5. Lena
LENA
One more day.
That’s what he said.
One more day, savor it, then he walked out and the lock clicked and I’ve been sitting here doing the math on what that means ever since.
And he called me Zayka, fucking Zayka. Who does he think he is?
Why would a sane man call his captive “little bunny?”
The cell is not large.
Stone walls, one overhead light that hums at a frequency designed to slowly dismantle sanity, a chair that has made itself intimately acquainted with every bone in my lower back.
There’s a small drain in the corner.
A bucket.
I’ve had two cups of water and half a piece of hard bread that I couldn’t finish because my throat kept closing around it.
I’ve counted the stones in the wall opposite me forty-one times.
One more day means when that door opens next, it’s over.
It means they’ve decided what they’re doing with me and what they’re doing with me is the same thing they did to Papa.
Somewhere in this compound there are men deciding the details.
Whether it’s clean.
Whether it’s fast.
Whether he does it himself or hands the job to one of the others.
My mind, with nothing else to do and no way to stop it, has been filling in the blanks.
A bullet is the most logical.
Quick, low effort, the kind of ending that makes practical sense for people who do this the way other people file paperwork.
But then I think about the way the man with the tattoo looked at me in this cell, that flat unreadable expression while I screamed at him, and something tells me practical isn’t the only thing on the table.
There could be days of it first.
Systematic and unhurried, the way his voice is unhurried, the way he moved through this cell like nothing I did could surprise him.
I think about the stories.
The things you hear about organizations like this, the things Papa never told me directly but that lived in the spaces between his careful silences.
What they do when they want to send a message.
What they do when they want information first.
Stop. I squeeze my eyes shut. Stop thinking about it.
My hands are shaking.
I press them flat against my thighs, feel the trembling move up through my arms and into my chest.
Whatever I’ve been running on since Moscow, since the closet and the shot and the bolt that always sticks and forty-eight hours of Vienna hostels, it’s almost gone.
The adrenaline that’s been holding me upright like scaffolding is quietly, piece by piece, coming down.
What’s underneath it is just fear.
Nadia doesn’t know where I am.
That thought sits differently than the rest.
She called, she had a plan, she was already moving, then I went silent and I’ve been silent ever since.
Nadia will be out of her mind by now.
Pacing her apartment in Budapest with the plants and the terrible television, checking her phone every four minutes, making tea she won’t drink.
She’ll be trying to figure out what happened.
She’ll be terrified.
I’m so sorry, Nadia.
A sound climbs my throat and I press my mouth shut and breathe through my nose until it goes back down.
You’re not going to cry.
There’s no point in crying.
There’s no one here to see it and it won’t change anything.
If I start I don’t know if I’ll stop, and I need to be present, I need to be sharp, I need to be thinking about whether there’s any way out of this that I haven’t thought of yet.
Except every time I try to think about ways out my mind slides sideways to him.
To the cell.
To the moment he cut the ties and stepped back and I stood up and he looked at me with that raised eyebrow like he was genuinely curious what I was going to do.
And I charged him.
I put everything I had into it, every bit of hatred and grief and two sleepless days and the sound of that one shot in the apartment, everything, and he caught me like I was nothing.
Like I weighed nothing.
Like my absolute maximum effort was mildly interesting to him.
He pressed me against the wall and my body stopped working correctly.
Don’t. I shift in the chair. Don’t think about that.
But my body, apparently, has its own agenda entirely separate from my self-respect, because the memory of his arm locked around me and the weight of him behind me and the way his voice sounded when he said zayka right against my ear is doing something that I despise with every functioning part of my brain.
My nipples pull tight against the fabric of my shirt and I look down at my own chest with an expression of absolute betrayal.
He killed Papa.
He stood in that room and gave the order and Papa fell and I am not allowed to feel anything about his hands except hatred.
I am not allowed to feel anything about him at all.
I’m saved from having to argue further with myself by the sound of the lock.
The door opens and my heart seizes so hard I make a sound, a small desperate sound that I hate myself for, and I grip the chair arms and wait for the flat grey eyes and the serpent tattoo and the quiet voice telling me my day is up.
A different man walks in.
Not the man with the tattoo.
Not either of the other two I saw briefly when they brought me in.
This man is carrying a tray and he has a face that belongs to someone’s friendly older brother, open and warm with an easiness around the eyes.
He looks at me across the cell with an expression that isn’t cold.
I stare at him.
He stares back.
Neither of us say anything for a moment.
“Is that poison?” I ask.
He blinks. Then his eyebrows go up slowly. “Poison?”
“On the tray. Is it poisoned?” I hold his gaze. “Because if so, I want you to know that’s extremely cowardly and I expected better from people who throw women into dungeons.”
He looks at the tray. Looks back at me. A sound leaves him that takes me a second to identify because it’s the last thing I expected in this room.
He’s laughing.
“Poison,” he repeats, like he’s tasting the word. “Do we look like people who handle enemies with poison?”
Enemies…
I think about the tattoo man’s hands and the cold efficiency of the men in Vienna and the way the whole compound went quiet when we arrived. My throat moves.
“No,” I admit. “No, you really don’t.”
He stops laughing, though something warm stays around his eyes, and he lifts the tray cover.
The smell hits me before I can prepare for it.
Actual food.
Bread that isn’t stale, something with meat and sauce, a cup of something steaming.
My stomach doesn’t wait for permission.
It makes a sound that fills the cell completely and bounces off all four walls.
I feel heat flood my face while it’s still happening.
The man looks at me and says absolutely nothing.
At least he has the grace not to smile.
He walks into the cell and holds the tray out toward me.
I stare at it.
Then at him.
Then at the food that smells like the first real thing I’ve encountered in days and I want it so badly my mouth is already doing something embarrassing.
I glare at him.
He holds the tray a moment longer, reads my face, sighs with the patience of a man who has dealt with difficult things before, and pulls it back.
He takes a fork and cuts into the meat and puts it in his mouth.
Chews.
Takes a piece of bread.
A sip from the cup.
Slow and deliberate about all of it, watching me the whole time I watch him with my hunger barely staying behind my teeth where I’m trying to keep it.
When he pushes the tray toward me this time I lunge forward before I can stop myself and then stop hard because the ties are still on and I’ve reached the end of them, straining toward the plate like a dog at a leash, and the humiliation of it is extraordinary.
I look at him pointedly.
He’s already moving toward me. “I’m going to untie you,” he says, crouching down to the ties, “and you should know just how unwise it would be to try anything stupid right now.”
I slump back in the chair. “I don’t even have the strength.”
The ties come off and I pull the tray close and eat. I find myself wondering why it’s so easy to talk to this man.
He’s one of them, he’s in this compound, he brought food to a prisoner in a cell, and yet there’s nothing in his manner that makes me want to bare my teeth.
I eat and he settles onto the floor with his back against the wall, legs stretched out, like we’re somewhere completely ordinary.
After the third bite he puts a hand on the edge of the tray.
“Slower,” he says. “You’ll choke yourself to death.”
“I would rather die from food,” I say, around a mouthful, “than have that bastard kill me.”
“That bastard?” he repeats.
“The one with the tattoo,” I say. “The serpent.”
“Razvan.”
The name lands in the room and sticks. Razvan. I turn it over in my mind without stopping eating.
It has weight to it, that name. Sharp at the start and then it drops. Like something being thrown.
“Razvan,” I say.
The man across from me, who has taken a seat on the floor with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out like we’re having a picnic, nods. He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says, “His father died.”
I stop chewing.
Look at him.
“Three days ago,” he says, not looking at me, looking at some point on the wall. “He got the news the same night you ran.”
Something moves through me that I don’t have a clean name for. I chew. Swallow. Put my fork down for a second.
“Well,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect. “He’s welcome to the club. My father is dead too. But you don’t see me kidnapping people and threatening to kill them over it.”
He tilts his head at me. Considering. “You did threaten to kill someone over it, actually.”
I pick my fork back up and glare at him. He accepts the glare without flinching and says nothing further, and I keep eating.
He passes me the water when I reach for it and doesn’t make me ask. He’s so easy in this space, so unbothered and almost gentle, that it keeps snagging my attention between bites. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand him in this place full of people whose faces do nothing.
“Why are you being kind to me?” The question comes out before I decide to ask it. It sounds more like an accusation than a question, which might be accurate.
He looks at me for a moment. The warmth in his expression doesn’t leave but something sadder moves underneath it. “I pity you,” he says simply. “I don’t think you deserve this.”
My eyes go hot. Instantly, treacherously hot, and I look down at the tray and blink hard and take another bite of bread that I can barely taste anymore.
“But revenge has to be had,” he says quietly. Like he’s apologizing and explaining at the same time and knows neither one is enough.
The cell is very quiet.
“Am I really going to die?” My voice comes out small. Smaller than I’ve let it be since Moscow, smaller than I’ve allowed myself to sound in front of any of them. I’m not even looking at him when I ask it. I’m looking at the crumbs on the plate.
He doesn’t answer.
I look up. He’s watching me with something in his face that is honest enough to be its own kind of answer, and he holds my gaze for a moment then he stands, takes the tray, and walks to the door.
I want to ask him to stay.
The want is immediate and embarrassing and real, this sudden desperate pull toward the only person in this building who has looked at me like I’m a person, and I swallow it down because wanting him to stay is stupid.
He’s not safe.
His kindness is just a softer version of the same thing the rest of them are doing.
He’s one of Razvan’s men and Razvan wants me dead and nothing about this man staying in this cell changes that.
The door closes.
The lock clicks.
I sit in the chair with the empty tray gone and the light still humming, the quiet pressing in from all four walls, and something behind my sternum gives way slowly, like a seam coming apart, and I cry.
Not the ugly heaving sobs from my father’s living room floor, not the hysterical running tears in the Vienna alley. Just quiet and steady, sitting in a chair in a room underground, grieving the life I hadn’t finished living yet.
The years I hadn’t gotten to.
The things I never told Papa.
The drive sitting somewhere in this compound that he died to protect and that I couldn’t even keep hold of.
I’m sorry, Papa. I press the back of my wrist to my mouth. I’m so sorry.
The light hums.
I cry softly.
And somewhere above me, a man named Razvan is deciding how much time I have left.