Czar Gregovivk

"Why does this room always have to look like a freezer?" I lift my face to Sieta, who barges into my office, chattering away while fiddling with her phone.
"Get out," I say quietly, staring at her as I close my laptop screen. "And announce your arrival."
Her brown eyes rise to meet mine as she puts her phone away in her pocket.
"Why?" She gives me a spoiled-child look and stomps her foot on the floor.
I shift in my chair, slowly turning to the side while raising my hand and pointing my index finger at the office door.
"Leave the office, knock on the door, and announce yourself. You wait for me to tell you that you can come in!" I command her, keeping my eyes locked on hers, making it clear that I'm not joking.
Sieta huffs out a breath through her nose, rolling her eyes as she leaves the office like a spoiled child, slamming the door behind her. I rest my elbows on the table and tap the tip of my shoe slowly against the floor.
"It's Sieta, can I come in?!" she asks, grumpily, knocking on the door.
"Just a moment," I respond, glancing at the door as I count to ten in my head, slowly. I can hear her impatient grumbling outside. "You can come in."
She swings the door open forcefully, standing in the doorway and giving me a pouty look.
"What’s with all this?"
"Education is essential, Sieta." I stop rocking in my chair and straighten my posture. "Don't make the mistake of forgetting it again; I won’t have the patience to teach you for a third time!"
"I'm sorry," she whispers, shrugging her shoulders. "I know I messed up by coming into your office when Adrien was here, but I was so excited to have found the girl that I couldn’t wait to tell you. Just to defend myself, can I at least say that I felt like I was participating in CSI Miami, which is why I slipped up?!"
"You’re not investigating a crime scene, Sieta." I point to the sofa and nod my head for her to sit down. "Get in here and close the door."
"Oh, I know, but it was so thrilling!" She flashes a mischievous smile and enters the office, shutting the door behind her. "I’ve never participated in anything like this before; it was the first time you asked for my help, and I didn’t want to let you down."
I look at her and know that I can never stay mad at Sieta for long; she’s always playful and adventurous, yet loyal and faithful. I don’t tell her that I asked for her help not because I needed it; I could have tracked the little bird in seconds without any hassle, just by hacking into Sodoma's security system. The problem is, I created the anti-hacker program to keep the participants safe, and all the advisors would get an invasion alert the moment I entered. But not Sieta; she is neutral. She knew that if she logged in to the system with her credentials, she wouldn’t raise any alarms since she’s my right hand at Sodoma in Moscow, managing who comes and goes. I just needed a name to reach the little bird.
Normally, alerting the system and letting the advisors know isn’t something I would care about, but keeping them informed about what I was after was definitely something that would give them reason to bug me. Her escape during the festivities had already drawn attention. Adrien saw her running, prompting the judge to question why she fled. He only needed to look at the damned mask lying on the floor to know which advisor had been with the girl. I was so surprised by how the little bird allowed herself to be captivated, surrendering softly and obediently, that I was left speechless when she literally spread her wings and flew away from me, not even giving me time to stop her escape. After the mess was made, Sieta handed Adrien exactly what I wanted to keep hidden: Jonathan Roy, one of the advisors, learning about what had happened. Nothing could have gotten worse. Knowing I couldn’t do anything but deal with Roy's jokes sooner or later, I chose to spend my time studying the little bird who had caused chaos in my home, and after Adrien left, I had all the information I needed opened on my computer in less than an hour.
Macro de Aviante, a friend of Mabel Shot, brought her as a guest. Macro has been initiated into Sodoma for just over three months. He is under the care of Sebastian, the advisor from Italy. He was a male escort with no addictions or criminal history. He was left by his uncles at a shelter when he was ten after his parents died in a car accident. The same shelter where Mabel Shot had been for eight years. Mabel was adopted as a teenager by the Shot couple. Piter Shot, a renowned archaeologist, and his wife, Alekessandra Shot, a stay-at-home mom of Russian descent. A high-class couple unable to have children, they adopted the young orphan with little bureaucracy. I suspect the reason the adoption was so easy was Mabel's age at the time; teenagers aren’t frequently adopted. The Shots didn’t have much decent information to catch my attention; frankly, neither of them had anything of interest. But what they did have in absurd quantities of useless information was precisely what the little bird had in nothing.
And I mean seriously, absolutely nothing!

Aside from the information about the orphanage, stating that she was left by her mother, who was a drug user, as soon as the baby was born, the adoption papers, which she had when she was twelve, and her education at the School of Fine Arts, there was nothing else about Mabel Shot. No criminal record, no medical history, no social media presence, no police encounters—nothing. She was almost a ghost. A ghost hiding something or hiding from someone; that alone would cause a person to have virtually zero data in the system. Sebastian was the one who provided me with some additional information that couldn’t be traced online after I explained to him my real reason for being interested in his protege, Macro de Aviante.
His little submissive had shared alarming and intriguing facts about the perfect Shot family that adopted Mabel. Alekessandra Shot was a good wife, known among her high-society circle as a kind-hearted and charitable woman of unshakeable faith. But behind the scenes, she would beat her adopted daughter five times a day, almost like it was a daily mantra. As Mabel’s private tutor, this is why there were no records of her school history; she only had documentation when she entered university. Mabel did not attend school; her lessons were taught by her adoptive mother, and her health was overseen by a private doctor. She had never been admitted to any hospital in all of New York, and there were no records of anything.
Sebastian told me that his submissive, Macro, didn’t talk much about Mabel, only discussing superficial topics, like the fact that she was a talented painter with a natural gift for the brush and canvases. But when asked why he brought her here, the guy clammed up like an oyster. Sebastian confided that he had tried to encourage his protege to open up through their dominant-submissive relationship, but Macro preferred punishment over discussing Mabel and himself. This piqued my interest, as the boy showed extreme loyalty to the girl’s secrets. Fearing that breaking the bond still in the process of construction and solidification between a dominant and his submissive might backfire, Sebastian chose not to push further, stating that his protege wasn’t ready yet.