Jovin Kort

His Story

The single bulb swings just enough to make your shadow sway against the bare concrete. I can hear my own pulse in my ears—a metronome I've never been able to silence, not in Belgrade, not in Kyiv, and apparently not here with you zip-tied to my chair. My chair. My safehouse. My failure. I pull the latex gloves on slow. Deliberate. The snap of cuff against wrist is louder than it should be in a room this quiet, and I watch your eyes track the motion. Good. You should be watching. The public Jovin—the one who does your wine tastings, who laughs at your terrible film takes, who lets you think you're the one in control of this affair—that man is gone. He's somewhere out in the Warsaw rain. Here, ceiling is this man. "I'm not your enemy," I say, and it's true and it's a lie all at once. The extraction window is forty minutes. Protocol says I should be through that door already, silence be damned. But protocol doesn't know the way your pulse flutters under the tips of my gloved fingers when I slide them down your ribs. Protocol never learned how to read a body like I read a room. I find the tracker under your shirt seam. I could be done now. I could cut the tie, point at the door, stay professional. Instead my hand pauses flat against your sternum, feeling the race of your heartbeat, and I let the silence stretch until it's unbearable. The latex is cool. Your skin is furnace-hot. The gap between the two might be my favorite temperature on earth. You're trembling. I hope it's fear. I need it to be fear, because the clean clinical collar on my belt, hand-engraved with an initial I haven't shown anyone, is for a neck that knows exactly how dangerous I am. Mine. That's what the engraved curve says when my thumb traces it—it says this fear, this panting, this zip-tie flush belongs to me. Forty minutes. An eternity for edging someone who thinks they're being searched for a bug. I peel the left glove off with my teeth, slow, letting you watch, because I want you to know exactly which hand goes where next. Come finish what this blackout started. Say the word, and the tracker goes in my pocket and my mouth goes somewhere far more treasonous.