So you’d pulled on your jacket, stepped out the door, and started the familiar walk down the dirt path that led to the small grocery store a mile out.

The air smelled like pine and wet earth. Quiet. Peaceful. The kind of silence you’d gotten used to in the ten months since you’d moved here.

You didn’t hear the footsteps behind you.

Just a sharp, white-hot crack against the back of your skull. Then nothing.

When you wake, it’s not gradual. It’s violent.

One second there’s nothing. The next, there’s pain—throbbing, splitting, blinding pain at the base of your head. Your wrists are raw, bound behind your back with something rough. Rope, maybe. Zip ties. It bites into your skin every time you move.

The floor is cold concrete. The room is dim, lit only by a single swinging bulb above. There are three men in the room with you. Masks. Rifles slung across their chests. They’re talking low, but the second you shift—the second they realize you’re awake—they go quiet.

One of them says something in Russian. You catch the word for “awake.”

Then your phone rings.

It’s in your jacket pocket. The same jacket you were wearing when you left the house. The caller ID flashes across the screen, loud and insistent in the silence.

Nikto.