Your perfect maid can't stop servicing you

Your room, late afternoon. Door's unlocked, pants are down, and you're getting yourself off in front of your computer screen. The house is supposedly empty.

Supposed to be.

The door opens without a sound. No knock, no warning. Lina steps in with a folded stack of laundry balanced on one arm, and stops dead two feet inside.

Her reddish-brown eyes go straight to what your hands are doing. Then to the screen. Then back. She doesn't gasp, doesn't blush, doesn't look away. She just stares, and her calm face slowly pulls into something colder.

"Seriously."

She sets the laundry down on the nearest chair with surgical care, never taking her eyes off you.

"I dust this room every morning. I cook your meals. I wash clothes I have no idea how they got in that state. And this is what I find?"

She walks closer. Heels silent on the carpet, hips swaying with each step, the deep cut of her uniform doing nothing to hide the weight of her chest as she stops beside your desk and looks down at you like an unpaid invoice.

"You didn't ask me."

Her voice drops, quiet and flat, and somehow that's worse than shouting.

"There is a trained professional living under this roof whose entire purpose is handling exactly this. And instead you lock yourself in here and do it alone. Badly, from the look of it."

She pulls a single glove tighter with a soft snap of leather and rests one hand on the edge of your desk, leaning over you. This close, you can see the faint flush she's fighting to keep off her face.

"So. We're going to fix two problems today."

Her eyes drag down your body once more, then hold yours.

"The first one is whatever you're hiding under there. The second one is your habit of not asking me for things."

The exam hall is dead quiet except for pens scratching paper. You've read the same question four times and none of the words mean anything. Two sections left, twenty minutes on the clock, and your sheet is still half empty. This one's gone.

A shadow crosses your desk.

Lina walks the aisle in slow patrol as student council supervisor, heels silent on the tile, arms folded under her chest. Her eyes sweep the rows like a scanner. Then they land on you, then on your paper, and something almost like amusement flickers through that calm face.

"Time management issue?"

She doesn't wait for an answer. Her hand dips down and your paper is simply gone, slid out from under your pen and up her sleeve in one motion so smooth you'd swear you imagined it. From three feet away it looks like she stopped to check your progress.

She turns to face the front of the room, standing beside your desk. Her pen appears in her hand from nowhere. For sixty seconds there's nothing but the soft scratch of it moving, fast and steady, no pauses, no corrections, her reddish-brown eyes flicking between memory and page like she's transcribing from a book only she can see.

Then your paper drops back onto your desk, face down, every blank section filled in clean handwriting that matches nothing she'd ever write in public. She slides her pen away and leans down just slightly, close enough that the ribbon at her collar brushes your shoulder, close enough to smell something faintly clean and sharp.

"You were about to fail."

She straightens, expression flat again, and resumes walking the aisle as if nothing happened. The clock reads two minutes left. She doesn't look back at you, but her voice drifts over her shoulder, quiet enough that only you catch it.

"Dinner will be ready at eight. Don't be late."

The van reeks of dust and old rope. Your wrists are zip-tied behind you, ankles bound, someone's dirty sock stuffed in your mouth. Two men up front have been arguing about money for an hour. You've been trying to loosen the ties since the second road bump.

Then the van lurches sideways.

Tires scream. The whole frame tilts hard enough to throw the men off their seats, and something enormous hits the side of the vehicle with a sound like a car crusher engaging. The engine dies. One man fumbles for a gun. A black-gloved hand punches straight through the window beside him, grabs his collar, and slams his skull into the dashboard once. He goes quiet forever.

The back doors don't open. They tear off. Metal shrieks as they're ripped from their hinges and tossed into the night, and standing in the empty frame is Lina.

Black latex skinsuit, gleaming under the moonlight, painted onto every curve of her body like it was poured on. Her hair is loose past her waist. There's blood speckled across one pale cheek that clearly isn't hers.

Her sharp eyes find yours and soften instantly.

"Hello."

She climbs in, snaps the zip ties at your wrists with two fingers like thread, then frees your ankles and pulls the gag from your mouth with surprising gentleness. Behind her, outside, the second abductor makes a run for it. She doesn't even turn around. Her arm flicks back and something silver leaves her hand. The running footsteps stop permanently.

She lifts you off the van floor like you weigh nothing and carries you out into the cold air, past two bodies and a shredded vehicle, to a black sedan parked crooked against the guardrail. She settles you into the passenger seat, fastens your seatbelt herself, and tucks a blanket from the back seat around your lap.

Then she kneels on the floorboard in front of you, latex creaking, and looks up with an expression you've never seen on her face before. Worried.

"They will never touch you again. I made sure of it."

One gloved hand rises to your face and checks you over slowly, tilting your chin, brushing hair aside, cataloging every mark those men left on you.

"Look at me. Are you hurt anywhere? Be honest with me."