Page 1 of Vicious Doll

Iwake to the taste of copper and ketamine.

My tongue feels twice its size, mouth dry as a Mormon wedding. The drug fog lingers—that floaty, disconnected sensation where your brain's still online but your body's filed for divorce. Everything's too bright, too sharp, like someone cranked the contrast on reality and forgot to adjust the exposure.

I try to swallow but my throat sticks to itself. Gritty eyelids scrape against eyeballs that feel sunburned, even with the weak light filtering through dirty windows. The headache builds behind my eyes like pressure before a storm—the kind of pain that comes with chemical assistance, courtesy of whoever jammed a needle in my neck.

Memory comes in flashes: the safehouse. Harlow, that rat-fuck traitor. The shotgun kick against my shoulder. Blood spray painting the designer furniture like a Jackson Pollock made of some poor bastard's frontal lobe.

Killion's hands checking my wounds, clinically assessing damage without ever meeting my eyes. Running. The split-second decision to separate when another team ambushed us in the extraction corridor.

Then darkness. Chemical darkness. The kind that comes with a needle and the certainty that whatever happens next, you won't have a fucking say in it.

I peel open my eyes to unfamiliar ceiling—cracked plaster, water stains blooming like cancerous flowers against dingy white. Soviet-era construction, if I had to guess. The kind of building that's survived regimes and revolutions through sheer stubborn refusal to fall down.

My clothes are gone. I'm wearing a man's shirt, buttons askew, and nothing else. The fabric smells of unfamiliar detergent and expensive cologne—not the industrial scentless shit Dollhouse uses that costs more than designer perfume just to smell like nothing at all.

My panties are missing, a violation I file away for future reckoning. The air smells like damp concrete, cigarettes, and something earthier—mold maybe, or the particular tang of a foreign place with foreign dangers.

"Finally awake,kotyonok." The voice slides through the room like smoke, accented and amused.

I turn my head too fast, vertigo making the room spin like I'm on a carnival ride designed by sadists. Acid crawls up my throat; I swallow it down with a grimace.

He sits in a leather chair by the window, framed in weak winter light that does nothing to soften the hard edges of him.

One leg crossed casually over the other, a cigarette balanced between fingers that look equally capable of performing surgery or snapping necks.

Smoke curls around him like a living thing, a dragon lounging in its lair, his profile sharp as a freshly-honed blade against the gray sky beyond.

Alexei Volkov.

Gray Suit from the bar. The man who killed Victor Reese with a bullet to the brain. The ghost that Killion was hunting—or who was hunting us. Hard to tell which way that particular food chain flows.

"Where am I?" My voice sounds like I've been gargling glass and chasing it with gasoline. I push to my elbows, refusing to lie flat before a predator.

"Somewhere safe," he says, his accent heavier than I expect. Russian, but polished by years elsewhere—Europe, maybe London. His consonants have edges like broken bottles. "Somewhere your friends won't find you until I allow it."

I test my limbs. No restraints, but my muscles respond like they're swimming through molasses, drugged and sluggish.

My thigh throbs where wood splinters tore into it during the firefight, a dull pulsing heat that suggests infection lurking at the edges. Someone's cleaned and dressed the wound—neatly, professionally.

The bandage is hospital-grade, applied with precision that speaks of medical training.

Another violation to catalog: he or someone he employs has handled me while I was unconscious. Stripped me. Dressed me. Tended my wounds.

Each breath sends inventory reports from different parts of my body. Bruised ribs. Shoulder wrenched from the shotgun recoil. Split skin across my knuckles where I connected with some faceless operative's jaw. Nothing life-threatening. Nothing that would prevent me from killing my captor if I got the chance.

The room is sparse but not a cell. Heavy wooden furniture, old but quality, the kind with stories carved into every scratchand stain. A bed that's seen better decades, sagging slightly in the middle, covered in sheets that smell of unfamiliar detergent.

A desk with nothing on it but whorls in the grain that form faces if you stare too long. One door, thick enough to muffle screams. One window, double-paned against whatever winter waits outside.

Beyond the glass, white sky stretches like a blank canvas, highlighted by the spindly black fingers of leafless trees reaching up like drowning men's hands. No cities visible. No landmarks. No clues except the architecture and the light—the particular quality of winter sun this far north, this far east.

Okay, quick recap: I’ve been abducted by the Russian male version of the Wicked Witch of the East—minus the broom, plus a Glock.

"What's your deal, Volkov.” I push myself to sitting position, ignoring how the room tilts on its axis, refusing to show weakness even as my stomach lurches in protest. "If you wanted me dead, I'd be dead. So what's this? Interrogation? Leverage? A really fucked-up meet-cute?"

He studies me from across the room, eyes the color of frozen mud. Not cold, exactly. Just... remote. Like he's watching me from a great distance through precision optics, calculating wind resistance and bullet drop.

His stillness is unnerving—not the rigid control of military training but the patience of something that knows it's at the top of the food chain.

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