Collateral Desire [ENG/Complete]

𝟏𝟏. 𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑪𝒊𝒓𝒄𝒖𝒎𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒔

It was Wednesday evening. Zabka called me at work today morning and demanded of me to come in later today, because he wanted to have a serious word with me. The thought of it made me shudder, thinking about what he did to me last time, and I knew, it had something to do with the photos. There were only two outcomes: either he would retaliate and that very harsh, merciless, and probably with causing me excrutiating pain, or he would ask me to stand down. Knowing it could go either way, I drove to the Russian consulate after I wrapped up things at my day-job. At these hours, around 6 PM, the consulate was becoming more and more empty. If he would want to hurt me, he had all night. Taking this into account, I knocked on his office door with my heart racing. I heard him stand up, open the door and lock it with his key after he let me enter. Without any of the prior procedures like handing him my phone and keys, he gently pushed me to follow him to his desk. On it its surface were the long shot and zoomed in photos. Almost emotionsless he lowered himself into his leather office chair making a sqeaking sound under his weight.
"You want to play games? I can play games too!" his voice emerging cold and pugnacious.
"Come! Come! I want you to see what I got here," I took a few steps around his desk, standing beside him where I saw him open a file. It was a video. He pressed the space bar and it started rolling.

It showed camera footage. Footage of me and Scott approaching the skyscraper building. We walked alongside each other, our shoulders bumping into each other, our hands interlaced. Out of gentle consideration for me, he slowed down his own pace to match mine. He is walking and smiling down at me. Then we are in the lobby of the building, walking to the elevators. When it jumped to the footage of us in the elevator together, the quality of the video bettered manifold. I could clearly make out our faces. Our faces are drawn to each other, planting kisses on each other's longing lips. My stomach dropped. My heart pumped my oxygen-deprvied blood through my limbs that seemed to be frozen stuck on the panneled hardwood floor. The video continued. The cameras followed us to the top floor. We pass the entrance area and we are being escorted by a waiter to our table. The video cuts off. I sigh deeply having to accept defeat: he chose to retaliate.

"Sit down, I want to talk to you," Zabka demanded and I complied holding my breath.
"Here is my proposition: you will make this disappear," he tapped his finger onto the photos in front of him.
"You will delete and destroy them from wherever you got them from, and in turn, I will delete this video and not report anything to our authorities, if you are not going to tell them anything either," I couldn't stop humming in agreement. He had me. He had full control over me.
"Because I won't allow you, to sink this ship. If I sink, you sink with me," he yelled mericless at me, almost popping a vein on his forehead.
"I could find out his identity within one week, if I wanted to. Less than one week, Veronika. I basically have his passport photo on my hard drive," he slammed his fist onto his desk, making the photos in front of him jump off the surface.

Each word he added just weighed my head down. I didn't even dare meeting his furious blue eyes. My only thought was how dumb I was. I just wanted to protect Scott.
"I have one more requirement. This can all go away, my dear. But there is one more thing that is worse than being gay in our country, and that is committing treason. You have to never see him again. I will let you make him vanish or break things off, I don't care how you do it, just do it and NEVER speak to him again," my shoulders couldn't hold the weight of my head anymore. My hair hanging on the sides of my face like thick curtains.
"Do you understand?" his trembling voice vibrated off the walls when he screamed at me. It consumed me, consumed my soul and every other little sound in this office.

"It affects your work. It affects our missions. You have to make him go away," he reitterated.
I just nodded. I took the photos off the desk and meticolously ripped them into tiny pieces, letting each piece glide into his trashcan below the desk.
"Look up here," he called for my attention. This time he turned his screen towards me.
"Because I will trust you to be precise with our deal, I will delete the video right now. In front of your eyes. And after that we will never speak of this again," I watched him press some buttons and saw the little animation of him wiping it off his hard-drive, then emtpying his virtual trash can, and resetting his PC to a previous time, where he has not yet had the footage available. 

And that was it. This sealed my break-up with Scott. Immediate, fast and within seconds. I just had to accept it, we both have to accept it, we both knew it didn't have a future anyways. No matter what would have come of it. It was merely an affair, on the verge of blossoming into something deeper, something more emotional. I was on the brink of trusting him with my body. Maybe all of this is a sign of a higher power that it shouldn't happen? Maybe it is a sign of protection from something with more meaning than humankind? After all, I did believe in destiny and faith. 

The same evening, when I was sitting at my coffee table in my apartment, I had to come up with a bullet proof way of breaking things off. It had to be something major. Scott is a puppy. He knows where I work, he will find me, approach me a million times, and I just can't and don't want to break his heart. Also, it is too dangerous to speak to him. It is too dangerous, because Zabka is not playing around. In this very same, sleepless night I came up with a plan while sifting through files and more files of new intelligence I have gathered. Concluding that I only had one option. Instead of killing him, having him killed, or have him tried for treason in the US, I wanted him to be reassigned and deployed. Reassigned to a place, where neither Zabka, nor other officals would suspect or hopefully find him.

The next day, while Pichelsberg was in a afternoon meeting, I arranged the documents necessary to seal the fate of my lover with a simple postal stamp. With a heavy heart I sealed the Russian documents into a big, white envelope, adressed to Scott's commander in chief: Commander Edward B. Jacobs. The very last page of the four-paged document was an "accidental" printer sample, and on the backside of it Scott's rank, full name and office address.