12. Alina
ALINA
Iknow I don’t have much time.
Since the shot, the house has tightened in ways that don’t announce themselves.
Guards stand closer. Cameras catch more angles.
People ask questions with polite voices and sharp eyes.
Nothing is openly restricted, but everything feels narrower, like choices are being quietly removed.
At one point, I considered telling Mikhail about the child growing inside me.
But now, I can’t think beyond the need to escape this place before I’m killed with that child.
Waiting isn’t an option.
I don’t tell Mikhail anything. I don’t mention the nausea, the counting, or the way my body no longer feels predictable. I stick to routines that look harmless and keep my expressions neutral, because the fastest way to lose freedom here is to look like you’re thinking too much.
Lira is the only place to start. Instead of rushing her, I let conversations wander and ask about ordinary things while she works, about linen schedules, how often rooms are turned over, whether the kitchen ever falls behind.
She answers easily enough, which tells me I haven’t crossed a line yet.
A few afternoons later, while she folds towels, I say, “Mikhail travels more than I expected.”
She nods quietly. “He always has.”
I gulp a lungful of air and keep my gaze fixed on her. “What happens here when he’s gone?”
She looks my way for just a breath and then away. “The house keeps running.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She sets the towels into neat little stacks. “Security shifts. There are fewer men inside, and more on the perimeter.”
“Why?”
“So no one thinks absence means opportunity.”
I let that sit and don’t ask anything else that day.
Later, I bring it up from a different angle. “The cars,” I say while she straightens the side table. “Do the same people always drive?”
“No,” she replies. “Drivers rotate.”
“And the routes?”
“Always changing.”
“How often?”
“Daily.”
That’s enough for me to stop.
It takes another few days before I ask the question that matters.
It’s late, the door is locked, and the guards outside are familiar enough that Lira doesn’t tense when she notices them.
She sets down a tray and doesn’t leave right away.
“Lira,” I say quietly, “if someone needed to leave this place without drawing attention, could they?”
She looks at the door, then at the camera, then back at me. “Guests can’t.”
“And staff?”
She exhales. “Staff don’t move the same way.”
I wait.
“There are supply runs,” she says after a moment. “Laundry. Produce. Maintenance.”
“How often?”
“Every day.”
“Who handles them?”
“The logistics office.”
“And the drivers?”
She hesitates. “Drivers have leeway. As long as paperwork matches, no one looks twice.”
My pulse picks up, but I keep my voice level. “When Mikhail’s away?”
“That’s when it’s easiest,” she replies. “Everyone wants things quiet.”
“Do you know someone,” I venture, “who could drive and not ask questions?”
She studies my face. “There’s a man,” she says slowly. “He drove for the house years ago. He was let go quietly because he botched up a delivery job and the boss lost a fair bit of money.”
“Does he hate Mikhail?”
“No,” she says. “He owes me.”
That matters more. At this point, I realize Lira is the only option I have if I want to get out of this place. “Lira,” I say, voice trembling just a little. “I have to go. If I stay here in this state, I could end up dead, and Mikhail—”
“Mikhail may not be able to save you,” she finishes for me.
I nod, grateful that she understands. “No one should be trapped,” she replies quietly. “And no child should be born into this.”
The words hit hard enough that I have to look away. “You’d help me?” I say.
She nods once. “Yes.” And I choose to believe her because I have to.
Over the next week, we build the plan carefully and piece by piece, checking each part against the others.
Lira draws it out in pencil on scrap paper she burns afterward.
We discuss the method, times, names, and the vehicle.
She knows when Mikhail will be away on business—two days, meetings outside the city, with no planned overnight return. That’s my window.
My heart aches a little at the thought of not having him in my periphery, which is odd because we really haven’t spent all that much time together as husband and wife. But there’s no time or room to second-guess myself.
I’ll leave disguised as a staff transfer. Hair covered. Clothes borrowed. I won’t carry anything that ties me back to this place. No phone. No jewelry. No documents with my name. Lira is very nifty in that she gets me an alternate ID within days of forming this plan.
The car will be a service vehicle, one of three scheduled to leave that morning. It will change plates at a rest stop before the secondary road. From there, it heads toward the border under a different manifest.
Lira rehearses the route with me until I can recite it without thinking.
“If anything feels wrong,” she says, “you say nothing. You let the driver handle it.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
She meets my eyes. “He will.”
I prepare quietly.
I pack nothing. Everything I own here belongs to the house, anyway. I focus on what I can control. Sleep. Food. Timing.
The nausea comes and goes. I learn how to breathe through it, and other necessary things like which foods stay down and which don’t. I tell myself I’ll deal with the rest later, when later is possible.
The night before Mikhail leaves, he stops by my room. He stands near the door, hands in his pockets, posture rigid. He looks tired. More tired than I’ve ever seen him.
“I’ll be away,” he says.
“I know.”
“Security will stay tight.”
“I expect nothing less.”
He watches me for a moment. “You’ve been quiet.”
“So have you.”
That earns a brief spark of something in his eyes. “Be careful,” he murmurs. “Don’t get into trouble, Alina.”
I meet his piercing gaze squarely. “I’ll do my best.”
He leaves without another word. I don’t sleep at all, because sleep would mean losing the count, and the count is the only thing keeping this from collapsing. By the time my watch reads 3:04 a.m., the house is in its deepest lull, since this is when rotations overlap and attention thins.
Lira arrives without knocking, exactly when she said she would, her key sliding in cleanly and quietly. She doesn’t turn on the light or speak until she’s checked the corridor through the crack in the door. “Third rotation just sat,” she says. “Night shift is tired. Morning shift is annoyed.”
She sets a small insulated bag on the table and opens it. Inside are pastries wrapped in paper, still warm enough to smell real.
“Security protocol says guards eat in place at three,” she continues. “Not together. Not supervised. It’s to keep them from clustering. I’ve drugged the sugar that goes in all their coffees.”
She hands me clothes next, not folded neatly, but bundled the way staff carry spares. Utility pants, soft shoes, a maintenance jacket with a name stitched inside that isn’t mine, and a cap that sits low without looking deliberate.
“This isn’t disguise,” she says. “This is camouflage.”
She explains while I change. The guards outside my door were dosed hours ago, lightly and legally enough to pass as fatigue. “And the cameras?” I ask.
“One corridor camera goes offline for calibration every night at three thirteen,” she says. “It’s logged and expected. Maintenance runs it.”
“What about the others?”
“They’ll still see you,” she says. “They just won’t be looking for you.”
That’s the first thing that lands hard enough to scare me.
She takes me into the bathroom next, because it’s the only place without audio.
She hands me scissors and turns away, and I cut my hair quickly and unevenly.
She hands me solvent wipes, and I strip scent and residue from my hands, my neck, my wrists.
“You’ll still look like you,” she says. “That’s fine.
At three in the morning, no one expects the wife to be anywhere but asleep. ”
We move at 3:11.
She opens the door and steps out first, her posture bored and irritated in a way that reads as authentic. I follow three steps behind, head down, hands full, moving at the pace of someone with a task, not a destination.
The guards outside my room glance up, register her, register me as an extension of her, and look away. Familiarity does the work.
At the service stairwell, she pauses long enough to scan the landing, then pushes through. The stairwell camera is active, but no one is watching it closely, because it never shows anything interesting.
At the second-floor landing, voices carry faintly from the east wing, and Lira adjusts without hesitation, turning us into a laundry corridor instead of continuing down. She sets the pastries on a cart already staged there and nods toward the guards stationed nearby.
“Kitchen,” she says, loud enough to be heard. “Fresh.”
One of them grunts. The other doesn’t look up.
At 3:13, the corridor camera clicks off, exactly as promised.
We move.
Lira unlocks a service door I didn’t know existed, one used by maintenance crews to access exterior fixtures, and we step into cold air and darkness.
The drop isn’t vertical. It’s staggered, ledges and stonework built to be decorative and never used.
I move carefully, hands numb, breath steady, and when my foot slips, I catch myself before panic can take over.
A guard turns the corner early.
He sees motion and opens his mouth to shout.
Lira’s already moving. She doesn’t shout or hesitate.
She strikes from the side with a compact shock unit that drops him hard and silently, and she drags him back into shadow without stopping to assess damage.
“No time,” she says. “He’ll come around in minutes. ”
We run.
The service car is waiting where it should be. The driver doesn’t look at me because he’s been paid not to. As the gate opens, the guard waves us through without checking inside, because nothing about this moment triggers protocol and no one expects me to run. It looks like every other night.
When the estate disappears behind us, I take a deep breath and look beside me.
Lira’s left a small package on the seat.
It smells like warm cinnamon, I think as I open it with cold fingers.
True enough, there’s a bun inside that’s doused with a generous serving of caramelized sugar syrup and warm spices.
It doesn’t make my stomach turn, so I eat it gratefully.
At 3:27 a.m., the plates change.
At 3:41 a.m., the driver takes a route I don’t recognize. At 3:58 a.m., I let myself think, just for a second, that this might work. That’s when the first headlight appears behind us, and it’s too fast to be coincidence. And that’s when I understand that foolproof doesn’t mean invisible.
It just means you get farther before the chase begins.