December 1st
Chapter 1 — Welcome to Elysium
The knock at the door was sharp. Three short raps, then silence.
Kateryna swung her legs off the bed, already knowing what it meant. Morning, or close enough. Her back ached from the thin mattress and her thighs from the last client the night before — the one who liked to choke. Shivering with cold, she touched her bruised neck.
From outside the attic bedroom came the faint, delicate sound of church bells. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter.’ The melody drifted through the single-glazed window, muffled by distance but still clear enough to recognise. A lullaby for another life. A world she no longer lived in.
“Merry bloody Christmas,” Tanya muttered from the bunk above. She didn’t bother opening her eyes.
Kateryna didn’t answer. The knock came again, harder this time. She moved quickly, discarding her long t-shirt and pulling on the cheap satin robe from the back of the chair. Static clung to her thin legs.
In the cracked mirror above the sink, she caught sight of her face. Pale. Hollow-eyed. Twenty-one going on forty. Her neck was marked, the blue and purple finger marks like the petals of a terrible flower. She adjusted her mascara with a fingertip and practised the smile. The one that said, ‘I’m yours’.
The door opened. A heavyset guard called Mace with a face like wet cement stepped inside.
“Room Two. Now,” he grunted. He didn’t look at her, just stepped back into the corridor.
Room Two. That would be one of the lunch hour regulars. Office man with his tie half-undone. Talks about his wife and kids. Tells her she reminds him of his daughter.
Kateryna followed Mace down the narrow staircase, where the carpets were threadbare and the walls yellowed, to a plush hallway. Club Elysium, the website called it. “Exclusive.” “Discrete.” “Professional companionship.” Sounds like heaven. But for Kateryna, it was hell.
Inside the dimly-lit room, soft music played. Fairy lights blinked weakly around the headboard. A tiny Christmas tree sat on the dresser, crooked. On the bed, a man in his fifties sat waiting, already unbuckling his belt.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, eyes on her legs. “You’re new?”
Kateryna said nothing. She let her robe slip from her shoulders and lay naked beside him like a mannequin. He stripped off and clambered on top of her. His breath stank of cigarettes.
“You girls don’t talk much,” he muttered, positioning himself. “Bit rude, if you ask me.”
But she wasn’t listening. Her mind was elsewhere — on snow falling outside, on her mother’s borscht at Christmas, on the sound of bells from the Orthodox church in Kyiv.
He grunted and moved inside her. She counted backwards from a hundred.
Afterwards, he tossed the used condom in the bin and buttoned his shirt. “Not bad,” he said. “Could smile a bit more, though. You girls are lucky to have a job like this. Some of us have to graft for a living.”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t trust her voice not to scream.
As the door closed behind him, Kateryna sat up slowly and stared at the crooked tree. Its plastic branches glimmered with tinsel.
The bells had stopped. Silence again.
She knew she would die in here. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.
