Artem paced back and forth in the kitchen, stopped by the table, and looked at Anya. She was sitting there, staring at a single point. There were no more tears, though her face was still wet.
“So… I’m calling?” he asked quietly.
She nodded without raising her eyes.
He dialed 112 in front of her and put the call on speaker. One ring. A second.
A woman’s voice answered quickly:
“Emergency services, go ahead.”
Artem exhaled noisily, forcing himself to speak calmly.
“There’s a girl in my apartment. She says she was kidnapped and held captive. We have the address where it happened. According to her, someone died there, and there was a fire.”
The pause lasted a fraction of a second—exactly long enough for the words “died” and “fire” to settle into the system.
“Give me the address where you are now.” The dispatcher’s voice became dry and professional at once.
Artem gave the address.
“She’s conscious. Breathing normally. But she has…” He faltered and glanced at Anya. “Marks on her neck. She says he tried to hang her.”
“Understood. Do you have the victim’s full name? And the address where she was held?”
Artem looked at Anya again. She nodded. He gave her name, then dictated Viktor’s address.
“There,” he continued, “according to the victim, there is the body of a man. I haven’t seen it myself. She says he hanged himself in the basement.”
“All right. Do not go back there. Stay at your address. A unit has been dispatched,” the dispatcher said. “Do you need an ambulance?”
“I think… If possible, yes.”
“Confirmed. Wait there. Open the door for the officers. Stay available,” the dispatcher said, and ended the call.
Silence fell. Artem placed the phone on the table. He did not show it, but inside he still felt deeply uneasy.
Anya sat motionless for a little while, then gave a short sigh and said:
“Well. Just as we agreed.”
The officers arrived soon after. Footsteps and voices sounded in the stairwell. The doorbell rang. Artem opened the door, and the kitchen immediately became cramped with foreign air: wet snow on soles, the smell of the street, heavy jackets, attentive eyes.
The ambulance crew came up after them. The paramedic immediately pushed the police into the background and examined Anya quickly, but without fuss: asked her to lift her chin, shone a small light, checked her breathing, pulse, blood pressure. Asked whether she had lost consciousness, whether she felt dizzy, whether it hurt to swallow. Anya answered briefly and to the point.
The paramedic did not argue or try to persuade her—he simply reached his conclusion: after a hanging attempt, it was better to be checked. There were marks on her neck, and this was not the kind of case where “well, it seems fine” was enough. Anya agreed at once, understanding that if she did not allow it to be documented now, later anyone could say: where is the evidence?
But she flatly refused to go right away with strangers.
“The police first.” Anya nodded toward the officers waiting patiently by the wall. “I need to tell them everything while I can still speak. I’ll go to the hospital afterward. With Artem, in his car.”
She looked at him, and he confirmed with a nod.
The paramedic did not argue—after that kind of stress, people often refused ambulances. He took another form from his folder.
“That is your right. Sign a refusal of medical transport. But you need to be in the emergency department within a couple of hours.”
Anya signed quickly. The medics packed up their kit and left, closing the door behind them. The kitchen immediately felt roomier.
The officers pulled chairs up to the table and began working: asking questions in a way that would make everything fit into a report, not into a “story.” Anya named Viktor and laid out the essential facts: he had kidnapped her, held her, threatened to kill her, her mother, her friends—had shown her real footage of himself near them so she would understand these were not just words. She explained the social media too: he had run it in her place, portraying an “ordinary life” so that no one would worry or look for her. No unnecessary details—only what could be checked.
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One of the officers, a man with a sharp, tired gaze, stopped writing for a second.
“A year is a long time. Were you in the basement the whole time? Did he tie you up?”
Anya raised her eyes to him.
“For the first months, yes, in the basement. Around summer, he started letting me out. Occasionally I even went to the supermarket for groceries.”
Artem tensed, remembering their strange meeting near the checkout, and the officer frowned slightly. To someone from the outside, it always sounds insane: why would a victim go out for bread and then return to her kidnapper?
But Anya knew that silent question. And she knew how to answer it, because the answer was pure, unbearable truth.
“You’re wondering why I didn’t ask for help?” Her voice became slightly frightening. “Because he told me he would get to my family faster than the police could get to his house. He… He killed a cat right in front of me. The one I used to feed in the park… He showed me videos where he was standing near my mother, where he was following my friend. I couldn’t… I was afraid…”
The officer lowered his pen to the paper again. He had no more questions about why she had not run earlier.
Anya described the last night like this:
“He didn’t drag me by force,” she said, looking at the officer with inflamed eyes. “I simply obeyed him. When he told me to stand on the table and put the noose around my neck, I was in a fog. We stepped at the same time. I was hanging, choking, thrashing… And then the noose broke. I don’t know how. Maybe the rope was old, maybe it frayed while I was struggling, I don’t know…”
The officer nodded as he wrote. That kind of “miraculous escape” fit perfectly into the logic of accidents.
“And then everything just went dark,” Anya swallowed heavily, as if she were short of air again. “But I think I managed to catch my breath and ran upstairs. The front door was locked,” she continued, building a clear chronology. “It has a complicated lock; you can’t get out from the inside without his keys. I had to run to his study. The safe was wide open. There was a bag on the desk that he must have packed before he died: my keys were in it, my old phone, and his phone. And beside it, right on the equipment, a bottle was burning, with something wrapped around its neck. The flame was bright, and it stank of kerosene or gasoline. I got scared, grabbed the bag, found two sets of his keys, unlocked the front door, and ran outside. There I took out my phone and called the first person I could think of—Artem. He came and picked me up.”
When she finished speaking, she pushed the same black bag toward the officer. Inside were documents, keys, and both phones—nothing else. She handed over her old device as the main evidence of where her social media had been run from. She had only removed the SIM card beforehand, explaining that she needed to stay in touch with her mother. The officers did not object.
Everything in the bag was listed and packed. The contents immediately stopped being her “loot” and became someone else’s cold burden in official hands.
While one officer clarified details, Anya added one more thing: in the garden, under the bench, was the burial place of his daughter. She indicated exactly where. Confirmed that she was certain. Said Viktor himself had told her before his death. And separately—the basement: a false wall, with a stolen skeleton hidden behind it. She spoke of it quietly, like someone relaying a madman’s dying delirium. The officers exchanged glances. The picture was coming together.
The officer finished writing. On the table in front of him lay the completed forms: a detailed statement and a voluntary handover form for the items. He had already sealed the bag in plastic. He put a sprawling signature at the bottom of the pages and slid them toward Anya.
“Read them. If everything is recorded correctly from your words, sign here. Here, on the statement, and here for the seized items. An investigator will take a full statement from you later.”
Anya ran her eyes over the lines, where her lie had now become an official document, and signed everywhere he pointed. The officer gathered the sheets, snapped the folder shut, and stood.
“That’s all. We’re going. And you—go to the emergency department, as you promised the medics. Don’t delay. We’ll contact you later.”
The police left, leaving behind only the smell of wet snow and a ringing silence. Anya exhaled. Her shoulders lowered slightly—this stage was over. She looked at Artem.
“Shall we go?” she asked.
He nodded and quickly pulled on his jacket. In the elevator, he stood both too close and too far away at the same time—he still did not know where he was allowed to be so that he would not get in the way.
The emergency department was white and harsh: overhead light, the smell of antiseptic, a line of other people’s troubles no one cared about. Anya was registered and examined more carefully. The marks on her neck were recorded—the very thing left by the attempt. They asked her to show the bruise on her thigh; a painful swelling there was already darkening into purple. She briefly explained that she had hit it when she fell and landed on the concrete. That too was noted, measured, photographed for her file, so that later no one could say it had not been there. They had her sign the forms and repeated the questions again—the same things, the same words, only under a lamp.
Artem sat beside her on a plastic chair, looking at the floor and occasionally clenching his fingers, trying to keep himself grounded. He wanted to do something—and there was nothing to do except be there and not fall apart.
Two hours later, they walked out through the doors of the emergency department. The winter morning had long since ended, giving way to a dim, cold day. Anya was exhausted to the limit, but inside her pulsed a strange, dry clarity: now these were not just her words. Now it was written down. Documented. Recognized as an “event,” not a “dream.”
On the way back, they stopped by a mobile phone shop. Artem, without unnecessary words, chose and paid for a new smartphone for her so she could insert her saved SIM card. She needed some way to stay in contact with her mother and appear again in the world the Architect had erased her from.
They returned to Artem’s place. Anya took off her jacket, placed the box with the phone on the small cabinet, and for a second simply leaned against the wall with her eyes closed: not resting—checking whether she could endure one more step.
Artem silently went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. For the first time in these twenty-four hours, what was happening began to resemble the beginning of a long, heavy “after.”