The agency called it "atmospheric modelling." Irina called it what it was: standing half-naked in a stranger's cabin while he did God-knows-what around her.
"Whatever you ask for," they'd said. She'd laughed and named a figure designed to make them hang up. Thirty thousand. An hour later, confirmation.
Now she understood why.
The cabin sat three hours into the Carpathian forest, accessible only by a road that dissolved into mud, then memory. Stone foundation, wooden walls blackened by decades of smoke. No electricity. No signal. The windows were small, defensive—built for a time when the forest held things that ate men.
But parts of it reminded her of her father's ranch. The woodsmoke. The silence. The smells. She'd been twelve when the cancer came, sixteen when the medical bills ate everything—experimental drugs, they'd said, cutting-edge treatment. The ranch had been sold to cover debts she was too young to understand and too old to forget.
The man who opened the door was a giant. Wide as the doorframe.
"Vasile."
That was the only name he gave. Massive hands, silver-streaked beard, eyes the color of frozen amber. He spoke in fragments. She followed him inside, worried, and the door closed on the last of December's dying light.
-----
The first night, he dressed her.
The costume was cheap—plasticky red polyester, the kind sold at petrol stations. A "sexy Santa" outfit designed by algorithm, by a culture that had forgotten what winter meant. The bra was red lace, cut to expose her nipples. The panties had zippers front and back. He wound LED lights around her arms, her waist, her throat. Clipped weighted ornaments to her nipples—red glass spheres that swung with every breath.
Finally, the hat. Drooping, absurd, trimmed with synthetic fur. "That's it" she thought. A childish fantasy of a man who lives in the wild. To fuck a plastic Santa.
"Do not move," he said. "Do not speak. You are tree now. Whatever I do. Whatever you see. Tree."
She almost laughed. Almost. But something in his voice stopped her—not threat, something older. Instruction.
He positioned her in the center of the room, facing the hearth. Then he began.
The sound started low, in his chest—a drone that climbed into her bones before she recognized it as human. Throat singing. He circled her, stomping on packed earth, his shadow thrown wild by fireplace. The song split into harmonics that shouldn't exist in a single throat, and Irina felt the hair rise on her arms.
This wasn't performance. He was completely lost in it. Like a madman raving.
Time dissolved. An hour? Two? She had no phone, no clock. Only the candles and his voice and the fire and the growing ache in her legs. When he finally stopped, he was sweating, trembling. He approached her slowly, like she was genuinely sacred, and began to unwind the LED lights.
He carried them to the hearth and threw them in.
The batteries cracked. Plastic curled black, releasing a chemical stink that didn't belong here.
"Cheap lights," he said. "Fake stars."
He gave her the bed. He slept outside, in the snow.
-----
Dawn. He showed her the kitchen—black bread, hard cheese, a kettle older than her grandmother. He dressed in furs and walked into the white until evening swallowed him.
She wandered the cabin like a ghost. No television, no books in any script she recognized. By afternoon, the silence had stopped being empty and started being full. She hadn't been alone with herself—truly alone—in years.
When Vasile returned at dusk, she realized she'd been waiting. Not for rescue. For continuation.
The second night: the same.
She stepped into the costume. He decorated her—sans the LEDs—and positioned her facing the fire. The singing began. She had learned to listen differently now, to hear the architecture of it, the layers. When the ritual reached its apex, he removed the jacket, the hat.
They went into the fire. The synthetic fur stank as it burned. Something in her chest loosened—some knot she hadn't known was there.
"Getting warmer," he said. The first joke. She didn't laugh, because she was tree, but something in her wanted to. Wanted more than just the joke.
0-0-0
The third night, the air was different.
She stood naked under the costume's remains—just the obscene bra, the zippered panties, the weighted ornaments pulling at her nipples. He barely touched her as he positioned her. Then she noticed that she wanted his touch.
The singing that night had a different quality. Rougher. More desperate. He didn't circle her—he closed in, his voice breaking around her like waves against rock. She could feel his breath on her skin, the heat of him, the controlled violence of whatever ancient thing he was channeling.
When he stopped, his hands were shaking.
He reached up and unclipped the ornaments from her nipples. His fingers brushed against her breasts. She gasped—the release almost worse than the pressure—and watched him carry them to the fire. The bra followed. The panties. The last red threads of a soda brand's winter, burning to ash.
She stood naked. Finally naked. Not the commercial nakedness of her failed shoots, where nudity was transaction. This was something else. Something stripped back to the root.
"Now," he said, "you are not tree."
-----
He took her on the floor, on the earth, on a wolf pelt. He probably hunted it himself.
The sex was not gentle. It was not brutal. It was animal—the honest, unsentimental hunger of creatures who didn't separate body from meaning. His weight pressed her down. His teeth found her throat. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper and made sounds she'd never made. She howled.
The fire painted them both gold and shadow.
When she came—and she came, hard, surprised, almost angry about it—she felt something leave her. Some accumulated residue. The desperation of the last year, the performing, the negotiations with her own reflection. It burned away like cheap plastic in a very old fire.
But he wasn't done, and she was too sensitive now. She wriggled herself apart and turned face down. He didn't hesitate. Just settled over her, pressing her into the pelt—the coarse fur against her breasts, her belly, her cheek. He entered her again from behind, deeper this way, his hips pinning hers to the earth. She couldn't move, could barely breathe, and didn't want to. His chest covered her back like a second skin. One hand found hers, fingers interlacing; the other gripped her hip, holding her exactly where he wanted.
The rhythm was slower now. Deliberate. Each thrust pushed her into the ground, and she felt the forest floor through the wolf's skin—cold and ancient and indifferent to anything as small as a woman's doubts.
When he tensed above her, when his breath caught and his grip tightened, she knew what was coming. No protection. She should have stopped him.
She didn't.
He spilled inside her with a sound that was half-growl, half-prayer—something wordless and old, spoken into the curve of her neck. She felt the heat of it, the pulse, and instead of panic there was only a strange, bone-deep calm. Just a sensation that things were alright this way.
After, he held her, spooning. His chest rumbled with some subsonic frequency that might have been speech or might have been song.
"Solstice," he said. "Old year dies. New one comes. But first—" he gestured at the hearth, the ash, the bones of everything modern and hollow she'd worn into this place, "—first, you burn what is diseased."
His hand moved slowly through her hair. Tender now. The wolf retreated; something gentler remained.
"What is your secret wish?" he asked. "For the new year."
She laughed, half-asleep. "I don't believe in Christmas magic anymore."
"But what if you did?"
The fire crackled. The wind pressed against the windows. She was warm for the first time in years—not just her body, but something deeper, something that had been cold since the ranch.
"My father's ranch," she murmured. "I'd wish it back."
He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was different. Certain.
"Don't buy anything red, then."
She was too tired to ask what he meant.
-----
For reasons she couldn't explain, she stopped buying red things. Red lipstick stayed on shelves. Red dresses on racks. Even the tomatoes felt wrong.
February brought a letter. The medical company had been investigated—the "experimental drugs" were free trial medications, billed as premium treatment. Fraud. Her father's debts had been manufactured from nothing. The court voided the sale of the ranch.
As next of kin, it returned to her.
She read the letter three times. The ranch was hers. Had always been hers.
Don't buy anything red.
Something older had begun. And it kept its promises.
