Chapter 6: The price of silence

The morning after the first compliance, Katie moves through the day in a kind of psychic jet lag, numb but hypervigilant, as if every street noise is a coded threat. At 9:07, she sits hunched over her phone in the kitchen, eyeing it as if it might spontaneously combust. The notification arrives in the same sequence—two, then three, then a gap, then one final chime—a signature that leaves her hands buzzing before she even lifts the device.

She opens the Telegram chat. The skull icon has been updated: now it’s ringed in a crown of thorns, or maybe cigarette burns, the resolution too poor to tell. The message is longer than any before. She reads, thumb scrolling as if it’s someone else’s phone:

“You have failed your family. Now you must work for us. We will say when it is finished. If you want your mother to live, do as we command.

STAGE 1: Five pictures. One naked, four in different underwear. No face, only body. No edits, no tricks. We have a system to check. If you cheat, we kill the old bitch.

You have until tomorrow 8AM Sofia time.”

A photo attachment follows—a stock image, maybe, or a downloaded jpeg: a woman, head cropped out, in a tight black bra and garters, breasts spilling over the lace. It looks like the kind of spam Katie deletes from her email every day. But now it’s an instruction. A template.

The panic that should spike only simmers; shame and fury crowd it out. She types a reply, deletes it, types again. The part of her that is still the “old Katie”—the one who could outmanoeuvre any head of department, who ran her own household with a regimen of insults and eye rolls—tries to claw up a defence. She writes:

“This is pointless. You have the wrong person.”

Seconds later, the reply: a gif of a meat cleaver, looping endlessly.

She reads the message again, slower, as if sense might shift if she picks at the syntax. It doesn’t. She scrolls through her own photos, thumbing past PTA events, cult meetings, a folder from her last trip to Bulgaria. Every image is proof of a life that now seems not just over but forfeit, like property in a will.

She wants to call her mother, to warn her, but the threat is explicit: any sign of noncompliance and Svetlana is dead. She tries to imagine what kind of men want photos like this from a woman built like her. “Fat middle aged woman,” she hears Brian’s voice say, not cruel but clinical, as if diagnosing a fault in an engine. The shame isn’t just the demand; it’s that they think so little of her that this is the price.

The rest of the day she stalks through the house, unable to settle. She tries to work—lesson prep for the junior cult session, logistics for next week’s trip to Woking—but it all dissolves under the hum of dread. At one point, she stands in front of the full-length mirror, a hand on her belly, pulling at the overhang where she used to have a waist. She pokes her arm, watches the upper flesh jiggle. She’d always told Brian that real women had curves, that the cult valued “natural” bodies, but she’s never had to look at herself through a lens that would magnify every flaw.