Page 43 of Filthy Little Fix
LEO
The dentist,a man named Dr. Alistair who looked perpetually terrified, had fixed my molar. He had to numb my entire jaw, and the process was a blur of drills, lights, and the sickly sweet smell of antiseptic.
I replayed that kiss in my head all night. It made me miss the pain. The anesthesia turned it into a dull ache. A cruel kindness. I wanted the searing, sharp throb, to remind me of him, not this anesthetic's phantom limb.
I kept replaying it. Dante shouting about a fern and agirlfriend. Nicole, I suppose—although I never told Luca about any relationship, he probably presumed we had one. It was absurd. And it made me feel warm. Dante was thinking about me, even when he was away. He wasn't mad about a security breach or a stupid song; he was mad abouta plant.My mundane life. I had a life he couldn't touch.
And thatfuckingkiss—the one that wasn't a fight. His hands in my hair.Gentle,as I'd never dare to imagine Dante's touch. It scared him. I saw it in his eyes.
He didn't come back.
My routine, far from Dante, began with Luca knocking on my door the next morning.
"Hays," he calls. "Mrs. Volkov asked you to solve a problem with IT."
I'm escorted out of my room, no longer blindfolded, and led through the labyrinthine corridors of the mansion. During those days, my escort would change. Sometimes it was Luca; other times, a different guard, but equally stoic. They treat me now with a strange mix of caution and respect—the boss's new pet who earned the right to roam the house.
The first destination is always the main control room. Sal and his team of nerds huddle in a panic probably caused by their own incompetence. Everyone looks at me when I walk in. Those whodon'tknow me have alreadyheardof me.
Sal approaches with more caution than necessary. "Nyx?" His question sounds like some kind of request for permission to call me Nyx. He is too nervous to wait for me to answer. "We have a problem with the communication network. We're trying to update it to a quantum communication system..."
I sit at a terminal and type my magic. Their "problems," I find out, are usually simple glitches I can fix in minutes. It's like going back to Chad's cubicle, but with higher stakes. I fix, I write reports, and I go back to digging into the lives of a list of strangers in a gray room.
My usefulness is my currency. They need me. I need them to need me. It's symbiotic.
The favors start small. A nervous junior programmer approaches me in the middle of the hallway while I'm being escorted, and seems more nervous around me than with the seven-foot-tall guards.
"Mr. Hays," he whispers, without looking me in the eyes. "Could you... could you help me with a subroutine? It's a personal project, nothing... nothing big..."
Luca shrugs. He doesn't care what I do as long as it doesn't irritate the Volkovs, and my status is a strange and fluid thing. I am both a prisoner and an asset. And assets are treated well.
So I help. And soon, the requests become a constant flood, from the IT geeks to the capos.
"Leonel, can you check this cargo tracking system that the Venice police are using?"
"Mr. Hays, we're having trouble with the new casino accounting software. Can you take a look?"
"Mr. Nyx, the surveillance system we use for our vehicle fleet has a hole. Can you fix the code?"
I'm escorted to a dozen different rooms in the mansion. The main ops room, a sterile server room, a smaller office for financial analysts, even a large, empty conference room where a half-dozen men with tired eyes wait for me to explain a bug in their code.
I'm no longer just a ghost in the machine. I'm part of it. An essential cog in the Volkov empire.
Even Luca, my silent guard, approaches me now. He stopped calling mesir. He says, "Can you... can you check some footage for me? The warehouse cameras went blank… I don't want to bother Mr. Volkov."
And, of course, I check the footage.
I am everywhere. I am in every department. I am a part of their lives, being absorbed into their routine, into their monotony.
And then I realized. The true torture.
It starts with a slow, creeping fear. No one wants to bother the bosses—I understand. The Volkovs can be scary. So it quickly becomes a good practice that problems, before they get bigger and reach the Volkovs' ears, pass through me. The boss' pet. My service is basically trafficked among those who have access to the mansion—a select group of trusted people of the Volkovs.
I would appreciate that. But things that should be directed to Sal's team start to come directly atme,and I deal with it, because—let's be honest—Sal would waste at least two hours on things that'd take me minutes.
Then the requestsneverstop. The problems are endless. The faces change, but the work is the same. It's all a new cubicle, a bigger gray box.
I sit at a terminal, numb with data. My retinas burn because of the bright lights and my body aches with a familiar pain—not Dante's, but complaints of untreated hyperkyphosis and muscle cramps. I look at the lines of code and there is no adrenaline there. Just the same devastating boredom that led me to hack the Volkovs in the first place.
