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Days, maybe more than that. Time doesn’t exist properly in places like this. It drips instead. It rots. It leaves you alone with the sound of your own breathing and the knowledge that no one is coming when the door opens.

They’ve been hurting me. I know that much. Hurting me, filming me and sending the videos to my father like this is all some kind of game between men with too much power and too little soul.

I miss home.

The thought arrives quietly, which somehow makes it worse.

I miss my bed. I miss my room.

I miss my mother and her scent most of all—that soft, flowery scent that always lingers in the hall after she walks through it, like spring was trying to follow her everywhere she goes.

I want her.

I want to bury my face in her dress and breathe until this place disappears.

But I’m a Petrov.

Petrovs stay strong no matter the circumstances.

Petrovs don’t cry.

That’s what Grandfather says.

I’m not sure if I’ve cried at all.

Maybe I did at the beginning. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe the fear in me dried out before it could turn into tears. I only know that my throat burns all the time and my eyes feel hot and empty and there’s something shameful in me that is glad for it, glad that if my father sees the videos, he won’t see me weeping.

The lock scrapes.

Every part of me flinches before I can stop it.

The door groans open, and I press myself harder into the corner, making myself smaller even though I know by now it never helps. The first man steps in —the one who brings me dry bread and stale water with the expression of someone feeding an unwanted stray. He’s ugly in an ordinary way, all mean mouth and dead eyes.

The second man is worse.

Bald. Thick neck. Tattoos crawling over his scalp like something diseased. He’s carrying a paint bucket in one hand, swinging it lightly like there’s nothing strange about that, like this is just another errand on an ordinary day.

They both smile when they see me watching.

That’s the first thing that makes the fear intensify.

The smiles.

“No one’s coming for you,” the bald one says.

His voice echoes in the dungeon like it belongs there.

The other one laughs. “Nobody is going to save you, little prince.”

I don’t answer.

I know better than that now.

The bald man sets the bucket down in the middle of the floor with a dull metallic scrape. I stare at it, confused despite myself, because for one ridiculous second I think maybe it’s paint. Maybe this is some new humiliation I haven’t seen yet. Something messy. Something stupid.

Then he kicks the side of it.

The bucket tips over.