Never leaving.
The apartment suddenly feels smaller, the glass walls closing in. I can smell the leather and his whiskey alongside the faint trace of another woman’s perfume still clinging to his shirt collar. My chest tightens until breathing hurts.
“I hate you!” I choke out.
He sighs like I’m a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, then pulls me against his chest anyway. His arms are strong, familiar, and for one nauseating second, I let myself sag there because my legs won’t hold me.
“Shh. You’re just scared. We’ll figure it out. I love you, Anja. You know that.”
I want to shove him off. I want to scream until the windows crack. Instead, I stand there shaking while he strokes my hair like I’m something fragile and broken he gets to keep. An object he broke, but now intends on fixing. Repairing to perfection.
Once again, I fall for his trap. I allow myself to be taken down by him, and I hate myself for it.
He calms me down eventually, the way he always does, with soft words, a glass of water, and endless promises whispered against my temple. By the time I crawl into the guest bed, as I refuse the master suite tonight, my throat is raw, and my eyes burn.
I tell myself tomorrow I’ll leave. Tomorrow I’ll pack my duffel and figure out a plan that doesn’t end with me going back home, and begging for shifts at the truck-stop diner while everyone stares.
But tomorrow comes and goes.
Three days blur into a haze of pretending everything’s normal. I smile when he kisses my forehead before he leaves for “meetings.” I make coffee in his stupid Italian espresso machine and scroll job listings on my phone like a good little kept woman.
But deep down, my rage simmers under my skin, low and constant, until it finally boils over into something sharper. My suspicion returns, and I know I have to act on it. I need to let my fury guide me. Only then can I leave Fadir.
He’s hiding more than Elena. I feel it in the way he locks his study door now. The way his phone lights up at 2 a.m. with numbers instead of names. The way he’s started watching me like he’s measuring how much I know.
So on the fourth night, when he kisses me goodnight and says he’ll be back late, I wait exactly twenty minutes after his taillights disappear down the ramp of the underground parking facility. Then I slip out the service entrance. My heart is hammering so loud I’m sure anyone nearby would hear it.
My old Civic is parked three blocks away in a pay lot. Fadir doesn’t like it in the building’s garage. He says it looks cheap.
Tonight I’m grateful for his demand, as I tail his black Mercedes at a careful distance with my headlights off once we hit the industrial stretch near the river. The moon gives me enough make weaver my way through the shipping containers and parking areas.
The city fades away, and warehouses and chain-link fences take over. I kill the engine behind a stack of empty pallets two blocks from the address his GPS pinged on the tracker I slipped into his glove box last week.
My hands are ice-cold as I quietly open my car door and creep forward on foot. My sneakers silent on the asphalt.
The warehouse squats low and ugly, with corrugated metal sides streaked with rust. A single loading door is cracked open, spilling yellow light onto the cracked concrete. Voices drift out to me, and I detect Fadir’s smooth baritone and two others, rougher and heavily accented.
I press myself to the cold metal wall beside the door, breath shallow. Out of nowhere, rain drips down the back of my neck. I'm so focused on getting to Fadir's secret meeting that I pay no attention to when it begins raining.
“…Sokolov territory is locked down tighter than a nun’s habit,” one of the men says. “You push there, you’re asking for a war.”
“War’s already coming. Katya’s just the opening move. Once I’ve got the girl locked down, the Sokolovs bleed slowly. Publicly. I want them watching while everything they built turns to ash,” Fadir laughs, low and ugly.
My stomach drops.
The girl.
He’s talking about someone else the same way he talked about me when he first offered me that spare key. Like I'm a piece of property.
My rage begins rumbling inside.
“And the shipments? The new supplier wants cash up front. No more credit after that last fuck-up with the feds sniffing around,” the second man grunts
“Tell him to relax,” Fadir snaps. “I’ve got leverage now. Anja’s got no one. No job, no apartment, no way back to that shithole town she came from. She thinks I’m her savior. By the time she figures out what I really mean, she’ll be too deep to run.”
I gasp. The sound is small, but in the quiet between their words, it might as well be a gunshot.
Footsteps crunch gravel. A hand clamps over my mouth before I can scream, yanking me backward so hard my feet leave the ground. I thrash, my elbow connecting with something solid, but the man is built like a brick wall. He hauls me inside the warehouse like I weigh nothing.
