The crimson leather jumpsuit, frankly, was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

  And not just in a “wow, that’s tailored” kind of way. No, it was supporting, reinforcing, and possibly under contract with a structural engineer. Svetlana Orlova, a woman with the physique of a female wrestler and the emotional range of a chainsaw, filled the doorway like a Russian, brutalist, stone monument.

  Svetlana Orlova entered without ceremony.

  She didn’t need theatrics. Her presence alone altered the physics of the room. The air seemed to hold its breath. Even the lamp’s flicker steadied, as if unwilling to offend.

  Her short, flame-red hair flickered like it was freshly ignited, and her eyes—icy blue, devoid of warmth or anything vaguely human—scanned the room with the precision of a laser-guided missile and the enthusiasm of a DMV employee on their fifth espresso. She didn’t blink much. She didn’t need to. Why blink when you can kill someone just by making eye contact?

  Throughout the house, muffled polka music played on. Its jubilant presence was not a mistake. With hidden speakers strapped to the walls with the sound pounding directly into the plaster, this was a tactical decision to render any outside surveillance microphones useless. So, the music bounced on, cheerful, chipper, deeply inappropriate. It sounded like something you’d hear at a German beer hall or inside the mind of someone having a full-blown psychotic episode. The wallpaper, tasteful in that Southern grandma kind of way, curled slightly at the corners, as if trying to quietly excuse itself from what was about to happen.

  At the center of the room: a man.

  His name was Henrik Lenz. Most people never noticed him, and Henrik liked it that way. He was the kind of man who remembered birthdays, sent thank-you notes, and apologized when he bumped into furniture. A quiet, middle-aged logistics coordinator for a boutique travel agency that catered—very discreetly—to clients who valued privacy above all else.

  It wasn’t his fault that many of those clients were criminals, spies, and people with enemies.

  Henrik never asked questions. Not out of fear—but out of principle. His job was to reroute plane tickets, update passports, schedule crossings at border checkpoints nobody officially acknowledged. He helped people disappear, but not all of them were bad. Some were just… scared. Women fleeing violent husbands. Journalists avoiding extradition. Whistleblowers.

  So, Henrik helped. He bent the rules when the cause felt right. Slid a forged identity through a customs backdoor here, arranged a midnight ferry ride there. In his mind, it balanced out. A quiet kind of justice. The kind nobody wrote poems about.

  He never considered himself a spy. He didn’t carry a gun. He didn’t eavesdrop or steal files. But the information passed through him—who was going where, when, and under what name.

  And someone, somewhere, was a client of his, and Svetlana needed their information.

  Blindfolded. Sweating. Tied to a chair so ostentatiously baroque it looked like it had been stolen from a haunted French opera house. The kind of chair that screamed, “This won’t end well, but at least we’ll look fabulous.” The man sat slumped, blindfolded, hands bound tight to the arms of the chair. His breath came in panicked bursts, short and uneven, a heartbeat trying to outrun time itself. Blood—old and new—matted the collar of his shirt. His body twitched occasionally. Whether from pain or fear, it no longer mattered. He had been in this room for hours.

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  He whimpered. Not a word yet—just a sound. A sad, wet sound. Like a raccoon in a washing machine. Svetlana’s lip twitched. Maybe it was a smirk. Maybe a muscle spasm. Maybe gas. One could never be sure with Svetlana, because Svetlana didn’t emote. She calculated.

  She stood tall and terrible in the doorway, framed by darkness, wrapped in a crimson leather jumpsuit that clung to her frame like a second skin. It reflected the light in shifting planes, gleaming where her curves caught it, disappearing into shadow where her silhouette narrowed into something sharp and lethal. Her short red hair flared like a warning signal. Her eyes, a glacial, expressionless blue, fixed on the man with clinical detachment.

  She closed the door behind her.

  Her steps were slow, deliberate, heels clicking like a metronome for dread. Each step said, “I don’t need to rush. You’re not going anywhere.”

  What followed wasn’t loud. Not the way people imagined torture. There was no yelling. No taunts. No sadistic monologue. Just the slow, meticulous unraveling of a human being.

  Svetlana moved like a surgeon—precise, economical, disturbingly calm. She began with the hands. When the man screamed, she tilted her head slightly, listening, not with malice, but interest. As though she were tuning an instrument.

  She didn’t rush. She never rushed.

  Sometimes she asked questions. Her voice was quiet, almost kind. A gentle lilt undercut by something cold enough to frost bone. He would try to answer. Sometimes she let him. Other times she interrupted—with a sudden twist, or the use of a tool.

  There were pliers. Scalpels. A coil of thin wire. None of them gleamed; each had been used too often for that.

  She then focused on his ribs—slowly, methodically, her knee pressed against his chest as she applied pressure. The sound was loud in the small room, competing only with the man’s guttural gasps, and a muffled polka tuba solo. The track seemed to loop. Again. And again. The tuba never tired. The clarinet never questioned its purpose. But no. It wasn’t looping. That was just the song.

  At one point, he passed out. She revived him with smelling salts and a slap that left a handprint the color of wine.

  She asked another question. He answered too slowly.

  She paid a little more attention to the whimpering man.

  Eventually, the pain broke him. The words spilled out. Names. Locations. Codes. He talked until his voice failed, then whispered until his breath grew wet and useless. Svetlana never wrote anything down. She never repeated a question. She listened, nodded once, and when he stopped shaking—when she was satisfied—she stood.

  And then the knife.

  It appeared like a magician’s trick—sleek, silver, and terrifyingly small, like it didn’t need to be big to do what it was born to do. She twirled it between her fingers with the bored ease of someone flipping through radio stations in search of something violent.

  The man must’ve sensed it, because he used his last energy to beg—a garbled plea.

  The knife didn’t care. And neither did Svetlana.

  With the practiced motion of someone peeling a grape, she slid the blade between his ribs. He jerked once. Twice. The final blow was swift. The man’s head fell forward with a soft, wet thud. Blood slid down his chest in lazy rivulets. His body remained in the chair for a few seconds more, swaying gently as if unsure it had permission to die.

  Svetlana watched, unblinking.

  The rest of the band suddenly rejoined the tuba player from the polka, of course. It just kept going. A relentless, chipper soundtrack to murder.

  Then, with the toe of her boot, she tipped the chair sideways. The body crumpled to the floor, a rag doll in a business suit, limbs bent at odd angles. She bent slightly—not to inspect, but to retrieve the blood-slick knife, wiping it clean against his shirt without looking.

  She left the room with the same silence she’d brought in.

  Her gloved hand smoothed a wrinkle in her jumpsuit.

  Professionalism.

  The scent of blood mixed faintly with her perfume—something French and expensive, with top notes of lilac and bottom notes of “oh god she’s behind me.”

  She turned and left. But before leaving the room, Svetlana murmured a phrase in Russian—low, like a benediction or a curse. Something about “snow melting in spring.” Henrik wouldn’t have understood it. But it wasn’t for him.

  The door shut behind her with a soft click, as if the room itself was trying not to draw attention to what had just transpired. The polka continued, cheerfully blaring on as if nothing had happened, which, to the stereo, was true.

  Outside, a black sedan waited at the curb, engine idling low. She slid into the driver’s seat, her jumpsuit creaking faintly as leather strained against muscle. She adjusted a side mirror with a manicured finger, shifted into drive, and pulled away. The tires whispered across the pavement. No hurry. No rush. The job was done.

  Back inside, the house settled.

  The lamp flickered once, then died.

  And silence—thick, metallic, and final—settled in.