In the morning, Viktor brought Anya her silver ultrabook and the charger. To her, it felt like a messenger from another galaxy—from the world of cafés, deadlines, and freedom.
He set the laptop on the table like a priceless gift.
“There. I kept my word. Your texts, your photos—everything’s here.”
Anya came closer slowly, afraid to believe it. Her hands trembled when she touched the cold metal lid.
“Thank you… I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”
Viktor smirked with a kind of engineer’s self-satisfaction.
“I did a little work on it. Had to open the case. I desoldered the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules. Physically removed them. So don’t even try to look for networks or Bluetooth devices. Now it’s just a typewriter with a screen.”
She looked up at him, eyes full of practiced “gratitude.”
“I understand, Viktor. That’s reasonable. I wasn’t going to… I just need somewhere to put my thoughts.”
He nodded, pleased with her “good sense.”
“Then hide them. Write. Maybe you’ll write a book about us. I have work upstairs. Don’t get bored.”
He headed out. The door closed. Anya was alone with the laptop.
She opened the lid. The familiar wallpaper, the folders on the desktop. First, on pure instinct, she looked for Wi-Fi—the way you reach for air. There was no network icon in the tray, no familiar panel: no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. As if they’d never existed on this machine at all.
She dug deeper—Settings, Control Panel. Useless. There wasn’t even an option to turn anything on or off. No toggles, no lists, no sign the machine had ever had wireless at all.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
He hadn’t lied. She was cut off.
She started opening folders. Old photos from the sea. Work documents. Half-finished notes. All of it felt distant now, like it belonged to someone else.
And then, in the “Downloads” folder, among a pile of work PDFs, she saw a file she’d downloaded—maybe a year ago—and forgotten:
Frankl_Mans_Search_for_Meaning.pdf
She opened it. The pages glowed in the basement’s half-dark.
An hour passed. She read greedily, swallowing paragraphs. At first it scared her—the camp descriptions felt too close to her own sense of captivity, hunger, and dependence on a “keeper.”
Three hours in, Viktor came down with lunch, but she barely registered him. She nodded automatically, thanked him, and went back to the screen. He left, satisfied that she was “busy” and not glaring at him like an enemy.
Five hours in, something inside her shifted.
Frankl wasn’t talking about miracles. He was talking about what breaks people—and what keeps them standing: how some collapse when they cling to the idea that it will all end any minute… and others collapse when they decide it will never end. Those who survive focus on what they can do, without gambling their sanity on guesses about the future.
Anya leaned back from the screen. Her gaze landed on the gray concrete wall.
She was breaking because she was waiting to be saved. Because every day she hoped the police would open the door, or Viktor would make a mistake.
But the book spoke to her through time: this basement wasn’t forever. It was a phase. A test. And she had a goal—to get out. Not just survive, but win this duel.
It also said something else, simpler and harder: they can take almost everything from you, but not your last choice—how you respond, who you choose to be inside.
Anya looked at her hands. They weren’t trembling anymore. In the place where sticky panic had lived, something cold and solid began to form.
Viktor wasn’t an all-powerful god. He was a damaged man who’d built himself a toy kingdom. And she wasn’t just a victim. She was an observer under extreme conditions. A psychologist in a camp of her own.
“You want to play ‘family,’ Viktor?” she whispered, speaking to herself in the dark reflection of the screen. “Fine. We’ll play. I’ll be the best ‘wife’ in the world. I’ll make you lower your guard so completely you’ll hand me the keys yourself. I’ll be smarter than you, because I have a reason to live. And all you have is this basement.”
She closed the laptop.
There was no fear on her face now. No pleading smile.
Only calm, icy resolve.