Nadia
The room they put me in is underground.
I know this from the quality of the silence, which is the specific silence of a space that has earth above it and on three sides — a different kind of quiet than a room at street level, more absolute, with the particular cold of somewhere that doesn't get light.
There are two guards outside the door on a rotation I've been mapping since they brought me in.
The door is solid and the lock is a deadbolt, which tells me the room was designed for this purpose rather than adapted to it.
Viktor is thorough. I've always known this. I built a file on his thoroughness.
My hands are zip-tied in front of me, which is the first operational mistake — in front is always better than behind, and whoever made that decision either underestimated me or was following a protocol that prioritized speed over security. I note it and file it and wait.
The waiting is the hard part.
Not because I'm afraid of what comes next — I know what comes next, I built the methodology file, I know Viktor's interrogation sequence as well as I know my own operational patterns.
Not because I'm in pain, though the shoulder from the extraction is a consistent presence.
Because waiting is the thing that lets the mind go to the places it's been trying not to go.
I let it go.
The first session is Viktor himself.
He comes in with the specific quality he always has — the unremarkable exterior, the absolute authority underneath it — and he sits across from me and he looks at me with the expression of someone who has revised their assessment of a situation and is deciding how to account for the revision.
"You chose him," he says.
"I chose myself," I say.
He looks at me. "Your father would be ashamed."
"My father declined an assignment," I say.
"And died for it. And you recruited me six months later because I was useful to you and because having me meant you controlled the only person who might ask the right questions about how he died.
" I hold his gaze. "My father would recognize exactly what you are. "
Something moves in Viktor's expression. Not anger. The specific quality of a man recalibrating how much the person across from him knows.
"You have forty-eight hours," he says. "Think about what you want that to look like."
He goes.
The second and third sessions are not Viktor.
I don't describe them. They are the methodology I documented, applied, and I move through them the way my father taught me to move through the things that have to be moved through — by going somewhere else.
I go to the house in Carroll Gardens.
The kitchen in the morning. The coffee that's better than his because he measures by approximation and I measure by result.
The fig tree through the window, bare and slightly reproachful.
The east-facing windows on the top floor that get the morning light in the specific way that was the reason he bought the house — he told me that, one morning, quietly, like he was giving me something he hadn't given anyone.
I go to the farmers market on a Saturday. The bread table. The cheese. Gerald at the honey stall with his opinions about buckwheat. A man standing at the edge of the park holding a loaf of rye he was never going to eat before it developed a personality.
I go to the studio, the old one three blocks from the house, the work lights warm against the old brick and the floor good under my feet and him standing in the middle of the room saying you're beautiful with the flat factual weight of someone reporting a truth rather than offering a compliment.
I stay there for a while.
Between the second and third sessions I think about Dara.
I haven't spoken to her since the morning I went back to Viktor.
Cover meant no contact — anyone Viktor's network watched could be a risk to her — and so for six days she has been holding what she has been holding without me.
She is, I hope, at the safehouse rather than the Astoria apartment.
I told Liam before I left that she should be moved to somewhere Viktor's people couldn't reach quickly, and I trust he moved her.
I trust that the same way I trust the floor under my feet, which is more than I have ever trusted anything to do with my own safety.
Dara, who told me to do what's best for myself.
Dara, who said come back from this one on the morning I went back, with the practical voice she uses for the things she's most afraid of saying differently.
I am trying, I tell her in my head. I am actively trying.
I think about Mackenzie. About the girl's day that was the most ordinary thing I'd done in years and felt like the most significant.
About a girl who brought food because she knew I'd need it and who told me off in the same breath and who said you're welcome here with the ease of someone who means it in all directions.
I think about Ailish. About the specific way she sees things.
About you're brave delivered as a fact rather than an encouragement, which is the kind of thing that lands differently from the performed version.
About the morning she drove me to wherever I needed to start from, and the way she said he knows when I tried to tell her something to pass along.
He knows.
I think about the car ride home from the gala. The city at night. His arm. I love you and his response, and the specific quality of a man saying a true thing he's been carrying for a long time.
I'm glad I said it when I did.
This is the thing I return to between the sessions, the thing that stays clean and clear while other things are more difficult.
I said it in a car on a Friday night because I'd decided to stop waiting for a better moment, and there is no better moment than the one where you say it because you mean it and not because you're afraid you won't get another chance.
I said it from fullness.
Whatever happens in this room, I said it from fullness, and that belongs to me.
At some point I sleep, which is the body making its own decisions. When I wake the cold has deepened, which means time has passed.
I listen.
The rotation outside the door. Two guards, regular intervals, the particular pattern of people who have been given a job they don't expect to be difficult and have settled into its rhythms.
And then, somewhere above me — muffled through the earth and the concrete — a sound that changes the quality of the silence.
Not an interior sound. Something penetrating from outside the building's perimeter. The specific percussion of a situation in which something has begun.
One of the guards says something. I hear the word compound in Russian. I hear the word penetrate. I hear the specific urgency of someone receiving information through an earpiece and recalibrating their position.
I sit up.
I know this sound. I know what it means.
I've been in enough operational situations to recognize the specific quality of a perimeter under pressure, the way it changes the atmosphere of a place, the way people who are tasked with guarding something react when the thing they were told wasn't coming turns out to be coming.
He came.
Of course he came.
I think about what he said the night before I went back, in the bedroom of the Carroll Gardens house with the go-bag between us — Two weeks maximum.
After that I'm coming in regardless of what the intervals say.
And the way he said it, which was not the way of someone setting a deadline but the way of someone stating a fact about what was going to happen.
It has been six days.
He came anyway.
I look at my zip-tied hands.
The guard outside the door is on his radio, turned toward the corridor, attention on the earpiece.
His partner will be moving to a secondary position to respond to the perimeter breach, which means the rotation has collapsed, which means the door is currently covered by one man who is facing the wrong direction.
I have approximately forty-five seconds.
I work the zip tie.
The compression technique is uncomfortable and I do it without sound because sound is the one thing I cannot afford.
My father showed me this when I was twelve, in a kitchen in Moscow, with a spare zip tie and the specific patience of a man who believed that knowing how to get out of things was as important as knowing how to get into them.
One step, Nadenka. Anyone can manage one step.
The right hand comes free.
I stand.
The cold of the room is full and present and I am not at full capacity — the shoulder, the sessions — but I am standing and my hands are free and there is a guard outside the door who is facing the wrong direction and a perimeter that is being penetrated by someone who said two weeks and came earlier.
I assess the door.
Solid. Deadbolt. I have no key and no tool.
I assess the room.
The chair. Metal, institutional, the kind with weight to it.
I pick up the chair.
I think about Mackenzie — the one who fought back, who Ailish said is the reason she has a laceration instead of something worse. I think about what it means to be someone who fights back.
I think about Liam on the other side of a perimeter that is being penetrated, moving toward this room with the specific quality of a man who has decided what he's doing and is doing it.
I am not going to be in this chair when he gets here.
I am going to be standing.
The guard's radio crackles. He turns to speak into it. His back is fully to the door.
I hit the deadbolt from the inside with the chair leg, which is not how deadbolts are supposed to open and which works on this specific lock because this specific lock has a weakness I identified two hours ago when the guard came in and the bolt didn't seat fully and I filed it in the same section I file everything.
Details, Nadenka.
The door opens.
The guard turns.
I hit him with the chair in the specific way my father taught me, which is not the way that looks most dramatic and is the way that produces the most efficient result, and he goes down and I step over him and I am in the corridor.
The corridor is chaos in the specific way of a compound under breach — movement, voices, the particular quality of an organization responding to something it didn't adequately prepare for.
I move through the chaos the way I move through everything.
Like I know where I'm going.
I go toward the sound of the breach.
And somewhere in the compound, getting closer, I can hear the specific quality of Liam Costello moving through a building he has decided to move through, which sounds like everything stopping in front of him.
I move faster.
One step.
Then the next.