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I wake to the taste of copper and ketamine.
My tongue feels twice its size, mouth dry as a Mormon wedding.
The drug fog lingers—that floaty, disconnected sensation where your brain's still online but your body's filed for divorce.
Everything's too bright, too sharp, like someone cranked the contrast on reality and forgot to adjust the exposure.
I try to swallow but my throat sticks to itself.
Gritty eyelids scrape against eyeballs that feel sunburned, even with the weak light filtering through dirty windows.
The headache builds behind my eyes like pressure before a storm—the kind of pain that comes with chemical assistance, courtesy of whoever jammed a needle in my neck.
Memory comes in flashes: the safehouse. Harlow, that rat-fuck traitor. The shotgun kick against my shoulder. Blood spray painting the designer furniture like a Jackson Pollock made of some poor bastard's frontal lobe.
Killion's hands checking my wounds, clinically assessing damage without ever meeting my eyes. Running. The split-second decision to separate when another team ambushed us in the extraction corridor.
Then darkness. Chemical darkness. The kind that comes with a needle and the certainty that whatever happens next, you won't have a fucking say in it.
I peel open my eyes to unfamiliar ceiling—cracked plaster, water stains blooming like cancerous flowers against dingy white. Soviet-era construction, if I had to guess. The kind of building that's survived regimes and revolutions through sheer stubborn refusal to fall down.
My clothes are gone. I'm wearing a man's shirt, buttons askew, and nothing else. The fabric smells of unfamiliar detergent and expensive cologne—not the industrial scentless shit Dollhouse uses that costs more than designer perfume just to smell like nothing at all.
My panties are missing, a violation I file away for future reckoning. The air smells like damp concrete, cigarettes, and something earthier—mold maybe, or the particular tang of a foreign place with foreign dangers.
"Finally awake, kotyonok ." The voice slides through the room like smoke, accented and amused.
I turn my head too fast, vertigo making the room spin like I'm on a carnival ride designed by sadists. Acid crawls up my throat; I swallow it down with a grimace.
He sits in a leather chair by the window, framed in weak winter light that does nothing to soften the hard edges of him.
One leg crossed casually over the other, a cigarette balanced between fingers that look equally capable of performing surgery or snapping necks.
Smoke curls around him like a living thing, a dragon lounging in its lair, his profile sharp as a freshly-honed blade against the gray sky beyond.
Alexei Volkov .
Gray Suit from the bar. The man who killed Victor Reese with a bullet to the brain. The ghost that Killion was hunting—or who was hunting us. Hard to tell which way that particular food chain flows.
"Where am I?" My voice sounds like I've been gargling glass and chasing it with gasoline. I push to my elbows, refusing to lie flat before a predator.
"Somewhere safe," he says, his accent heavier than I expect. Russian, but polished by years elsewhere—Europe, maybe London. His consonants have edges like broken bottles. "Somewhere your friends won't find you until I allow it."
I test my limbs. No restraints, but my muscles respond like they're swimming through molasses, drugged and sluggish.
My thigh throbs where wood splinters tore into it during the firefight, a dull pulsing heat that suggests infection lurking at the edges. Someone's cleaned and dressed the wound—neatly, professionally.
The bandage is hospital-grade, applied with precision that speaks of medical training.
Another violation to catalog: he or someone he employs has handled me while I was unconscious. Stripped me. Dressed me. Tended my wounds.
Each breath sends inventory reports from different parts of my body.
Bruised ribs. Shoulder wrenched from the shotgun recoil.
Split skin across my knuckles where I connected with some faceless operative's jaw.
Nothing life-threatening. Nothing that would prevent me from killing my captor if I got the chance.
The room is sparse but not a cell. Heavy wooden furniture, old but quality, the kind with stories carved into every scratch and stain. A bed that's seen better decades, sagging slightly in the middle, covered in sheets that smell of unfamiliar detergent.
A desk with nothing on it but whorls in the grain that form faces if you stare too long. One door, thick enough to muffle screams. One window, double-paned against whatever winter waits outside.
Beyond the glass, white sky stretches like a blank canvas, highlighted by the spindly black fingers of leafless trees reaching up like drowning men's hands.
No cities visible. No landmarks. No clues except the architecture and the light—the particular quality of winter sun this far north, this far east.
Okay, quick recap: I’ve been abducted by the Russian male version of the Wicked Witch of the East—minus the broom, plus a Glock.
"What's your deal, Volkov.” I push myself to sitting position, ignoring how the room tilts on its axis, refusing to show weakness even as my stomach lurches in protest. "If you wanted me dead, I'd be dead. So what's this? Interrogation? Leverage? A really fucked-up meet-cute?"
He studies me from across the room, eyes the color of frozen mud. Not cold, exactly. Just... remote. Like he's watching me from a great distance through precision optics, calculating wind resistance and bullet drop.
His stillness is unnerving—not the rigid control of military training but the patience of something that knows it's at the top of the food chain.
"Smart girl," he says, voice a low rumble that seems to vibrate through the floorboards. He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray—crystal, incongruously elegant in this decaying room—before immediately lighting another with practiced efficiency.
I gestured toward his cigarette. “Careful, those are going to kill you someday.”
He chuckles, the flame from his antique Zippo briefly illuminates the planes of his face, casting dramatic shadows that highlight cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, jaw darkened with precise stubble that's been cultivated rather than neglected, a scar bisecting his left eyebrow like a question mark missing its dot. “Not likely,” he says with a shrug and he’s probably right.
There’s a reason you never see old spies. The retirement plan is a bullet.
Handsome in that ruthless, Eastern European way that suggests he knows exactly how many ways to kill a man with a shoelace and has had occasion to use at least three of them.
The kind of face that belongs on propaganda posters or movie villains—striking enough to remember, controlled enough to fear.
"But you are asking wrong question," he continues, exhaling smoke through nostrils like some dragon taking measure of a knight. "Question is not why I keep you alive. Question is why Director Harlow wanted you dead."
My laugh comes out harsh, brittle, scraping my throat raw. "What can I say? Sometimes I rub people the wrong way."
The understatement of the century. I've spent my life as sandpaper on other people's soft spots—Isaac's suburban dreams, men's ego-wrapped lust, now agency directors with God complexes. If there's a line to cross, I'll fucking dance over it while giving the middle finger to whoever drew it.
Volkov shakes his head, standing with the liquid grace of a predator who knows exactly how much energy each movement requires. Nothing wasted. Nothing excessive. Just pure function wrapped in expensive fabric.
He moves to the bed, and I tense, calculating odds and angles, but he only sits on its edge, far enough to be non-threatening, close enough that I can smell his cologne— something expensive with notes of pine and some underlying spice I can't identify.
"Harlow wanted you dead before that," he says, voice dropping lower, intimate as a confession or a threat.
He doesn't lean in—doesn't need to. His presence fills the space between us, heavy as lead, sharp as a blade.
"Before Victor Reese. Before you were ever sent to that apartment.
Why do you think you were chosen as bait, Nova? Or should I call you Landry?"
The sound of my real name on his lips sends ice water cascading down my spine, flash-freezing every vertebra. Only a handful of people know both my identities.
"How do you?—"
"I know everything about you." His eyes don't leave mine as he takes another drag, the cigarette's ember reflecting tiny points of fire in his pupils.
The smoke hangs between us. "Landry Elizabeth James.
Thirty years old. Married to accountant Isaac, who thinks you are on extended girls' trip because he is too stupid or too willfully blind to see what sits across from him at breakfast table. "
He taps ash into his palm—a strangely fastidious gesture in this decaying room—before continuing.
"Former fixture at sex club Malvagio. Regular partner: Derek Klein, who was left in alley the night of your extraction and now seeing therapist for nightmares.
Recruited by Killion three months ago after.
.. what was phrase in your file? 'Demonstrated aptitude for extended deception and sexual manipulation. '"
Each fact lands like a slap, precise and stinging. He knows me—not just the file details but the little things, the personal things, the dots that connect to form the constellation of my fucked-up life choices.
He leans closer, and I fight the urge to recoil. His proximity carries no sexual threat—somehow that's worse. Like I'm a specimen under glass, a problem to be solved rather than a body to be used. I know how to handle men who want me. I have no fucking clue what to do with one who sees through me.