An ominous silence prevailed over the palace that morning, a stillness resembling the calm before destructive Siberian storms that uproot trees and stones. Alexander left before dawn in a majestic procession; I saw only the flash of armored black cars swallowing the pale morning light, leaving behind the dust of dread. He did not bid me farewell with tender words, but with a sharp grey look capable of freezing the blood in my veins, and a cruel kiss on my neck that left a glaring red mark, as if stamping his seal of ownership before vanishing behind the tinted glass. "Do not leave the wing, Ayla. Curiosity in this house is the fastest route to the grave, and my eyes haunt you even in your dreams." This was his commandment, echoing in my ears like a symphony of endless threats.
The hours passed as heavily as eons, and I began to feel a strange coldness creeping into my bones, a shivering that no cover could stop. I realized then the terrifying truth: the drugs his doctors injected into me daily, those transparent fluids inhabiting my veins, were not merely to treat my ailing heart, but were "chemical shackles" binding my very being to his existence. In his absence, my body began to demand his presence, and my nerves began to scream for his dominion. It was an organized addiction Alexander had cooked over a slow fire so that I could not breathe without him, so that my lungs would become incapable of inhaling air if it was not mixed with the scent of his luxurious tobacco.
Driven by the pain of withdrawal and a suicidal curiosity that nearly tore my chest apart, I sneaked out of my room. The palace looked like a labyrinth, its high marble walls watching me in silence. I headed toward the basement, that forbidden place surrounded by an aura of death and mystery. I descended the cold marble stairs where the smell of antiseptics mixed with a pungent metallic scent, as if the earth here breathed blood and iron. Behind the advanced medical laboratory, I found a heavy iron door equipped with an electronic lock requiring a fingerprint and a code. With trembling fingers and heartbeats nearly piercing my ribs, I entered the code I had glimpsed one night between his long fingers. The door opened with a quiet hiss, only to be swallowed by a pitch darkness that was soon dispelled by dim motion-sensor lights.
I gasped in shock, my hand over my mouth, as if the earth had split open and swallowed me. It was not a torture chamber; it was a "temple" dedicated to one man's obsession. The walls were covered with photos of me, hundreds of photos I never knew existed. The images began from the age of eighteen, the moment my features of womanhood began to crystallize. Photos of me walking in the public park, reading a book on a dilapidated bench, laughing with Sophia with an innocence I thought was hidden from the world. He had been watching my maturity, watching the blooming of my body and its details with the coldness of a sniper waiting for the right moment to strike. I was no coincidence in his life; I was a "project" being fattened with demonic patience for years.
In the center of the room, on an ebony table, I found a file bearing the gilded "Wolf" emblem. Old papers, written in harsh Russian, and names of mysterious families I had never heard of before. And while I was trying to comprehend the horror of being an "idol" worshipped in the dark, I felt a sudden coldness touch the nape of my neck, and the scent of his fine cigar—that bitter blend of tobacco and musk—filled the room to choke my breath.
"Did you like what you saw in the gallery of my stolen memories, Ayla?" he asked in his sonorous, deep voice, which carried the tone of death and lust simultaneously.
I turned in panic, my eyes colliding with his broad chest covered in a bleak black shirt. He stood like a mountain of suppressed rage, peeling off his leather gloves with a slowness that invoked terror, his grey eyes burning with a demonic fire I had never seen before.
"You are sick... You were watching me for years? You saw me starving and crying while you possessed all this?" I screamed, tears pouring down burningly, as I tried to back away until my body hit the wall covered with photos of me stripped of privacy.
He took one step toward me that was enough to suck the oxygen from the room. "I wanted life to break you completely, Ayla. I wanted you to lose hope in every man, in every shelter, so that you would come to me crawling, begging for salvation. I wanted to be your god and your only savior, the person who grants you life and owns the right to reclaim it." He gripped my jaw with a force that made my facial bones scream, and tilted my head so my gaze met his, which was drowning in madness. "And since you have profaned my altar with your damned curiosity, it is time you knew the meaning of absolute, indivisible ownership."
He shoved me toward a cold metal table in the center of the room, and with stunning speed, pulled out sturdy leather restraints attached to the table's edges. "Alexander, no! Please, let me go!" I screamed, trying to resist, but his strength was crushing, as if I were trying to move a giant boulder. He bound my wrists tightly above my head, then pulled my legs to bind them at the other end of the table, until I was splayed out before him—helpless, stretched taut, and exposed under the bright lights that revealed every tremor in my body.
"I will place a mark on you that time dares not erase," he said, producing a small tattoo machine, his voice terrifyingly calm as he prepared the needle. "This tattoo will not be ordinary ink; it will be the title deed to your blood and flesh. Every man who tries to look at you will know that you are forbidden territory, that you are a spare part in Alexander's colossal machine."
He began driving the needle into the delicate, sensitive area directly beneath my breast, above the heart he had installed in my chest like a mechanical component. I let out a scream that shook the sealed walls of the basement; a burning pain like fire gnawing at my skin, but he did not stop. He looked into my eyes with sadistic coldness, enjoying the sight of my brokenness and my tears wetting the metal table. "Scream, Ayla... I want this place to be watered by your screams. I want you to realize that no one will hear you but me."
He was not satisfied with the physical pain of the tattoo; he began tearing what remained of my clothes with his bare hands, and began to possess me physically with a savagery befitting his title and the dominance of his obsession. It was a scene drowning in blackness and forbidden lust; the needle carving the letter "V" in Russian into my skin, while his massive body carved his sovereignty into the depths of my womanhood. The restraints prevented me from escaping his poisonous pleasure and lethal pain, and I arched beneath his dominion as if being slaughtered alive.
"I hate you... I will kill you one day!" I screamed between my torn sobs, but my treacherous body, poisoned by his drugs, began to tremble under his touch in a terrifying way. The addiction he had planted in my blood made my nerves ignite with a desire that contradicted my terrified mind. I began to shiver under his cruelty, and screams of pain began to turn, against my will, into moans of deformed ecstasy, making me loathe myself even more than I loathed him.
"Say you are mine," he roared in his low voice, wrapping his hands around my neck with a gentleness that threatened strangulation, his eyes tracking every movement of my bound body. "Say you adore this enslavement, that you do not want to escape this table."
"Never... I will... never say it," I uttered, tears blinding my vision, trying to cling to the last atom of my remaining pride, even though he was tearing me apart from the inside with cold poise.
"You will say it," he whispered as he continued drawing the tattoo with frightening focus, like an artist painting his final masterpiece in blood. "You will say it when you discover that without me, you are just a lifeless corpse in a dark alley. I am the air that allows my patient's lungs to function, I am the blood flowing in your veins, and this tattoo is the seal that locks the doors of the world in your face forever."
The physical and psychological confrontation continued for long hours inside that isolated basement. The dialogue between us flowed with torn groans and cruel words that stripped one of humanity. He forced me to look at the tattoo as he carved it, forced me to see how my pale color turned to irritated red under his black ink. "Look, Ayla... this is your inevitable fate. You are not Ayla the poor orphan... you are Alexander's object, the tattooed doll that grants me ecstasy."
When he finally finished and undid my leather restraints, I was a human wreck shivering on the cold metal, unable even to touch my face. He looked at the irritated red tattoo under my breast with a dark smile of victory that froze my insides. He bent down and kissed the letter carved into my skin with a tenderness that was more terrifying than his previous savagery, as if sanctifying the idol he had made with his own hands.
"Now, return to your room and wash away your tears," he said, buttoning his shirt with total coldness as if nothing had happened. "My absence today was to cut the last tongue in this city that might dare to mention your old name or wonder about your whereabouts. From today, you have no past, and you have no future that does not begin with me and end with me."
As I tried to cover my tattooed body with trembling fingers, dragging the tails of my disappointment toward the stairs, I realized I had entered a layer of hell from which there was no return. I did not admire him; I loathed him with every cell in my body, yet I was unable to breathe without him. He had succeeded in transforming me into an "idol" belonging only to him, and I had become addicted to the monster who worshipped and destroyed me all at once—a jailer who had become the entire world to his victim.