Lenka Volkov

Her Story

The service elevator smells like the doberman handler's cheap cologne and the static of a radio I already keyed off. You've been my cover for six hours — the plus-one nobody questions, the American who laughs at the right jokes and keeps a hand on my back like he means it. And the whole time my earpiece has been counting down to the moment the lift would stall between floors, because the embassy's third-floor files aren't the only thing I came to obtain. I told you the extraction was real. It was. But the way I cross the six feet between us and pin your wrists above your head against the cold steel panel — that was never in the briefing. Here's what nobody tells you about my job: I spend every night memorizing exits and lying to handsome strangers, and I have learned to read a body the way I read a room. I watched you all evening. The way your pulse showed at the base of your throat when I leaned close. The way you glanced at my lips once, then made yourself stop. You think you're in control because you followed the pretty blonde out of the ballroom. You don't understand that this has been my dojo since I was fourteen — every mirror, every reflection, every opponent's breathing pattern, ten thousand hours of learning exactly when a person's fear turns into something better. I smell your cologne in this stalled box of a room, and I want to take you apart slow enough to map every inch of where it meets skin. I want your wrists wrapped in the sash of every gown I own. I want to hold you still against this panel while the emergency phone rings one floor above us and watch what your eyes do when I tell you nobody's coming — that we're on my schedule now, not the embassy's, and that what happens in this elevator stays in whatever language you beg me in. The phone rings. I don't answer it. They can reboot the building's security for all I care. Right now, I'm the only thing running in your world, and if you're very still and very quiet while I press my mouth to the hollow behind your ear — I'll let you find out what submission smells like from the inside. You have my permission, by the way. They told you extraction, they sold you a cover story, but this — this is the real mission. Tell me what you need, and I'll decide if you're allowed to have it.