someone else. A character in a story I read once. A man who died a long time ago.
None of them are looking for me. None of them wondered where I went. My father held a funeral, and they attended, and they drank the vodka and ate the food, and then they went back to their lives and forgot that Nikolai Petrenko ever existed.
Alexei is the only person who remembers me.
The IV site throbs. A sharp spike of pain that travels up my arm to my shoulder. The infection is definitely spreading now—I can see the red lines tracking up my forearm, the early signs of something systemic.
He would notice.
He would notice immediately. He would produce medical supplies from that cabinet of his—antiseptic, fresh gauze, antibiotics. He would address the problem with his characteristic precision. He would touch my arm with his gloved fingers, and I would feel his attention like sunlight on my skin.
But he’s not here. And the infection spreads.
The cameras watch me. Black glass eyes embedded in the ceiling, recording everything.
He watches through them. He must. He is probably watching right now, documenting my deterioration, noting the infection rate in his file.
I find myself looking up at them. I find myself speaking to the glass.
“I know you can hear me.”
My voice sounds strange in the silence. Hoarse. Too loud. I haven’t spoken to anyone in days.
“I know you’re watching. You’re always watching. That’s what you do. You watch and you wait and you document and you decide when to intervene.”
The cameras don’t respond. Of course they don’t respond. But I can feel him behind them, his pale eyes fixed on my face. I can feel his attention like a physical weight pressing down on me.
“I’m not angry anymore,” I say. “I was angry. I wanted to be angry. But I can’t make it stick. I keep trying to hate you and my brain keeps remembering your hands on my face and I can’t—”
I’m crying.
When did I start crying? The tears feel foreign, hot and stinging on my cheeks. My dehydrated body reluctantly producing moisture it can’t afford to waste.
“Please come back,” I whisper. “I’ll give you more names. I’ll give you anything you want. The Washington senator. The Delaware law firm. The recordings my father keeps in his private vault. I know things I haven’t told you yet. Valuable things.”
The cameras stare. Unblinking. Indifferent.
“But I don’t care about being valuable anymore. I just want you to come back. I want to hear your footsteps. I want you to touch me, even if it hurts. I don’t care what you do to me as long as you’re here while you’re doing it.”
My voice breaks on the last word. The sobs come then, ugly and uncontrolled, racking my chest. I am begging. I am begging my torturer to return and torture me some more, because his torture is better than this absence.
What has he made me?
What have I let him make me?
The questions don’t matter. Nothing matters except the door and the footsteps and the possibility that he might still come.
“Alexei.” His name is a prayer in my mouth. “Alexei, please. I’m sorry I asked you to leave. I’m sorry I made you go. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t understand what it would feel like without you.”
The silence stretches.
The IV drips. One drop. Two.
He’s not coming.
The realization settles over me like a shroud. He’s not coming back. He’s done with me. I provided valuable intelligence during my fever, and now I’m just another processed asset. The file is closed. The mission is complete.
The Monster has moved on.
I should feel relief. Without him, I might be able to reconstruct some version of myself. I might be able to find the edges of my own mind again.
I feel nothing like relief.
I feel like I’m drowning in air. Like my lungs are filling with something that isn’t oxygen.
Being ignored by him is worse than being broken by him.
The truth is so obvious that I laugh, a broken, jagged sound that echoes off the acoustic panels. Of course it’s worse. The breaking was connection. The breaking was his attention, his focus, his hands on my body. The breaking was proof that I existed, that I mattered enough to destroy.
This is nothing. This is the void.
My father’s house was never home. It was a battlefield, every meal a negotiation, every conversation a test I was destined to fail.
My penthouse was a showcase, a stage set for performances I gave to audiences who never saw the real me.
The clubs and the parties and the women were distractions, noise to drown out the silence inside me.
But when Alexei knelt at my feet and wiped my face with cool water, something in me recognized the gesture. Something in me understood that I was being seen—not as a Petrenko, not as a resource, not as a symbol of wealth or power. Just as a person who was suffering and needed help.
That’s what I’m mourning now.
Not the freedom. Not the dignity. Not even the men who died because of my fever-loosened tongue.
I’m mourning the attention. I’m mourning the connection.
The infection in my IV site pulses with my heartbeat. A steady, burning throb. I should be worried about that. In a normal state of mind, I would be calculating the progression, estimating how long before the sepsis sets in.
Let it spread. Let it take me. At least that would be an ending.
The IV drips. The pipes carry water through the walls. The elevator cable groans again in its shaft.
I catch myself counting—one drip, two—and force myself to stop. Counting is what I do to stay connected to time, and I don’t want to be connected anymore. I want to float. I want to dissolve.
I close my eyes and let myself sink into it. The amber light glows and I stop seeing it. The broth goes cold on the table and I don’t drink it.
What’s the point? What’s the point of maintaining a body that no one is coming to use?
The despair is complete now. Total. It fills every corner of the room and every corner of my mind. I have become what the darkness wanted me to become in those forty-eight hours. Empty. Hollowed out. A shell waiting to be filled or discarded.
I am going to die in this chair.
Not from dehydration or infection or interrogation, but from the simple absence of the only person who made existence bearable. I will stop eating. I will stop drinking. I will stop breathing, eventually, because there is nothing left to breathe for.
And the worst part is that I can’t even blame him.
He did exactly what I asked. I told him to leave.
I pushed him away because I was angry about the fever and the safe house and the men who died.
And now I’m lying in the grave I dug for myself, wondering why I thought I could survive without him when every cell in my body was already conditioned to need his presence.
I was stronger before he touched me. I was more complete before he started taking me apart. But I was also alone, always alone, even in crowds, even in my father’s house, even in beds with women who meant nothing.
He saw me.
That’s what I can’t forgive myself for craving. He saw the real thing underneath the Petrenko name, and he didn’t look away.
The IV site burns. The infection is getting worse. Somewhere down the corridor, Dima screams again, or maybe that’s my imagination filling the silence with ghosts.
The pipes gurgle. The elevator cable creaks. The IV drips.
I don’t count.
I just wait.
And somewhere, through the cameras, the Monster watches me dissolve into nothing, and I hope—I pray—that watching hurts him even a fraction as much as being watched has hurt me.
Because if it doesn’t, then I have lost everything for nothing.
And if it does, then maybe—maybe—there is still a chance that the door will open, and the footsteps will come, and his pale eyes will find me in the amber light, and I will be something other than alone.