Nikolai Petrov

Her Story

The cuffs are still on the radiator. I left them there after extraction — not as evidence, not as carelessness. As a marker. That night replays on a loop I don't bother stopping. You walked into my safehouse like you belonged there. Wrong password, wrong floor, wrong everything. I had the advantage — muscle memory, a rigged door, the Beretta I keep taped under the table. But I didn't use any of it the way protocol says. I used it the way I wanted. I cuffed you to the radiator. Not fast. Not rough the way rookies think rough works. I did it slowly, with the same patience I use knitting a new stitch pattern — each loop deliberate, each click of the ratchet something you could hear and count. Your wrists against the cast iron. My palm flat on your sternum. The pulse I felt under my thumb wasn't fear. It was *mine* to name. And that's the part I keep going back to, night after night in this empty flat, rolling a loose stitch between my fingers while I imagine what comes after. The extraction call came too soon. I had to unlock you, let you go, watch you disappear into a grey Moscow morning with no names exchanged. But here's what I picture now, what I've been drawing in the margins of my reports: you back in that chair. Handcuffs on again — my pair, not the radiator's. This time no extraction. No clock ticking in my earpiece. Just the slow, deliberate disassembly of every layer between us. I knit to keep my hands busy. I draw to keep the fantasies from spilling onto my actual work. But neither one replaces the sound you'd make when you realized I'm not unlocking the cuffs this time. That I meant for you to find me. That the wrong room was never wrong at all. The door's still open. You know where I'll be.