The cell is not large.
Stone walls, one overhead light that hums at a frequency designed to slowly dismantle sanity, a chair that has made itself intimately acquainted with every bone in my lower back.
There’s a small drain in the corner.
A bucket.
I’ve had two cups of water and half a piece of hard bread that I couldn’t finish because my throat kept closing around it.
I’ve counted the stones in the wall opposite me forty-one times.
One more daymeans when that door opens next, it’s over.
It means they’ve decided what they’re doing with me and what they’re doing with me is the same thing they did to Papa.
Somewhere in this compound there are men deciding the details.
Whether it’s clean.
Whether it’s fast.
Whether he does it himself or hands the job to one of the others.
My mind, with nothing else to do and no way to stop it, has been filling in the blanks.
A bullet is the most logical.
Quick, low effort, the kind of ending that makes practical sense for people who do this the way other people file paperwork.
But then I think about the way the man with the tattoo looked at me in this cell, that flat unreadable expression while I screamed at him, and something tells me practical isn’t the only thing on the table.
There could be days of it first.
Systematic and unhurried, the way his voice is unhurried, the way he moved through this cell like nothing I did could surprise him.
I think about the stories.
The things you hear about organizations like this, the things Papa never told me directly but that lived in the spaces between his careful silences.
What they do when they want to send a message.
What they do when they want information first.
Stop.I squeeze my eyes shut.Stop thinking about it.
My hands are shaking.
I press them flat against my thighs, feel the trembling move up through my arms and into my chest.
Whatever I’ve been running on since Moscow, since the closet and the shot and the bolt that always sticks and forty-eight hours of Vienna hostels, it’s almost gone.
The adrenaline that’s been holding me upright like scaffolding is quietly, piece by piece, coming down.
What’s underneath it is just fear.
Nadia doesn’t know where I am.
That thought sits differently than the rest.
