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My hands go to my stomach before my eyes even open. I press down gently, feel the same curve as this morning. No pain. My baby’s still okay.

I’m sitting in a chair, wrists zip-tied to the arms the same way they were the very first night in that other house months ago, ankles bound the same way too.

The room around me is bare: concrete walls, a single bulb overhead, no windows I can find no matter how far I turn my head.

Cold enough that I can see my own breath if I focus on it, the kind of cold that seeps into skin rather than just the air around it.

My clothes still smell faintly of the café, coffee and something floral I don’t recognize, a strange, small reminder of how ordinary this afternoon started.

I take stock of what I can anyway, an old habit that refuses to switch off even now. There’s one door, made of metal, with no visible handle from this side.

A drain sits in the floor, and I decide not to think too hard about that.

I don’t see any cameras, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any hidden somewhere in the shadows past the reach of that single bulb.

The door opens eventually, and two men walk in, neither of them the one who spoke to me in the van. One pulls a chair opposite mine and sits, unhurried, the kind of calm that’s meant to unsettle more than reassure.

The other stays standing near the door, arms crossed, watching me the way you’d watch something you already expect to behave predictably. Neither of them looks particularly cruel, which somehow unsettles me more than if they had.

“You’re going to answer some questions now.” The seated man’s accent is thick, his English careful in the way of someone who learned it precisely rather than growing up with it. “How easy this is for you depends entirely on how honest you are with me.”

I don’t say anything. I focus on my breathing instead, the same counting I’ve used since that first night: in for four, hold for four, out for four, giving myself something steady to hold onto while my mind works out what to actually say.

“Security rotations at the estate. How many men, and what schedule do they follow?”

“I don’t know.” The words come out steadier than I feel saying them, my hands staying still against the restraints even as my pulse climbs. “I’m not exactly given a briefing on security logistics. I live there. I don’t run anything.”

“You’ve lived there for months. You notice things, whether you mean to or not.”

“I notice when dinner’s ready. I don’t notice guard rotations.” I keep my voice flat, bored even, the same tone I’d use deflecting a question from a nosy client back when I still had a normal life. “You’re asking the wrong person entirely.”

“Shipping routes now. The port operation specifically.”

“I clean houses for a living. Or I did, before all of this happened to me.” I let a thread of real bitterness leak into my voice, since bitterness reads as honest in a way denial doesn’t. “I don’t know anything about shipping routes. I barely know what he actually does most days.”

“That’s difficult to believe, given everything you must have seen in that house.”

“Believe whatever you want. It doesn’t make it less true.” I shift in the chair, testing the give in the restraints out of old reflex, finding none, the plastic already digging fresh marks into skin still tender from the last time I wore something like this. “You grabbed the wrong source if you think I’m carrying operational secrets around in my head. I clean toilets and read books. That’s the extent of my expertise.”

He leans back, considering me, and I keep counting under my breath where he can’t hear it: in for four, hold for four, out for four, the rhythm the only thing standing between me and the fear trying to climb up through my chest.

I think about the baby the entire time he keeps pushing, different angles on the same questions, security details, contacts, anything that might give Viktor leverage beyond just my existence.

Every time the fear threatens to crack through my composure, I press my thoughts back down toward the one fact I can hold onto without it shaking.

Still there. Still safe, right now, in this moment.

Whatever happens to me in this room, that has to stay true. I picture the exact shape of my own hand against my stomach this morning, the flutter I felt on the garden path, anything solid enough to anchor me against the fear trying to work its way into every answer I give.

I think about Artem too, more than I expect to, running through everything he’s told me about men like this, about how information given under pressure isn’t information at all if it’s wrong, if it’s vague enough to waste their time without actually costing him anything real.

I feed them nothing but plausible nothing, answers just specific enough to sound like cooperation and empty enough to be useless.

“The child.” The seated man’s tone shifts, quieter, more deliberate. “Does Leonov know it’s his?”

The question lands harder than any of the others, and I have to work to keep my face from giving away exactly how hard, my pulse spiking somewhere underneath the flat expression I’m fighting to hold in place. “Obviously.”

“He’s claimed it as his own.”