Page 60 of The Last Dance

He nodded, but stayed where he was. “Do you want to run it yourself?”

“No,” I said. “I want it done right.”

He looked up at the board. “We’ll find him.”

“I know,” I said, but the words landed so flat I almost didn’t hear them myself.

I looked at the photo again. I thought about what it would feel like to be locked in that room, to see the daylight through a slit, to know that the only way out was the man who put you there.

I wondered if he would fight. I wondered if he would break. I wondered if he would believe I was coming, or if he would assume, as I would, that the world does not save people like us.

I pressed two fingers to the notation: purpose: known. I felt nothing. Not even the paper.

Yuri said, “Report will be in within the hour.”

I said, “We move when it is.”

He waited.

“I want him back tonight,” I said. “No mistakes. No speeches. No survivors.”

The word tonight landed like a shot against the metal of the server rack.

He nodded. “Understood.”

We watched the board together, neither of us blinking, neither of us needing anything from the other. This was not comfort. This was war.

The hum of the monitors was the only music in the room. I listened to it and let it fill the space where the panic had been. It was better than prayer. It was the only thing that made sense.

Yuri left to make the call. The notation stared back at me, the words so sharp I could almost hear them.

I waited, and knew what it meant to want a thing more than the world would allow.

Tonight, the world would have to allow it.

Chapter Fifteen

~ Iren ~

I woke up fighting.

That’s not a metaphor. My entire nervous system detonated before my brain caught up, and I jolted so hard the cheap mattress on my back nearly took the metal frame with it.

The scream died in my throat because, by the time I’d inhaled enough to voice it, my eyes had already mapped the perimeter: concrete, cold, bare except for a band of sickly light coming through a slit of window near the ceiling.

The air stank of fresh cement, bleach, and a chemical I only recognized from the time Lin made me help clean the marble with “something stronger” after a wine spill. I was vertical and braced against the wall before the second panic hit.

The panic comes in layers, like an onion, or a cheap cake. First is pure animal terror, the kind that launches you upright and shoves adrenaline into your armpits. You let it roll. You count to thirty. If you’re still alive at the end, you start cataloguing. That’s the part that feels like me.

Thirty seconds, then I started the list.

I was chained to the bed. Not metaphorically; my right ankle wore a metal cuff attached to a chain about ten feet long, bolted directly into the concrete beneath the headboard. The chain wasn’t heavy enough to be a prop. It was heavy enough to be the kind you use on a Rottweiler you’re only half sure is house-trained.

The bed was a twin, the blanket institutional beige, sheets scratchy as a cat’s tongue. There was a nightstand, but no lamp. On the wall above, a square shelf held a single houseplant—pothos, green and trailing, which in this climate meant it needed to be watered at least weekly, maybe daily, if the HVAC was running hot. The plant was not just alive, but thriving.

That was what got me. Not the chain. The fucking plant.

I did the rest of the room in a slow spiral. To the right: a flat-pack bookshelf, loaded with hardcovers and trade paperbacks, spines all crisp and dust-free. I could tell by the titles that they weren’t random.