LOGINCATALINA’S PERSPECTIVE
SOCHI, RUSSIA – Week 30The bed was no longer mine alone.Some time after the twenty-eighth week, Gavriil simply stopped leaving.He would bathe, change into black silk pajama bottoms, and slide in on the left side as if he had always belonged there.He never crossed the invisible line down the middle.He never touched me beyond a hand resting on the swell of my belly, feeling our child kick, eyes closed in something that looked disturbingly like peace.I let him.Because fighting over sheets was not the war I was fighting.By week thirty he began taking me outside the mansion.First to the cliff-side terrace at sunrise, then to the armored convoy that waited like a black serpent in the courtyard.He wanted to show me his empire.First stop: the Aurora Casino, his crown jewel on the Sochi waterfront.Crystal chandeliers, blackjack tables inlaid with motCATALINA’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI, RUSSIA – Week 4, Day 30I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.I wanted to fuck him until neither of us could breathe.The two desires were braided so tightly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.I felt him before I saw him: the shift in air pressure when the gym door opened, the scent of gun oil and winter that always clung to his skin.My pulse answered before my mind did.He stepped into the ring shirtless, scar livid across his ribs, eyes already black with hunger.I hated that my body recognized him instantly; hated more that it arched toward him like a magnet.We didn’t speak.Words had become useless weeks ago.He moved first, or maybe I did; it didn’t matter.The first clash was pure violence: my shin cracking against his thigh, his knuckles grazing my cheekbone, the copper bloom of blood on both our tongues.Every strik
GAVRIIL’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI, RUSSIA – Week 4, Day 30I had starved for this moment for thirty nights.Thirty nights of watching her carve herself back into a weapon, of feeling her body harden under my hands while her eyes grew colder. Tonight I would remind her whose name her pulse answered to.The gym was stripped to its bones. Mirrors, cage, blood-red lights. No one else alive for a kilometer.She waited in the center like a blade unsheathed: black sports bra soaked with sweat, shorts riding low on sharp hipbones, braid coiled tight. Her nipples were already hard against the fabric. Good.I stepped in shirtless, barefoot, cock already half-hard just from the way she looked at me.“No rules,” she said, voice like smoke and sin.I didn’t answer with words.We collided.She came in low and vicious, thigh slicing toward my lead leg.
CATALINA’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI, RUSSIA – Week 4, Day 29 after the “death”The gym was a cathedral of violence.Floor-to-ceiling mirrors, black rubber mats, heavy bags swinging like corpses. Gavriil had turned the entire east wing into my personal coliseum: kickboxing ring in the center, Muay Thai pads, a cage wall for grappling, and a row of weapons I wasn’t supposed to notice yet.Today he brought me an opponent.A woman. Tall, cropped blonde hair, shoulders like a swimmer, eyes flat and professional. Former Spetsnaz, he said. Now one of his private trainers.Anya.She bowed slightly when she entered, no smile. Good. I didn’t want pleasantries.Gavriil leaned against the ropes, arms folded, scar livid under the harsh lights. He wore loose black gi pants and nothing else, watching me like I was about to perform for him.“Light contact,” he ordered Any
CATALINA’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI, RUSSIA – The Month AfterGrief is a living thing. It eats first, then it sleeps inside you, waiting.For seven days I let it devour me.I stayed in bed, curtains drawn, the gold urn on the nightstand catching every sliver of light like a cruel joke. I didn’t speak. I barely ate. I let the tears come until my eyes swelled shut and my voice was nothing but gravel.Gavriil never left my side.He became something softer, something monstrous in its tenderness. He bathed me when I couldn’t move, hands reverent as he washed the salt from my skin. He carried me to the balcony when the room grew too small, cradling me like a broken doll while the sea wind whipped my hair. He pressed his face into my empty belly, inhaling like a man addicted, murmuring over and over, “Now you’re mine. Only mine. No one else inside you.”His obsession had turn
DANTE’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI PERINATAL CENTER – Week 38I smelled like bleach and hospital floor wax. Gray maintenance jumpsuit, fake beard, cap pulled low. My hands shook only once, when I clipped the forged ID to my chest: Ivan Petrov, Sanitation ServicesThe rest of me was ice.Three weeks of drills in Voronin’s mountain bunker had burned the route into muscle memory. Thirty-four seconds, door to door. I could do it in twenty.I had been living in the hospital for forty-eight hours already, sleeping in the janitor’s closet, eating vending-machine sandwiches, watching the monitors Voronin had hacked into. I knew every nurse’s shift change. I knew which security camera looped for exactly 4.7 seconds at 19:45. I knew the exact moment Catalina’s water broke, because the entire eleventh floor lit up like a war zone.19:43. Dr. Morozova’s voice crackled in the tiny earpiece C
CATALINA’S PERSPECTIVE SOCHI, RUSSIA – Week 38The contractions started as a whisper, a faint tightening in my lower belly, like a hand gently squeezing, then releasing. I was in the library, curled in an armchair with a book I wasn’t reading, pretending to rest while Gavriil worked at his desk across the room. The first one came and went, mild enough to ignore. I shifted, hand on my belly, feeling our son stir. But the second hit sharper, a ripple that stole my breath. By the third, they were coming every ten minutes, repetitive, insistent.Gavriil noticed before I said a word. His head snapped up, eyes locking on my face as I winced. “Rosa mia?” He was across the room in an instant, kneeling beside me, hand pressing to my belly. “It’s time?”I nodded, gritting my teeth as another wave built. “Contractions. Mild, but… getting stronger.”He didn’t hesitate. He scooped me up like I weighed nothing, his







