1
IVY
The days have begun to blur together.
I’ve stopped marking them on the wall near my bed and in my head because the climbing numbers only make it worse. The numbers remind me of how long it’s been since I’ve last seen Leo’s face, and touched his hair, kissed his forehead goodnight or sang him to sleep. The numbers make the ache in my chest sharper, make it harder to breathe through during these long days and nights I’ve been forced to spend all alone in this godforsaken room.
But I’m forced to count time in other ways, anyway.
By the meals slapped down on the bed by my feet, just far enough away that I have to strain to get them because they want to see me struggling and humiliated, begging for the scraps they feed me. Sometimes, I’m allowed bread, but it’s always stale around the edges. The meals come twice a day, just enough to keep me alive, never enough to keep me energized.
All by design.
I measure time in the showers I’m uncuffed and dragged out of my bed every morning for. Always ten minutes, no more, before I’m pulled from the stall regardless of how much soap I’ve managed to wash off my body. But there’s never enough that can scrub away the fear, the helplessness, that I feel being at the mercy of these people.
And then, I’m always shackled back to the bed like an animal. The click of the key in the lock is a sound that’s become more familiar to me than Leo’s laugh.
None of them talk to me.
They don’t even look at me.
Even when the nurses with their masks pulled up over the bottom halves of their faces when they come in to check on me say nothing. Their cold fingers poke and prod at my body, checking the bruises still left from the crash, the slowly healing gashes on my arms from where glass sliced me open.
They never spend long with me. Not that they want to in the first place.
The worse out of all of this? I haven’t seen Leo since the crash.
I don’t even know if he’s alive.
That’s the worst part—the not knowing.
I replay every possibility until exhaustion claims me. Is he being kept safe? Crying for me? Is he nearby, locked in some other room, just as scared, just as alone? Or did Mikhail send him off to some frozen corner of the earthjust to twist the knife? To punish me for belonging to Maksim?
Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? A message. Areminder. Being Maksim Antonov’s woman, bearing his son, this is the price I’m forced to pay for jumping into bed with a Bratva leader.
At night, I lie awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the shuffle of footsteps outside the door and the murmur of voices that are always too low to make out what they’re saying.
I always wonder if tonight’s the night. If the door will open not for food, not for more restraints to chain me to the bed, but for an ending. If a bullet will be my final goodnight instead of the steady clicking of the air coming in through the vent above my bed.
So far, it hasn’t happened. They just let me sit in this limbo instead, suspended in the in-between.
I can’t do this anymore.
That thought grows louder each day, carving itself into me until it’s a brand. I’ve had enough of the silence, enough of the waiting for someone else to decide whether I get to live or die. Because if no one’s coming for me, I’ll have to get out of here myself.
I don’t know how yet.
I don’t know if I’ll even succeed, or if my first step toward freedom will also be my last.
But I do know this. I won’t rot here. I won’t let Leo wonder why his mother didn’t fight to get him back.
I takemy shower like usual.
A guard waits outside the door, his silhouette visible through the frosted glass. I scrub myself clean under barely-there water pressure, pretending I don’t hear the faint beep of the surveillance system watching me from overhead. I’ve long since gotten used to having no privacy anymore. At this point, I’ve lost all shame.
Today, I move slower than usual, my gaze drifting again and again to that spot in the far corner.
The grout dips just slightly there, leaving the tile more bowed down than the rest. I’ve noticed it every morning when I step into the shower, have watched it fill with a shallow puddle of water each time I flick on the faucet overhead. I’ve cataloged it the way I’ve cataloged everything around me.