Chapter Seventeen
~ Iren ~
Two weeks out from rescue, the human body is supposed to heal in increments you can track by calendar. The mind does not get the memo.
I sat cross-legged in the deep leather chair of Vadim’s study, a hardback open and not being read in my lap, the afternoon light striping the dark wood of his desk and the spines of a hundred volumes lined up with military precision behind it.
The yellow bruises on my jaw and arm, in theory, were the last traces of what happened.
They were not.
I turned the same page three times, pretending to take notes in the margin, my brain blanking the text into a gray fog.
If I wasn’t actively reading, my mind filled the air with all the things I didn’t want to think about: the clang of a chain, the sound of my own breathing, the slow creak of footsteps in the corridor above.
Vadim sat at the desk, pretending not to watch me. He did not fidget, not with his hands or his pen or his coffee. He just inhabited the air, spine perfectly straight, head angled like he was listening to the room itself.
I wondered if he was bored. I wondered what it would feel like to be a person whose nervous system had only two speeds: absolute violence and complete, predatory stillness.
The bruises on my jaw had faded to a jaundiced haze, more embarrassing than painful now. The memory of how I got them was neither.
The door opened with a snap that was engineered to sound accidental. Yuri entered, and the temperature in the room dropped a half-degree. He wore the same suit as every day, tie knotted at an angle that told you it was done left-handed and without looking.
He did not bother with the nod to me. He just crossed to Vadim’s desk in three efficient steps, bent down, and murmured something directly into Vadim’s ear.
It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen Vadim caught off guard.
His face moved—just for a fraction of a second, a flicker of surprise that cut across the smooth stone of his features and was erased before the air had a chance to catch it.
I filed the look away, careful as a fingerprint on glass. Vadim did not do surprise. If something could get to him, it meant it was real.
Then his eyes cut across the room to me. He didn’t speak. He didn’t smile. He just crooked two fingers and waited for me to cross the room.
I marked my place in the book, set it on the arm of the chair, and approached with the careful pace of someone who’d learned that when Vadim summoned you, it was either to kill you or make you immortal.
Some days I couldn’t tell the difference.
He pulled me down onto his lap, efficient, the chair squealing in protest at the sudden load. I yelped—too loud, too easy—and he just gripped my hip until I quieted.
From the desk, he picked up a slim remote, pointed it at the wall-mounted television, and turned it on. The screen, already set to a local news channel, resolved into an anchor with the kind of plastic sincerity you could bottle and use as chemical weapon.
Vadim said nothing. He waited until my gaze was fixed to the screen before squeezing my thigh once, firm.
The anchor was already in mid-segment: “…arrested earlier today after police discovered a hidden basement room at a property owned by a shell corporation linked to Dr. Robert Parsons, prominent dentist and deacon at St. Hilary’s.
Investigators found a sixteen-year-old boy—name withheld—in what officials are describing as a ‘carefully constructed holding environment,’ complete with food, books, and a locking chain attached to the concrete wall.
The boy, physically abused, is now in protective custody… ”
The anchor’s voice was a glide path, even as the segment escalated.
Cut to B-roll of a nondescript suburban house, then to police tape across a perfectly normal garage.
Then back to the desk, where the woman in the power blue suit intoned the word “predator” and let it hang in the air for a beat before continuing.
Vadim watched my face, not the screen.
I watched the screen, not Vadim.
I tried not to breathe.
“—practiced this for years, say law enforcement sources. The room was custom-poured concrete, reinforced, with hardware purchased in small amounts from multiple suppliers to avoid suspicion. Investigators are combing through Dr. Parsons’s financials, dental records, and church activity logs.
His wife has retained an attorney. His dental practice has been shuttered—”
I felt my jaw go loose. “Wait,” I said, voice soft as a warning. “That young man. Who is he?”
Vadim answered without inflection. “Someone we hired to play the part you were supposed to have.”
I let that settle. It took a while.
The screen now cycled through local interviews. Parents at the boy’s school, neighbors, a parishioner whose eyes were red-rimmed as she explained how “Dr. Parsons always gave out the best candy at Halloween, we never could have imagined—”
I said, “What happens to the boy?”
“He will be set for life,” Vadim said. “As soon as the cameras are off him, he will be paid. Disappear if he wants. He was never in danger.”
A line from the news ticker caught my eye: “Anonymous tip led to rescue, say police.”
I asked, “You sent the evidence.”
Vadim nodded, just once. “Anonymous tip. A file delivered directly to the chief of police.”
I exhaled, and the air in my chest moved for the first time in two weeks. I had not realized how little of it I’d been holding onto.
I watched Parsons’s world burn in real time. The dental practice, the church, his wife’s name and his children’s school, all of it converted to evidence, to horror, to a lifetime of being the answer to a security question you never wanted to ask.
For a long time I said nothing. Then, quietly, I said, “I thought you were going to take him out.”
Vadim’s mouth curved, not soft, but deep.
“I did,” he said. “In the only way that would matter. He will spend the rest of his life locked away the same way he wanted to lock you. If I had killed him, it would have been faster than he deserved. Now he loses everything. His wife, his children, his standing. Now everyone knows what he is.” A pause.
“That is not a mercy. That is a sentence.”
I slumped back against Vadim’s chest, and only then realized how hard I’d been holding my own hands. “It’s over,” I said, almost to myself. “It’s really over.”
“It is.”
The study held the quiet, the kind of silence you get after a thunderclap, not relief but the knowledge that you survived and the world had survived with you.
I didn’t want to move, but I forced myself to sit up, to shift in his lap so I could see his face. I felt the new bruise, hidden under the denim at my hip, and almost laughed at how little it mattered now.
I said, “If I’m starting spring term, I need two bodyguards.
Trained, not just bouncers. Like Yuri, but not actually Yuri, because that would make me look like an asshole.
I need a tracker, something I can wear or swallow.
Or both. I need to learn to fight. Like really fight, not just the bullshit street stuff you taught me the first week.
I want pepper spray, and I want a switchblade.
Two, if you think I’ll lose the first one. ”
Vadim’s hand found my hair, fisted it, turned my face to his, and he kissed me hard enough to stop the sentence cold.
When he let go, he was smiling for real—none of the controlled, sociopath curve he used for meetings, but the kind that put a dimple under one eye and made the skin at the corner of his mouth pull tight.
He said, “It will be done.”
Yuri, who had been standing perfectly still by the door, gave a single nod and left, closing the study door behind him with a click so quiet it could have been a breath.
I didn’t get up from Vadim’s lap. I just sat there, for once letting myself have the weight of him, the certainty of his hand on my leg, the knowledge that, for now, no one was coming through the door and no one was going to drag me out by the throat.
On the television, the anchor repeated the phrase: “—predator, premeditated, years of planning—” and I thought about how you could be so many things to so many people at once, and how none of them would matter as much as being the person who got to decide the ending.
I thought about the room in the basement. I thought about the boy in the story, the one who never had to exist, because someone had thought far enough ahead to build an ending no one would ever see coming.
Vadim’s arm tightened around my waist. He said, low: “You are not to be taken again. Not ever.”
I believed him.
I let my head fall back, and let myself rest.
Just for a little while.
* * * *
The house had more rooms than you could ever justify, but only one had a brass pole bolted into the ceiling.
It was the “dance studio,” which meant the connecting lounge off the master bedroom where Vadim had cleared out every stick of furniture and installed a surround-sound system that cost more than my last three years of rent combined.
He called it the “gym annex” when anyone else was in the house, but we both knew what it was for.
I spent fifteen minutes picking an outfit.
Which was a lie—I’d bought the thing specifically for this night, and had been thinking about it since the day it arrived: mesh tank, white and see-through, and a pair of red lamé boy shorts with an elastic band that glittered under the fake candlelight. No shoes. Just the way he liked it.
I put in the plug first. Small, acrylic, slicked and comfortable. I’d gotten used to the weight of it, the way it made my stride change, the way it kept my body half-primed for what was going to happen.
I wore a slick of coconut oil along the insides of my thighs and ran the pad of my thumb along the edge of the mesh until the edge frayed, which is how I kept my hands from shaking.