The Dept Collector's Obsession

Chapter 3: The Room With No Locks

Elena didn't sleep much that first night.

The bed was better than the one at home. The sheets actually matched. There was a bathroom attached to her room bigger than her old kitchen. None of that made her relax. She lay there most of the night listening to a house she didn't know, trying to learn its sounds, waiting for footsteps outside her door that never came.

Around six in the morning she gave up on sleep and got up to look around.

The first thing she noticed was the door. Not the locked one down the hall, her own. There was a small hole where a lock should have been, and no lock in it. No bolt. No chain. Just a plain handle that turned easily in her hand.

She stood there for a second, testing it. In, out, in, out. No click. No resistance.

That didn't make sense. If she was collateral, if she mattered enough that a whole room of armed men got told not to touch her, then someone should have locked her in. That was the normal thing. That was what she'd expected walking in last night, some kind of cell dressed up nice.

Instead, nothing.

She walked the length of the east wing first. Her room, the sitting room Kirill had mentioned, a bathroom, and at the end, the locked door she wasn't allowed to open. She didn't try the handle. She'd learned enough last night to know that door was different from the rest, and pushing it on day one felt like the wrong move.

Past the wing, the hallway kept going. No one stopped her. A woman she didn't recognize passed her carrying folded towels and gave her a short nod, nothing more.

Downstairs, the front hall from last night was empty. Sunlight came in through tall windows on either side of the door. Somewhere in the house she could hear someone talking on a phone, low and businesslike, too far away to make out any words.

Elena stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the front door.

Kirill had said she wasn't confined to the house. He'd said the gate too, technically, though he told her not to test it. She thought about that for a long moment, the careful way he'd said it, like he expected her to try anyway.

Maybe that was exactly why she should.

She wasn't stupid. She knew leaving wouldn't fix anything long term. Her father's debt would still exist. But if the door really was unlocked, if the gate really would open, then she wanted to know that for herself instead of taking his word for it. Knowing her own limits mattered. It always had.

She walked to the door and opened it.

No alarm. No shout. Just cool morning air and a long gravel path leading down toward the gate she'd seen from the car last night.

She started walking.

Her heart picked up with every step, though nothing chased her, nothing called out. The gravel crunched under her shoes. Somewhere behind her a bird was making a racket in one of the trees lining the path, completely unbothered by the fact that she might be doing something incredibly stupid.

She made it almost all the way to the gate before a man stepped out from beside the guard post, blocking her path without seeming to hurry at all.

She recognized him from last night. Dmitri, Kirill had called him. Tall, calm, the kind of calm that felt practiced rather than natural.

"Morning," he said, like she'd come out for a walk and nothing more.

"Morning," Elena said, because there wasn't anything smarter to say.

"Going somewhere?"

"Testing something," she said. "He told me I wasn't locked in. I wanted to see if that was true."

Dmitri nodded slowly, like this made perfect sense to him. "It is true. The gate will open for you right now, if you want it to. Nobody's going to grab you and drag you back inside."

"So I can leave."

"You can walk out that gate in the next ten seconds if you want," he said. "Nobody here will stop your body from moving."

There was something in the way he said body that made her stomach drop before he even finished the thought.

"But," she said.

"But your father's debt doesn't go away because you walked out a gate," Dmitri said. "It gets worse. A lot worse. Right now, you being here is the only reason the number isn't climbing every single day. The second you're gone, that stops being true. Mr. Drazen doesn't chase people down. He just adjusts terms. And trust me, you do not want to see what the terms look like once the collateral removes itself."

Elena stood very still.

"That's not a real choice," she said. "You're describing a locked door. You're just doing it without actually locking anything."

"I'm describing your situation accurately," Dmitri said. "Whether that feels like a locked door is up to you."

"It feels exactly like a locked door."

"Then I guess it is one," he said, not unkindly. "Doesn't mean I'm lying about the gate opening. It will. I'm just telling you what happens on the other side of it, so you're not surprised later."

Elena looked past him at the gate, close enough now that she could see the street beyond it, cars, a normal morning happening to normal people who had never heard of Kirill Drazen or her father's debt.

She could still walk there. Nothing was stopping her feet.

But Dmitri was right, and she hated that he was right. If she left now, her father paid for it. Every extra day, every extra dollar, all of it landing on a man who was already gray in the face and shaking the last time she saw him.

"You didn't have to come out here and explain all that," she said. "You could have just grabbed my arm and walked me back inside. Would've been faster."

"Would've also confirmed you were a prisoner," Dmitri said. "Mr. Drazen doesn't like that word used about you. Figured I'd rather explain the real situation than pretend the wrong one."

"Why does he care what word gets used?"

Dmitri looked at her for a second, like he was deciding how much to say.

"That's a question for him," he said. "Not me."

Elena glanced back at the gate one more time, then turned around and started walking back up the gravel path toward the house. Dmitri fell into step beside her, not touching her, not rushing her, just there.

"For what it's worth," he said, halfway up the path, "most people don't make it this far before they turn around on their own. You made it almost to the gate."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"No," Dmitri said. "Just an observation."

By the time they reached the front steps, Elena understood something she hadn't fully understood last night, standing in that hallway listening to Kirill lay out his rules. The locks weren't on the doors. They were on the numbers. A door she could open any time she wanted, and it still wouldn't matter, because the real cage was a debt she couldn't see and couldn't touch and couldn't argue her way out of with any clever line about interest rates.

That was worse than a locked door. A locked door, at least, she could have picked, or broken, or waited out.

This one just followed her, no matter which way she walked.