3. Raven
Raven
Thirty-one hours in, I have a complete inventory of the room I’m being held in, and not one thing in it that will help to get me out.
One door, steel core, opening outward — which means the hinges are on the far side where I can’t reach them.
One window at shoulder height, ten inches by fourteen, and I could get my head through it or my shoulders but not both.
A generator in a housing bolted to the floor.
A chemical toilet behind a curtain, which they installed at some point in the last thirty hours and which tells me more about my situation than anything else in here.
Nobody installs a toilet for a person they're going to shoot tonight.
Four bottles of water. Three trays of food, two of them eaten, because starving myself would be a gesture and gestures are for people with an audience.
I've had the zip ties off since hour six. But I've been putting my hands behind my back whenever the door opens, out of pure professional spite.
The guard rotation is every four hours, and they're good — no talking, no phones, and the one who brings the trays in refuses to look at me.
I've timed the generator cycle too. Mapped the ground I can see out of the window, which is all of forty feet of grass, a tree line beyond it, and the corner of the main house.
And the thing I keep circling back to, the thing that's actually eating me, isn't any of that.
Nobody's come.
Thirty-one hours. An agent down inside a hostile structure, comms cut, position known to five of her own people.
There's a protocol for this. There's a whole apparatus for this, and I've been on the other end of it twice, and by hour twelve there should have been something — a knock on this door by somebody with a badge and a bad attitude.
Thirty-one hours and the loudest thing I’ve witnessed is the generator.
I'm working through the third or fourth version of what that means when I hear footsteps on the gravel outside, only these aren’t like the others. Too light. Too quick, and uneven — the sound of somebody hurrying who is trying very hard not to get caught.
The bolt goes back, and the door opens about a foot, and the boy who I’d stayed for edges his way through it sideways with a plate held out in front of him in both hands like it's a present.
He is, to put it lightly, extremely small.
Pajama pants and a sweater that's too big. He stops just inside the door with his back against it and looks at me with his chin up, obviously unsure.
Neither of us says anything for a long moment.
"Hey kid, glad to see you're ok." I say, then ask, "How’d you get past the guard?"
"He goes to the generator shed at eight." He says it fast, like he’s in trouble. "It takes him about four minutes to fill it and come back."
Four minutes. I've had thirty-one hours, and I've been timing the wrong man.
"Oh." I don't move off the bed; he's still got one hand on the door, and I don't want to give him a reason to bolt for it. "Okay. That’s — good to know."
He crosses the floor in four quick steps, puts the plate on the crate beside the bed that serves as a table, and retreats to the door again. I take a moment to look at its contents: chicken and rice and a bread roll.
"Did you cut this up for me?"
"Karina did. I said it was for me." He shrugs, wincing slightly. "I already ate."
"So you lied to Karina."
"...Yes."
"Good instinct. Terrible execution." I pick up the roll and wink at him with a small smile, attempting to stay friendly. "She's going to notice a whole missing dinner plate. Next time, take it off a plate that's already been served and leave the plate."
He stares at me, mouth opening slightly.
Great. Excellent. You're coaching a ten-year-old in the craft of deception. Good mentorship skill.
"Why are you telling me that?"
"Because you're going to do it again whether I tell you to or not, and I'd rather you didn't get caught." I tear the roll in half. "Why are you here, Sergei?"
He blinks. "You know my name?"
"Somebody said it in the hall last night. When they took me into custody."
He processes that. Then he says, all in one breath: "Why did a woman like you come into our house?"
That causes me to pause, it’s my turn to stare at him now. I blink rapidly, trying to comprehend what exactly it is that he is asking me.
"Because it's my job."
"Women don't—" He stops himself. Starts over, carefully. "Andrei says the people who broke in were soldiers."
"Andrei's not wrong, well not completely." I chew, motioning with my hand. "There are about eight hundred of us who do what I do. Roughly a hundred and forty are women. We're not soldiers, we're police, technically, although the paperwork's different and the hours are worse."
"You're police?"
"I'm a supervisory special agent. That means I run the team." I catch myself. "Ran — It isn’t looking optimistic right now."
He inches away from the door. Not much. A foot back inside, maybe.
"Last night you said your name is Raven."
"I did."
"That's not a real name."
"It absolutely is a real name. It's on a federal ID and everything." I point the roll at him. "How old are you?"
"Ten. Almost eleven."
"When's your birthday?"
"February."
"It's March. That's not almost eleven, that's just barely ten, and you've been telling people 'almost eleven' since about January, haven't you."
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. It's not a smile, but it's close to one.
"How's the arm?" I ask, pointing to the bandage.
The almost-smile goes as fast as it appeared. He looks down at the sling. "It itches."
"Good. That means it’s healing. It's supposed to be miserable.
" I set the roll down. "Sergei. I need to say something to you, and then I'm not going to bring it up again unless you want to talk about it.
What happened in that hallway was my responsibility.
I was in charge. That means everything that happened is on me, including the part I didn't order them to do, and didn't want to happen.
What happened to you — well, it should never have happened in the first place. "
He's quiet a long moment.
"Papa says the man who shot me is going to be found."
I'll bet he does.
"Does the — " He stops. Starts again, quieter. "Does it happen to you? The thing where you can't get air?"
And there it is, that sideways entry into a hard topic in the way only kids ask.
"Yeah, sometimes." I admit. "Twice. It's not the same as yours; mine was one bad night, and yours has been a while, but I know what it is."
"How long have you—"
"How long have you?"
He looks at the floor. "Four years."
Four years. So it's not the shooting. It’s past trauma.
"Oh," I say, and I let it go, because he's ten and I'm not going to strip-mine a child while I’m being held prisoner in a little cabin. "For what it's worth, you came through that one fast. Faster than most adults do."
"You were counting?"
"Counting helps, actually. It's just — your body's trying to run, and there's nowhere to go, so you give it a job to do instead. Counting's a job; it occupies your mind and tells it to do something useful." I shrug, keeping up with the nonchalance.
He looks up at that, and his whole face is bright for a second.
It hits me somewhere under the ribs that I have no business being anywhere near this kid, and also that this is the first non-hostile conversation I've had in the past thirty-one hours and I am hungry for it in a genuinely embarrassing way.
"You should go," I say. "You've got about ninety seconds, if your count's accurate."
He doesn't move. "Are they going to kill you?"
I open my mouth to lie to him. Pause before I do. And then I choose not to, because I've got a rule about that sort of thing.
"I don't know," I say instead.
He takes that better than an adult would have. Kids are like that, more accepting of uncertainty. He nods once, and he's turning for the door when it opens.
Ilya Yaroslav, as I’ve now come to know him thanks to his loose-lipped brethren, fills the doorframe — completely without appearing to make any effort at it.
Sergei goes rigid.
"Sergei." His voice isn’t loud, but still firm. "Back to bed."
The boy edges past him with his shoulders up around his ears and is gone, and neither of them touches the other, which I find interesting.
Then the door closes, and it's just the two of us and my stolen dinner.
He looks at the plate. Looks at me. Then ultimately decides not to comment.
"Your mouth," he says instead. Pointing briefly at the split lip that he caused. It's scabbed and about half the size it was last night.
"What about it?"
"I can have Bogdan look at it if you require."
"Bogdan can stay exactly where he is.” I retort, my voice edgy.
He takes the chair from beside the door, turns it around, and sits.
It's the same chair from last night; only this time he brings it even closer, when he sits our knees practically touch.
The nearness of him makes my heart beat faster in my chest, not out of fear, out of a primal appreciation that I have absolutely no right to feel.
Tonight there's nothing behind his eyes that wants to take the room apart, and I don't yet know what's replaced that. I don't like not knowing.
“You broke into my home,” he says after clearing his throat. “My son was injured by your people.”
Son? Sergei is his son?
“So, I won’t apologize for the way I have treated you." He says this the way another man might report the weather. "But I will assure you that it will not happen again while you are in my house. Not from me. Not from anyone here."
I wait for him to say more. But after a long moment I conclude he’s done—a man of few words.
"That's it? No 'you understand my position' speech?"
"There is no position."
And that — irritatingly, unhelpfully — is true.
In my defense, I’d like to state for the record – a statement that I fully resent – he is an exceptionally good looking man.
I hadn’t gotten a great look at him last night, the dim light had hidden some of his best qualities in fact. With his sleeves pushed up I can see the ink running down both his forearms, and I find myself cataloging them for a far more devious reason than the target profile I’ve been building.
Get a grip, West.
"Fine." I fold my arms. "Then let's do the part where you tell me who you are, and I tell you nothing, and we both go about our lives."
"I know who you are." He reaches into his coat, pulls out a small tablet, and opens it to read its contents.
"Raven Aleksandra West. Thirty-one. Supervisory Special Agent at the New York Field Office, C-16.
Nine years, three commendations, one disciplinary review in 2019 that went nowhere.
" He sets the tablet on the crate beside my dinner and turns it toward me. "And as of Tuesday, a fugitive."
I don't touch it, choosing instead to stare at him as I attempt to digest what he’s just said.
"Nice try," I say with an uncertain snort.
"Read it for yourself."
I read it.
It's a Bureau file. It's my Bureau file; it's got the right header and the right case number and the right internal routing string down the left margin, the one you can't fake unless you've been inside the system, and it says:
Discharge of a firearm on a minor. Deliberate compromise of an authorized operation. Assault on a fellow agent. Failure to report. On the run.
There are four sworn statements attached. I read all four.
Reyes. Ortiz. Boyd. And Louis.
Every one of them puts the weapon in my hands.
Every one of them has me firing on a ten-year-old and then attacking the agent who tried to stop me.
Louis's statement is three pages long and beautifully specific, containing details about the layout of that corridor that only somebody who was standing in it with me could possibly have known.
I read it a second time looking for the seam: the wrong date, the wrong shift code, the tell.
There isn't one. Either this is real, or somebody built it inside the house to confuse me.
And the worst part is I can't tell. That's the thing that gets through — not the charges, not the betrayal from my fellow agents. It's that I have nine years and three commendations and here I am looking at a document about my own life and I cannot tell whether it's true or false.
I put the tablet down very carefully, because my hands want to do something else with it. Something far more violent.
"Thirty-one hours," I say absently. "Nobody came."
"No."
"Because there's nobody coming." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Instead, there's a man hunt for a fugitive, and it's not going to knock on your door, because as far as three hundred people at 26 Federal Plaza are concerned, I'm not in this cabin. I'm running."
"Yes."
"Why tell me? Why show me?"
"Because I want something from you," he says, "and you will not listen to my offer until you have understood the alternative that is waiting for you outside of these walls."
I sit back. "Go on, then."
"My son needs a bodyguard. The woman who held the post is no longer employed here. The post requires a woman, for reasons I am not going to discuss tonight, and it requires someone he doesn’t flinch away from, and as of yesterday there is precisely one person on this property who meets both of those conditions.
" He doesn't blink as he continues. "For the next 90 days you agree to keep him alive, to keep him safe, and you try to get him engaged with life again.
At the end of our contract you walk out of here breathing, with what I know about that file, and you can do whatever you like. "
"And if I say no?"
"Then we are back to last night's conversation, and neither of us enjoyed it."
I look at the tablet. At the four names on it. At the door I've spent thirty-one hours proving I can't get through. Three months.
"Ninety days," I echo.
"Ninety days."
"I want a copy of that file. The original routing, not a screenshot."
"Acceptable."
"And I don't work for you. I work for the kid. If those two things ever point in different directions, I'm siding with him."
A smug shadow moves behind his eyes.
"Agreed," he says, and stands, and holds the door open for me like we've just concluded a dinner meeting.
I walk out into the cold with my legs unsteady under me, and I'm four steps onto the grass when he says it.
"One condition."
I stop.
"If harm comes to my son while he is in your care," Ilya says, perfectly pleasant, "the ninety days end that day."
"And then what?"
He looks at me for a long moment, then he smiles, and I understand that he has been waiting the entire conversation not to answer this question.
"You are the one with three commendations," he says. "You tell me."