Chapter 37 Samira
Samira
I dream.
It’s warm—real warmth, the kind that seeps into your bones instead of pressing down on them.
Sunlight spills through open windows, turning dust into gold.
I’m barefoot on cool tile, standing in a kitchen that smells like coffee just poured and bread still breathing from the oven. The air feels gentle. Unafraid.
My hands are steady. Whole. No tremor. No pain humming under the skin. My body fits me again, like it hasn’t been a battleground, like it hasn’t learned how to prep for battle.
Marcello is there.
He looks at me the way people do when they’re still surprised by happiness—soft, almost cautious, like if he blinks too hard, I might disappear. He smiles, slow and real, unguarded. When he reaches for me, he stops first. Asks. Waits.
I nod.
We laugh about nothing. About everything. The sound comes easy, unforced. I tell him something small—stupid, forgettable—and he listens like it’s important. Like it’s worth holding onto. Like I am.
In the dream, my shoulders are relaxed. My breath comes easy. Nothing is watching from the dark.
In the dream, I am safe.
And the cruelest part is this—I recognize the feeling. I’ve been safe before. I know its shape. Its weight. The way it settles instead of tightens.
Which means this isn’t a fantasy.
It’s a memory.
And because I have survived once—I know, even now, that I can survive again.
When I woke, the disorientation was thick, sticky, clinging to every thought. My head throbbed dully, like it had been wrapped in cotton and struck once, hard. The air felt wrong. Stale. Heavy. Each breath tasted faintly metallic, like the space hadn’t been opened in a long time.
My eyes opened to darkness.
A low, amber glow seeped in from somewhere beyond my line of sight, barely enough to outline shapes. The ceiling above me was unfamiliar—too low and smooth. There were no cracks; no shadows I recognized.
I tried to move.
Pain flared through my shoulder and down my arm, sharp enough to pull a sound from my throat before I could stop it. I froze immediately, breath hitching, every muscle locking as instinct screamed at me to be still.
That was when I felt it.
The restraint.
My wrists were secured above my head—making me immobile. My ankles were the same, spaced just enough apart to be uncomfortable, to remind me of my body every time I shifted. The surface beneath me was firm, metal, unforgiving.
The back of the van.
Panic rose fast and hot, flooding my chest. I pulled once, hard, testing the bonds, and the response was immediate: the restraints held, and the movement sent pain streaking through my joints.
I stopped.
I forced myself to stop.
Breathing came shallow and uneven as I stared into the dark, my heart hammering loud enough that I was certain he could hear it if he were nearby.
Mikhail.
The name slid through me like ice.
Memory followed in pieces—being dragged, the stairs, the van, the weightlessness before impact. The way the doors had closed. The certainty in his hands.
I swallowed, my throat dry.
“Hello?” I tried.
My voice came out small. Wrong. It didn’t belong to me anymore. It echoed faintly, thin and brittle, before the space swallowed it whole like it had never existed.
Then I heard it—the slow creak of metal.
The sound scraped down my spine.
Light burst into the back of the van, sudden and blinding, slicing through the dark and forcing my eyes to sting and water. I strained against the restraints, stretching my neck, heart slamming so hard it hurt.
And then he stepped into the light.
My stomach dropped.
The shadow resolved into shape, into certainty, and there was no room left for hope to hide.
Mikhail looked exactly the same.
He wore the same immaculate suit he always favored—the kind he owned in multiples, identical down to the cut and colour, hanging in neat rows in his closet like uniforms. The fabric was unwrinkled. Untouched by haste. Untouched by me.
His posture was relaxed, almost careless, the loose confidence of a man who had never once had to doubt his own authority.
It was the kind of composure that fooled even the most practiced liars into mistaking it for innocence.
The kind that made people second-guess their instincts, made them wonder if they were the ones overreacting.
His face gave nothing away. He wore his expression the way he wore his suits—precisely, deliberately, revealing only what he chose. Emotion was a tool to him, deployed only when it served him. Right now, he didn’t need it.
He might have been stepping into a boardroom.
Might have been about to deliver a quarterly report or shake hands with a colleague.
Instead, he had stepped into the place he’d brought me to break.
And the fact that he looked exactly the same—that nothing about him had changed—was the most terrifying thing of all.
He stood a few feet from the back of the van and looked at me.
Not at the restraints biting into my wrists, or the bruises already blooming beneath my skin. Not at the way my chest hitched with every shallow breath. At my face.
The attention felt invasive in a way touch never had—like he was peeling me open layer by layer, inspecting what was left.
“Samira, my love,” he purred, almost fondly. “I thought you’d never join the party.”
The words slid over me, causing my skin to prickle, a warning firing through every nerve. This was the voice he used when he wanted to confuse pain with affection. When he wanted obedience to feel earned instead of taken.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every instinct I had screamed that words were weapons in his hands—that anything I gave him would be reshaped, corrected, turned into proof of whatever story he needed to tell himself.
He smiled anyway. Just a faint curve of his mouth, like he’d anticipated my silence and found it pleasing.
“You scared everyone,” he went on, conversational, as if we were catching up over drinks instead of standing on opposite sides of captivity. “Running like that. All the noise. It was unnecessary.”
Anger flared—hot and reckless—burning through my chest, demanding release. For a heartbeat, I wanted to spit at him. Scream. Join his name in the same sentence with a curse.
Fear crushed it before it reached my throat.
I held his gaze instead, jaw clenched so tightly it throbbed, my teeth aching with the effort not to give him anything.
He tilted his head, studying me.
“You look different,” he added after a moment. “Stronger.”
The word wasn’t praise. It was assessment.
A slow smile followed, colder this time. “I suppose I should thank whoever thought they could fix you.”
The implication landed hard and heavy.
Whatever he saw when he looked at me now—whatever change he’d noticed—it wasn’t something he intended to allow to exist for long.
He stepped closer.
The distance closed too quickly, the air shifting as his presence pressed in, and my body reacted before my mind had a chance to argue. Every muscle locked. Every nerve lit up. Heat flashed through me, sharp and instinctive, my skin remembering things I had spent years trying to forget.
I tensed. He saw it. His gaze flicked down, tracking the minute changes in my posture—the way my shoulders drew in, the way my breath caught, the way my body betrayed me by bracing for impact that hadn’t yet come.
A slow, satisfied calm settled over his features, like he’d just been handed confirmation of a theory.
“That,” he lifted one hand in a small, almost indulgent gesture toward me, “is what we’re going to work on first.”
My breath stuttered, catching painfully in my chest. I forced air back into my lungs, forced my spine straighter, forced my eyes to stay on his face even as panic clawed at the inside of my ribs.
“Work on… what?” I asked.
I hated the tremor in my voice. Hated that no matter how delicately I shaped the words, fear leaked through them anyway—thin and humiliating and impossible to hide.
He tilted his head, studying me with clinical interest, like I was an equation that hadn’t quite balanced yet. Not angry or impatient. Just curious.
“Your defiance,” he said simply. His mouth curved slightly. “You’ve picked up some very bad habits.”