And I keep one thing untouched inside me—one thing the Kennel never managed to kill and Sergei Baranov cannot confine.
The memory of Ivan's hands on my face.
The sound of his voice when he saidI love youas if it cost him blood.
The promise in that small lift of his hand.
The SUV merges onto the highway.
Chicago fades behind us.
Volgograd awaits.
Beneath the layers of discipline, conditioning, and the walls I've rebuilt countless times, I cling to one stubborn, unsettling truth:
Some bonds, once forged, cannot be severed cleanly.
They tear apart.
Yet, what tears can be stitched back together.
23
MAKSIM
Three months.
Ninety-one days since the Estate gates closed behind me. Ninety-one nights spent in a concrete cell with a narrow window overlooking frozen ground and a sky the color of tarnished steel. Ninety-one mornings waking with my jaw clenched and my hands already formed into fists, as if my body is still trying to hold onto someone who isn't there.
I am learning what it means to disappear.
The facility is a Soviet relic—one of those half-forgotten monitoring stations repurposed when the organization expanded its reach across the region. Everything about it feels like it was built for men who were never meant to return to anything softer than duty. The walls are made of poured concrete, cracked at the corners, stained by decades of smoke and moisture. The radiators hiss and then go cold without warning. Some mornings, I can see my breath in my room, the air sharp enough to sting my lungs, as if winter has decided to settle inside the building.
My assignment is labeled monitoring duty.
That's what they put on the paperwork. That's what they tell themselves to make it sound useful.
But it isn't.
It's storage.
I work twelve-hour shifts, watching feeds from warehouses and depots scattered across the Volga region and beyond. Loading docks. Perimeter fences. Aisle cameras trained on stacks of crates that only move when a man moves them. Grainy footage cycles every thirty seconds, the same angles, the same fluorescent glare, the same men in work jackets pushing pallets and checking seals.
Nothing ever happens. That's the point. If something happened, I would be needed. Sergei Baranov doesn't want me needed.
He wants me alive. Far away. Quiet.
The men here know what I am.
Word spreads through this organization like smoke through a house: it finds every crack. Some version of the story has reached this frozen corner of Russia—that Subject 43, the Kennel graduate, crossed a line he wasn't meant to survive. That the heir's dog got too close. That Sergei made an example without creating a mess.
They look at me like men regard something retired but still sharp—a tool left on a bench because it cuts the hand that holds it.
A few of them mock me when they think my hearing is worse than it is. They whisper about the heir's pet being sent backto the kennel where he belongs. They make jokes with their mouths half-covered by their hands, like schoolboys who don't understand that some jokes are only funny until the wrong person hears them.
I don't respond.
Response costs energy. Energy is better spent elsewhere.
