She awoke to find herself lying on a mattress on top of a metal camp bed. They had dressed her again and her clothes smelled musty and dirty. There were several blankets over her and she saw that she was still in the cold-meat store. No, not still; she realised that they must have taken her out of the store to warm her up and stop her terminal decline into a hypothermic death. That would have taken time and skill. Maria rolled up the sleeves of her coat and jumper. She found what she was looking for on her left arm: a fresh puncture wound into a vein. Her brain was still running sluggishly and her head pounded but she knew what this meant: they would have administered a warm dextrose and saline drip to increase her core body temperature, and they would probably have put a mask on her to administer warm, humidified oxygen.

Maria knew that she was already a dead woman. And before she died there would be a lot of pain: both for Vitrenko’s enjoyment and to extract whatever information he could from her. But Maria was aware that what she knew was not enough for him to keep her alive. He was going to use her somehow to gain access to the dossier he was obsessed with. She had to escape: it was the only way for her to survive. And to stop Vitrenko from winning.

Maria still felt chilled to the core. She sat up on the edge of the bed and gathered the musty blankets around her. She removed her glove and waved her naked hand through the air. The temperature in the cold store was tolerable. It would have taken a long time to remove the chill from the air. There were no heaters in sight but she surmised that they must have been used. Maria’s guess was that she had been taken out, treated for hypothermia and kept sedated somewhere until the temperature in the store had risen sufficiently. This was no longer a torture chamber, merely a place of confinement. For the moment.

Maria tried to stand but an electric shock of pain from her cracked ribs jolted her. She allowed her fingers to explore gingerly beneath her jumper. Her ribs had been strapped. She eased back on the camp bed and thought about Buslenko, someone who had existed for her only through Vitrenko’s masquerade. She lay still, looking up at the ceiling with its bleak, relentless neon light and mourned a man she didn’t know.