I didn't sleep that night either.
10
The First Job
Monika
The call came at midnight, but I was already awake.
I'd been lying in the dark for hours, staring at the ceiling, tracing the cracks in the plaster with my eyes. The city hummed outside my window—distant sirens, the rumble of the El train, the occasional shout from the street below. Sounds I'd learned to ignore. Sounds that had become a lullaby, ugly and familiar.
The phone buzzed against my nightstand. I picked it up before the second vibration.
"Yes."
"Be ready in ten." Aleksander's voice was low, clipped. No greeting. No explanation. "Dress warm. Wear boots."
"What's happening?"
"A meeting. I need you there."
The line went dead. I sat up in the dark and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My feet were cold against the floorboards—the radiator had been making strange noises all week, and the landlord hadn't fixed it. I pulled on jeans, a thermal shirt, the heavy boots I'd worn on the farm. They were scuffed and worn, the laces frayed, but they'd seen me through worse than this.
I didn't ask myself what I was doing. I didn't let myself think about the cages, the women, the way Aleksander's grey eyes had looked at me in the warehouse alley. I just moved. One foot in front of the other. The way you walk through a fire when there's no other way out.
Viktor was waiting downstairs. He didn't speak. He just opened the door and I got in, and the car pulled away from the curb before I'd fastened my seatbelt.
The city slid past the windows. We drove east, toward the river, toward the parts of the city where the streets had no names and the buildings had no numbers. I watched the neighborhoods change—the convenience stores with their iron bars, the empty lots where something had been torn down and nothing had been built, the men standing on corners in coats that were too thin for the weather.
"This is a bad part of town," I said.
"Yes," Viktor said.
"That's all you're going to tell me?"
"That's all I know."
I didn't believe him. But I didn't push. I'd learned that silence was a language in this world, and I was still learning to speak it.
The building was a club—or had been, once. The sign above the door was faded, the letters peeling, but I could make out the ghost of a name:The Velvet Room. The windows were dark, theentrance blocked by a steel door that looked like it could stop a truck.
Viktor pulled into an alley and killed the engine. The headlights died, and the dark rushed in—thick and sudden, like being underwater.
"Wait here," he said.
"No." I reached for the door handle. "I'm supposed to be with him. That's why he called me."
Viktor's eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. They were old eyes, tired eyes, the kind that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. "You don't know what's in there."
"Then show me."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, just once, and got out of the car.
The alley smelled like garbage and rust and something chemical—paint thinner, maybe, or gasoline. My boots crunched on broken glass as I followed Viktor toward the steel door. He knocked—three times, a pause, two more—and the door opened inward, revealing a hallway lit by red bulbs.
The man who opened the door was broad, bald, wearing a suit that didn't fit. He looked at Viktor, then at me, and his lip curled.
"She stays outside."
