Chapter 14 Nikolai
Chapter Fourteen
NIKOLAI
I wake in a different room.
The realization takes time to process. My brain moves slowly through the fog of exhaustion and aftermath.
The ceiling is different—lower, acoustic tile instead of concrete.
The walls meet at sharper angles. There’s a cot beneath me instead of the chair, thin padding that feels like absolute luxury after days of rigid metal.
I’m covered by a blanket. The fabric is rough, military-issue wool, but it is warm. My body aches in unfamiliar ways—my throat raw from screaming, my hips sore from the angle against the wall, the bite mark on my shoulder throbbing with each heartbeat.
The memories surface in fragments, vivid and chaotic.
His hand on my throat, constricting, releasing.
The codes spilling out of me like blood from a wound.
His mouth on mine, hard and consuming. The wall against my chest, the acoustic panels swallowing the sound of my surrender.
The overwhelming fullness of him inside me.
I gave him everything. The Zurich accounts. The Geneva vault. The insurance recordings that my father kept to ensure the loyalty of politicians and judges. And then I gave him more—my body, my submission, the last shreds of the person I used to be.
I should feel like a traitor. I should feel the weight of what I’ve done crushing me from the inside.
I feel light.
The lightness is strange, almost physical. Like something has been removed from my body along with the codes. The weight of expectation. The burden of being the heir. The constant, grinding pressure of trying to be something I was never capable of becoming.
Nikolai Petrenko, heir to the Petrenko organization, is officially dead. Not just buried in an empty box in Moscow, but actually gone. Erased from the inside out.
What remains is something simpler. Something that exists only in this room, under these lights, in the space between his body and mine.
The door opens.
Alexei enters. He is carrying a tray—not the surgical implements of the Processing Room, but food. Real food. A bowl of steaming broth. A piece of bread. Cheese. Thin-sliced smoked meat. The sight of it makes my stomach clench with a hunger I’d forgotten I could feel.
He crosses to a small table and sets the tray down. His movements are precise as always, but something in him has shifted. The mask is still there, but it fits differently now. Like armor worn by someone who has begun to question whether they need it.
“You’re awake,” he says. Not a question.
“You moved me.” My voice is destroyed, barely a rasp.
“The Processing Room is no longer appropriate for your containment. This is a recovery cell. Different feeds, different access protocols.” He pauses, and something flickers across his face. “The surveillance here is... more easily managed.”
Different feeds. More easily managed. He’s telling me something without saying it. Something about privacy, about protection, about the lie he is constructing around us.
“How long was I out?”
“Several hours. Your body required rest after—” He stops. Starts again. “After the extraction.”
The extraction. Such a clinical word for what happened between us. For the way he took me apart and then held me together.
He pulls a chair to the side of my cot and begins arranging the tray. His hands are bare—no gloves. I stare at them, at the pale fingers, the scar across his left knuckle, the evidence of humanity he usually keeps hidden.
“The gloves,” I whisper.
He follows my gaze to his own hands. For a moment, he seems confused, as if he’d forgotten their absence.
“The barrier was no longer necessary,” he says finally.
I don’t know what that means. I don’t care what it means. All I care about is that his skin touched mine without latex between us, and something about that feels more intimate than everything else we did.
He begins feeding me—small pieces of bread dipped in the broth, cubes of cheese, slivers of meat that taste like smoke and pepper. Between each bite, he offers water from a cup he holds to my lips. The ritual is slow, careful. It is his version of care.
“The funeral video,” I say between mouthfuls. “You showed me my own burial.”
His hands still briefly, then resume their work.
“Viktor Petrenko held a service for his heir. Empty casket. Public mourning.”
“I’m a ghost.” The words come out flat. Factual. I’m not looking for comfort or contradiction. I’m stating what is true.
“My father buried me. My cousin replaced me. Everyone I knew before this room has moved on with their lives as if I never existed.” I pause while he offers another piece of bread. “I only exist here. In this room. Under these lights.”
He doesn’t respond immediately. His attention seems fixed on calibrating the next portion, ensuring it is small enough for my shrunken stomach to handle.
“I only exist because you see me,” I continue. “If you walked away right now, if you stopped watching, I would just... dissolve. Like I was never real at all.”
His hands stop moving. He looks up at me, and in his pale eyes I see something that might be recognition. The understanding of what it means to exist only in relation to another person’s attention.
“I see you,” he says. The words are quiet. Almost reluctant. As if they cost him something to speak aloud.
I feel tears forming again. My dehydrated body shouldn’t be capable of producing them, but somehow it manages. One slides down my cheek.
His bare thumb catches it before it can fall. The touch is feather-light, but it sends a jolt through my system.
He finishes the feeding in silence. When the tray is half empty, he removes it without being told—he knows my limits better than I do.
“I will need to report to Ivan,” he says. “The account codes require immediate action. The window for asset seizure is limited.”
I nod. I expected this. The intelligence I provided has to go somewhere.
“I will inform him that the asset remains under active analysis,” he continues. His voice has shifted into something more careful, each word precisely chosen. “Extended evaluation is required to ensure complete extraction of relevant intelligence.”
I blink. “That’s a lie.”
“Yes.”
“You already have everything. The codes, the locations, the vault. There’s nothing left to extract.”
“Yes.”
The silence stretches between us. I stare at him, processing what he’s telling me. He’s lying to Ivan. He’s claiming I still have value when we both know I’ve given him everything. He’s constructing a justification for keeping me alive.
“Why?” The question emerges barely above a whisper.
He doesn’t answer directly. Instead, he reaches for me, sliding his arms beneath my body with a clinical efficiency that is undermined by the gentleness of his grip.
One arm beneath my shoulders. One beneath my knees.
He lifts me from the chair I was propped on, and I have no choice but to let him.
My muscles refuse to cooperate. My limbs hang limp and useless.
My head falls against his shoulder, and I feel the warmth of his body through the dark fabric of his sweater.
He carries me like something fragile. Something worth preserving. Something that might shatter if handled too roughly.
I have been carried before. As a child, when I fell asleep in the car and my mother would bring me to bed.
Once, after a car accident in Belgrade, when strangers pulled me from the wreckage before the fire spread.
But this is different. This carrying has intention behind it.
This carrying says: you are mine, and I am not finished with you.
He carries me to the cot. He releases the catches and lowers me onto a surface that is softer than anything I’ve felt in weeks. The padding gives beneath my weight. The pillow cradles my head. After the rigid metal of the chair, it feels almost obscenely comfortable.
It feels like mercy. It feels like a trap. It feels like both at once.
He pulls a thin blanket over my body, covering the smock that is the only clothing I’ve worn since he stripped me of my Hermès suit. The fabric is rough but warm, and I clutch at it with fingers that barely function.
“You’re protecting me,” I say. “From disposal. That’s what happens to assets who have given up all their intelligence. They get disposed.”
He doesn’t confirm or deny. He just stands there beside the cot, looking down at me with an expression I cannot read.
“If Ivan finds out you’re lying, you’ll be disposed too.”
“That is a possibility.”
“Then we’re both traitors now.” I let the words settle between us, feeling their weight. “You betrayed me with the fever. I betrayed my family with the codes. And now you’re betraying Ivan by keeping me alive.”
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. The reaction tells me everything his words do not.
We are bound now. Not by restraints or walls or the architecture of this room, but by shared treason. He cannot give me up without explaining why he lied. I cannot exist without his protection. The power dynamic has shifted into something more complex than captive and captor.
We are conspirators. Accomplices. Two people whose survival has become entangled in ways that cannot be easily severed.
There is a strange comfort in this. A dark kind of intimacy that has nothing to do with touch or affection. We have each other’s destruction in our hands. We have each other’s survival in our keeping.
“I need to transmit the codes,” he says. “The delay has already exceeded optimal parameters.”
I nod. My chest is tight with something that might be panic. He’s leaving. He’s walking away.
“Come back,” I say. The words come out desperate, pleading. I hate how they sound. I don’t care how they sound. “Please. When you’re done. Come back.”
He pauses at the door. His bare hand rests on the frame.
“The analysis of your intelligence will require continued supervision,” he says. The words are formal, professional. The words are also a promise.
“The light,” I whisper. “Don’t turn off the light.”
He reaches for the panel beside the door. His fingers move across it, adjusting something I cannot see.
“Ten percent,” he says. “Warm spectrum. I will return.”
The door opens. He steps through. The door closes.
The warm glow still filters through my closed eyelids.
Ten percent. The settings he chose specifically for me, calibrated to provide comfort instead of clinical illumination.
Every detail of this room has been shaped by his decisions.
The temperature. The light. The cot that appeared when the chair was no longer necessary.
Somewhere in this building, the Monster is lying to his masters to keep me alive. The Monster is risking his own destruction for something he cannot explain.
I close my eyes. My body sinks into the cot, exhausted beyond measure, drained of every secret and every defense. The blanket is rough against my skin. The pillow is thin beneath my head. But these small discomforts feel like luxuries after the chair.
I count the seconds until the footsteps return.
I lose count somewhere after two hundred. Sleep drags me down into darkness that is softer than the void. But even in the darkness, I am listening. Even in the darkness, I am waiting.
For the door. For the light. For the sound of his breathing in the room.
For the only person who remembers that I exist.
The warm glow filters through my closed eyelids, painting my dreams in honeyed colors. And somewhere in those dreams, I hear footsteps approaching. I hear the lock disengage. I feel the weight of his presence settling into the room like a physical force.
I do not know if the footsteps are real or imagined.
I do not know if I am sleeping or waking.
I only know that when morning comes—if morning ever comes to this windowless place—I will open my eyes and search for him. And if he is there, I will be alive. And if he is not, I will simply wait until he returns.
Because waiting for him is all I know how to do now.
It is all I am.