BLOOD AND ASHES

Petrov’s House

Twentythree days.

She counted those too.

The house was large and cold in the specific way of houses that had been built for status rather than comfort, high ceilings, imported marble, windows that looked expensive and let in no warmth. There were guards. There was a woman named Galina who was not a guard but who managed the household and who looked at Anya with something that was not quite sympathy and not quite contempt and never fully resolved into either.

She would later think of Petrov's house as the place where she learned the shape of endurance.

Not survival, survival was about the body, about food and water and not being killed, and the body was managing those things on its own with a steadiness that surprised her. Endurance was something else. Endurance was about maintaining the interior while the exterior was not yours to control. It was about keeping the self intact, the private self, the one no one could enter while the presented self complied with whatever was required of it.

She became very good at the division.

---

She had been there three days when she found the pen.

It was behind a radiator in the hallway, a cheap ballpoint, the kind that came in packs of ten and lost their lids immediately. Probably dropped by a workman, she thought, during whatever construction or renovation had produced the interminable smell of new paint on the first floor.

She put it in the waistband of her skirt.

That night, in the room that was hers only in the sense that it was where they put her, she took off her cardigan and drew on the inside of her forearm. Not frantically, methodically. The pigeon first, because she had been meaning to finish it and because the act of finishing it felt important, felt like a small continuity. Then the cargo hold. The curve of the hull. Dara's sleeping face. Adaeze's hands.

She drew everything she needed to hold onto.

When she ran out of room on her forearm she moved to her calf, and when she ran out of room there she started on the inside of her upper arm, which was easier to hide.

In twenty-three days she ran out of room on both arms and both legs.

She started on the wall beside her bed.

She used tiny marks, the smallest she could manage, and she drew in the corner that was furthest from the door and the light switch, in the place where the shadow was thickest. She drew Eli. She drew her mother from memory, which was increasingly imperfect, which panicked her in the specific irrational way that forgetting the faces of the dead panicked people, as though forgetting was losing them a second time. She drew her flat in Peckham: the cracked window, the safety pin on the curtain, the coffee mug on the counter that she had not washed before the men arrived.

She drew things she wanted to be true. A door standing open. A street she recognised. Eli's face, twenty years older, laughing at something.

She drew herself walking away from this house.

She drew it seventeen times in seventeen different poses, walking in seventeen different directions, and then she lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought *seventeen ways out, Anya. Pick one.*

---

Petrov was not interested in her.

She had understood, slowly, that she was not what he had expected or not what had been advertised, which was a different thing. She had been described as a companion, which was the word they used, and she had arrived two days into a screaming, silent, locked-door refusal that she had maintained with a stubbornness that had surprised everyone including herself.

She had calculated, compliance was surrender. Surrender was death, not physical death, but the other kind, the interior kind that she was more afraid of. She could comply with the small things, the ones that cost nothing, but not the ones that cost everything.

It had cost her. She didn't think about what it had cost her.

The result was that Petrov had concluded she was more trouble than she was worth and had handed her off to Galina, who installed her in the room and gave her the peripheral domestic duties of a household member who was not quite staff and not quite guest and not quite anything that had a name.

She cleaned. She cooked, when they let her. She sat in rooms and listened to men talk in Russian and she filed every word away like evidence.

She was building a case.

She didn't know against what, or what she would do with it when it was built. But the building was something to do, and doing was the only thing keeping her tethered to the version of herself she was trying to preserve.

---

She was sitting in the kitchen on the twenty-third day when she heard the sound.

It came from outside first not an alarm, something less regular and more frightening. Shouting in Russian. Then, rapidly, the particular staccato rhythm of gunfire that she had only ever heard on television and which, in person, was so much louder and so much more physical that it registered in her sternum before her brain had processed it.

She was under the table before she knew she had moved.

The house exploded into motion. She could hear running multiple sets of feet, the heavy boots of the guards. More shouting. A crash of something large and glass from the direction of the front of the house. Galina appeared in the kitchen doorway, looked at Anya under the table, said something in Russian that had the sound of an instruction, and then disappeared.

Smoke.

She smelled it first. Then she saw it curling under the kitchen door, not the kitchen door to the hallway, the other one, the one that led to what she thought of as the back rooms. Thin, grey, purposeful.

Fire.

She came out from under the table. She did not go toward the fire and she did not go toward the hallway where the gunfire was. She went to the kitchen window, which she had spent twenty-three days assessing and which she knew opened outward on a hinge and was, at a stretch, large enough.

She was reaching for the latch when the hallway door opened.

She spun around.

The man in the doorway was not Petrov. He was not one of the guards. He was tall, significantly tall, the kind of height that filled a doorframe with the sort of face that had been made for severity, sharp, angular, the jaw set like something structural. He was wearing black. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a gun at his hip that he had not drawn.

He was looking at her.

Not the way Petrov looked at her. Not the way any of them looked at her. He was looking at her the way she looked at things she was drawing with a kind of concentrated attention that was trying to understand something rather than possess it.

Behind him, the hallway was chaos. In front of her, the window. She was two steps from the latch.

He looked at the wall beside her bed. She followed his gaze automatically.

He was looking at her drawings.

The tiny careful marks in the corner, Eli's face, her mother's face, seventeen versions of herself walking out of a door.

He looked at them for a long moment. In the hallway the sound of gunfire was slowing, which she had learned meant one side was winning.

Then he looked back at her.

He said something. Russian, like everyone. She didn't understand it.

He turned to the man behind him she hadn't seen him, she'd been too focused on the tall one and said something else. The second man, shorter, with a more approachable face and currently expressing significant surprise, glanced at Anya and then back at his superior and said what sounded like a question.

The tall man repeated himself. Quiet. Absolute.

Then he walked away.

The second man looked at Anya.

"Come," he said. His English was accented but clear. "You come with us. You are safe."

She looked at the window. She looked at the hallway. She looked at the wall where her drawings were, the careful desperate record of everything she'd been trying to hold onto.

She could not take the wall with her.

She went with the men.

She did not know yet who the tall one was. She did not know that the second man was called Marco. She did not know that she had just been claimed by the most dangerous person in the criminal underworld of five countries, or that the word *safe*, in his world, was a complicated and constantly renegotiated thing.

She knew only that the house was burning and she was leaving it.

She was walking out the door.