"Your husband killed twelve of my men." He stops. Turns. Studies me the way a collector studies an acquisition: value assessed, provenance confirmed. "For YOU. Not for territory. Not for the alliance. Not for the strategic assets my father would understand. For a woman."
He sounds disgusted. He also sounds fascinated.
"He loves you."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"No." Viktor crouches in front of my chair. Eye level. Pleasant. The pleasantness is the most disturbing thing about him, the way violence lives underneath good manners like a current beneath still water. "It's better this way. Love is a vulnerability. Your husband handed me the weapon when he married you. When he watches you die, it will hurt more than any bullet I could put in his body."
"He's going to kill you."
Viktor smiles. "He's going to try."
I study him back. Assess. Viktor Reznikov is smart but theatrical. Controlled but vain. He needs the performance: the chair, the spotlight, the monologue. A man who simply wanted me dead would have done it at the safe house. Viktor wants an audience. He wants Nico to watch.
Which means he'll keep me alive until Nico arrives.
Time. I have time.
"Your father knows what you are," I say. Calm. Conversational. The tone I use in boardrooms when I'm delivering findings a client doesn't want to hear.
Viktor stops pacing.
"Dmitri Reznikov has been in this business longer than you've been alive. He understands cost-benefit the way you understand theatrics. And you, this war, this escalation, you've united every family on the East Coast against you. Greeks. Irish. Romanos. You've made your father's operations more expensive and more visible with every move you've made."
"My father supports me."
"Your father tolerates you. There's a difference. Ask Elena Drakos about the distance between the two."
Viktor's composure flickers. A crack. Small but visible. I file it: he's vulnerable about Dmitri. About whether his father sees a son or a liability. About whether the old man's silence is approval or calculation. The wound is old and deep, and I just pressed my thumb into it.
"You're brave, Mrs. Konstantinos."
"My name is Siobhan O'Brien. And I've been brave longer than you've been dangerous."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then laughs. It's genuine, which makes it worse.
"I can see why he chose you."
Hour five. The nausea crests and breaks. I turn my head and vomit. Bile and nothing, twelve hours since my last meal. The acid burns my throat. Viktor steps back, disgusted, turning away.
The two seconds he looks away are the two seconds I need. I work the zip ties hard against the weld ridge, flexing both wrists with force instead of the careful micro-movements of the previous hours. The plastic bites into raw skin. I don't care. The fraying accelerates.
"Nerves?" Viktor asks, composure restored.
"You try sitting in a chair for five hours."
He waves a hand. A guard brings water. I drink. The water settles the nausea for ten minutes, maybe less. I use every second.
I think about the baby. Twenty-four days. A poppy seed, maybe. Something so small it doesn't have a heartbeat yet, just the electrical suggestion of one, cells dividing in the dark toward something that will eventually be a person. My person. The only thing in this factory that belongs entirely to me.
If I die tonight, that's the unforgivable part. Not my death. The death of a possibility that Nico doesn't know exists. A child who will never hear its father's voice or feel its mother's hand or know that it was loved before it was anything at all.
I will not die in this chair.
I work the zip ties.
Hour six. The main door opens.