Page 106 of Captured By the Pakhan

"I've thought about the pregnancy, I've thought about it a great deal, and I asked Bogdan a hypothetical question on Tuesday that he didn't for one second believe was hypothetical." I hold his eyes. "Nothing on the abdomen. Nothing near it. I'm ten weeks along. But, I'm fine, and I'd really like you to stop looking at me like I'm made of glass, because that's the only part of any of this I actually can't stand."

Something moves in his face.

"All right," he says.

"That's it? No eleven minutes on a bed?"

"You have taken four weeks," Ilya says. "I am not going to insult you with eleven minutes."

He does it properly, which by now I would have been offended by anything else.

The room is warm before I get into it — he has been in here for half an hour, and the heating is up, because cooled wax on a cold body is a different and worse experience, and he knows that and I didn't.

The blindfold goes on first. Same as before. And the moment it does, the room stops being a place I have mapped and becomes a place I have to take on trust, and my whole body has the same argument it had in June and loses it faster.

He ties my hands above me. Good work, again — enough slack that I am not stretched, not enough to reach, and the small professional part of me that noticed the quality of the knots last time notices that he has changed the wrap so there is less on the pulse point.

"Water. To you're right." Something sets down beside my head. "Hear it?"

"Yes."

"Bowl on the floor by my knee. You won't need it."

"Ilya."

"Mm."

"Stop being competent, it's very annoying."

"No," he says.

And then the nothing.

Ten minutes of it, maybe more — the same appalling opening move, a man moving quietly around a room and doing absolutely nothing, and me lying in the dark with every nerve I own trying to triangulate a set of footsteps.

By the time he touches me, I am already gone.

The wax starts high and goes further than June.

He is more confident this time, and I can hear it — the pause, the small sound of him testing it on his own forearm, the drop. Collarbone. The flat under it. The outside of one breast and then, eventually, both, and by the fourth of those I have stopped making words.

He works down my sides. Never across, never anywhere near the middle of me, and after about the eleventh drop I notice that he has built the whole geography of this around a place he isn't going, and that noticing it does something to my chest that has nothing to do with heat.

And it does what it did in June: it takes everything.

Every drop takes the whole apparatus — the courthouse, the corridor, four sworn statements, sixty hours in a basement, a bathroom floor on Florida Avenue — and puts all of it into one square centimeter of skin for a second and a half. There isn't anything else, and I didn't know how badly I needed there to be nothing else until the fourth one.

Somewhere in the middle, I start to shake; it’s not cold, and it isn't fear.

"Raven."

"Don't stop."

"That was not the question."

"Green. Fine. Perfect. Don't stop."

"Say it in your own words."