Monday began with the heavy clang of the lock. Early in the morning Viktor opened the door and simply called her upstairs to the kitchen. His voice was even, but there was a certain tautness in it, as if he himself didn’t fully understand how to behave after yesterday’s burst of rage.
When Anya came into the kitchen, everything was still gleaming from the cleaning she’d done the day before. Sunlight fell on the polished surfaces she had scrubbed to exhaustion, and it stood in cruel contrast to the dark red blotches hidden beneath the fabric of her dress. Viktor stood by the stove, his back tense.
He turned when she entered. In his eyes was a complicated mix: relief, the remnants of nighttime suspicion, and the awkwardness of a man who had lost control of himself yesterday.
“Anya, sit down.” He pointed to a chair. “We need… we need to talk about what happened yesterday…”
He was clearly about to launch into a long, self-justifying monologue, perhaps even apologize in his own way, but Anya didn’t give him the chance. She knew: if he started explaining, he might arrive at conclusions she wouldn’t like. She needed to seize the initiative through submission.
“Viktor, please,” she interrupted him gently, lowering her head so he could see only her defenseless neck.
She folded her hands in her lap; her voice trembled slightly—just enough to sound sincere.
“I want to ask for your forgiveness. I screwed up. I spent the whole evening thinking about how wretched and imperfect human words are. You said: ‘Clean everything you can reach.’ I took it too literally… I used chairs to reach higher, and by doing that I crossed your unspoken boundaries. I wanted to give you a perfect result, and in the end I brought only chaos.”
She raised her eyes to his, full of quiet sadness.
“I’m so afraid that because of this mistake you’ll lock me back in the basement,” she whispered, and her lower lip trembled almost imperceptibly. “Please, let me continue. Let me have dinner here and use the bathroom. Those hours upstairs are the only thing that gives me the strength to be that ‘value’ you see in me. I promise: no more chairs and no more improvising. I’ll only clean what’s at eye level.”
Viktor froze with the coffeepot in his hand. Her words settled over his anger from yesterday like healing balm. She had acknowledged her guilt herself, framed his aggression as a misunderstanding, and—most importantly—confirmed his status as the supreme judge.
“You… you really see it that way?” His voice softened noticeably.
“Yes,” she nodded. “We just understood the same thing differently. I wanted too much to please you. Will you let me continue? It… it makes me better for you.”
Viktor slowly set down the coffeepot and came up to her. He laid his hand on her head, almost as if she were a pet that knew it had done wrong.
“All right, Anya. All right. I appreciate your honesty. Your ability to analyze your mistakes is what makes you special. Continue. We’ll leave everything as it is. But…” His voice hardened for a second. “No more improvising.”
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“Never. I promise you.”
Eat up, my Gardener. Go on. How easily you swallowed it. It’s so convenient for you to believe that I’m just a stupid, overly diligent girl who ‘misunderstood what you said.’ Right now you feel like a great, all-forgiving deity, but in reality you just put everything back where it was. You gave me back the bathroom. You gave me back the kitchen. You didn’t even notice how I legitimized my right to ‘make a mistake’ in the future. Now, if I do something suspicious, I’ll say again that I ‘misunderstood what you said.’
After breakfast Anya went back down and was alone again in the sterile silence of her basement. She walked slowly to the couch, but didn’t sit. She stopped in front of it, staring at the rumpled upholstery—at the exact spot where he had thrown her yesterday like an old rag.
Something inside her began to boil. It wasn’t just indignation; it was a thick, scalding brew of humiliation, the ache in her shoulder, and the awareness of what a vile, sticky lie she had had to feed him over breakfast. Rage rose from her belly, demanding an outlet. She wanted to grab a pillow and tear it with her teeth, to scream until the concrete floors trembled, to spit into the camera exactly what she thought of this “Architect,” this scum who had imagined himself a god.
But she didn’t move.
Anya stood motionless, like a statue. She knew: the camera would catch the slightest tremor of her fingers. If she gave in now, if even one thread of her true self seeped out—everything, the whole game, all that carefully crafted pretense would turn to dust.
She began methodically, layer by layer, to push that rage deep inside herself. She packed her anger into lead containers and lowered it to the very bottom of her mind. With every inner shove, her breathing grew steadier.
A minute ago she had managed to be obedient, almost soft, in the kitchen. Down here, the mask slipped off by itself. Her eyes, which had just been shining with devotion, slowly went cold. They turned into two pieces of obsidian—dark, devoid of any human warmth. It was a terrifying look. There was no fear left in it, no hope, not even hatred in the usual sense. Only a dry, calculating will to survive remained.
Anya slowly shifted her gaze to the corner, to the place where once, in another life, Viktor had killed the cat. Before, the very memory of that scene had brought a choking lump to her throat, nausea, and helpless tears.
Now she looked at that spot in an entirely different way. No disgust surfaced in her memory. There was no horror. Only dry, documented information remained: the cat died here. It was simply a fact, stripped of emotion, like a note on a blueprint.
And that truly frightened her.
Because right after that, a question surfaced in her head. Not as a fantasy and not as a desire—as if her brain had, for some reason, thrown a prompt onto the screen:
“If it were necessary to achieve the goal… could I do the same?”
She didn’t flinch. Not because she had become “strong,” but because her body didn’t seem to react in time. No disgust rose up inside her, no pity. Something else kicked in: a calm assessment—as if someone were flipping through options.
Yes. No. Risk. Consequences. Chance to survive.
And only a second later did she realize what had happened. That the question had appeared at all. And that the answer hadn’t sounded like “never,” but like “possible under certain conditions.”
She shuddered—not sharply, but in a series of small, almost imperceptible tremors. A chill ran over her skin. For a moment she wanted to believe it wasn’t her. That it was him—his house, his air, his rules—that had plowed through her mind like this.
But the thought didn’t vanish. It sank to the bottom like a sharp object better left untouched.
Anya took another breath. She clenched her fingers until her knuckles whitened, then unclenched—carefully, so it wouldn’t look like a gesture. She didn’t have time to deal with this now. She needed to survive. Not today—in general.
She looked away from the corner and went to the mirror. The reflection showed the same fragile Anya, but the old brightness was gone from the depths of her gaze. Something else had settled there—something she was afraid to name.