Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
“Well, focus on being charming. Brenteuil has particular tastes—he likes his women submissive but intelligent. Play the part.”
Submissive. If only he knew the rage that burned beneath my practiced smile. But I nodded, the perfect political wife, while imagining how his body would look crumpled on the marble floor of our foyer.
The front door clicked shut behind him, the sound echoing through the modernist prime minister’s residence like a gunshot. I waited, counting to one hundred, listening for any sign he might return for something forgotten. When silence persisted, I moved.
My study—the one room Takken never entered, dismissing it as my ‘little hobby space’—waited at the end of the hall. Inside, behind a false panel I’d installed myself during one of his trips to Brussels, sat an ancient laptop I’d bought with cash from a pawn shop in the old quarter. The cybersecurity office tracked every device on our network, but this machine had never touched it. I connected through a neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi, then bounced the signal through three VPN layers.
My fingers trembled as I navigated to the forum I’d been lurking on for months. NordicTruth, they called themselves. Conspiracy theorists, mostly, but occasionally someone posted data that made my blood run cold. Energy consumption reports that didn’t match public records. Brownout patterns that coincided too perfectly with spikes in industrial usage across the border.
I created an account: TrueNorth1917. Generic enough. My heart hammered against my ribs as I typed:
Check correlation between Jagland power interruptions (Jul-Sep) and Kaliningrad industrial sector reports. Someone’s selling what isn’t theirs.
I hit post and immediately cleared the browser cache. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the laptop as I powered it down. What had I done? If Takken found out—
My phone buzzed.
Not my regular phone. The burner I kept hidden in my tampon box. The one that I had never turned on, never fully activated. The screen glowed with a notification from an app I’d never seen before: a black icon with a silver raven.
Go to your bedroom. Remove your clothing. Stand in front of your mirror with this device.
The message vanished as soon as I’d read it, leaving only the strange app icon. My mouth went dry. How was this possible? The phone had been off—more important, it didn’t have any connection to a network that I was aware of.
I should have destroyed the phone immediately. Should have flushed the SIM down the toilet and pretended none of this had happened. Instead, I found myself walking toward our bedroom, each step feeling predetermined, as if I’d already made this choice long ago.
The mirror—full length, framed in austere steel that Takken had chosen—reflected a woman I barely recognized. When had my eyes gotten so hollow? When had my shoulders started curving inward like I was protecting myself from invisible blows?
I shook my head, trying to clear it, as I realized I’d just obeyed a command from… whom? And at the moment, apparently, I was considering obeying another one—of a very different kind. I watched myself shake my head again, more decisively. No.
I looked at the phone in my hand. I tapped the silver raven tentatively. A box opened up with a blinking cursor, but before I could type anything there, another message came in.
I told you to take off your clothes. Last chance.
I swallowed harder than I thought I’d ever swallowed in my life. I felt the breath coming shallow and rapid, in and out of my nostrils. I thought, then typed, This is to make sure I’m not wearing a wire or something?
I wanted it to be true. I chewed the inside of my cheek. No, I desperately wanted to want it to be true.
No. Ten seconds.
My lips parted as if I could say something that would reach the person at the other end of the terrifying messages. My finger trembled visibly as I tapped out, or what?
I had no idea whether ten seconds had actually elapsed, or whether whoever it was had simply decided to demonstrate. What seemed a microsecond after I had tapped send, I felt as if my panties had burst into flame. Fiery pain grew rapidly into tormenting heat between my thighs. I cried out, dropped the phone, hunched down, watching in the mirror as Lorna Norquist, the prime minister’s wife, clutched at her privates as if in terrible need of the toilet.
“Oh, God,” I sobbed. “Oh, no… please…”
It couldn’t be happening, yet it definitely, definitely was. I could see it happening in the mirror. I sobbed as I managed to move my hands from my lap to the zipper at my neck. As soon as I did that, the pain vanished as though it had never been there at all. The immediate result, though, felt almost as bad: I felt myself clench, down there, for the first time in months, and I felt how instantly damp I had just become.