I don’t answer. Their hands move away from their weapons, hovering near their belts in a gesture of non-aggression.
We know what you are.
It isn’t respect. Not yet. It is compliance.
At the end of the corridor is a reinforced steel door. I take the keycard out. Swipe. The keypad beeps once. I enter the code Ivan gave me.
The lock releases with a heavy, metallicthunkthat travels through the floor.
I push the door open.
The room is familiar.
Same blueprint as the Processing Room. Same philosophy. Concrete that swallows sound. A single light hung slightly off-center so shadows pull at the edges of vision. A metal table bolted into the floor.
In one of the chairs sits Sergei Baranov.
Ivan had him moved to the Tower the night of the coup—quietly, efficiently. The old Pakhan stripped of his court and brought into the center of the machine he once controlled.
Sergei is still in the dinner suit from that night. It is rumpled now, stained at the cuffs. His silver hair has fallen out of its usual discipline. Chains run from his wrists to the table eyelet.
A man contained.
He looks up when I enter.
Even hollowed out, his eyes are sharp. He assesses me the way he always has—cost, threat, usefulness. He is looking for the old reflex in me. The flinch.
“Ah,” he says. His voice is rough from disuse. “Did he send the dog to finish it?”
The word lands differently than it used to.
Three months ago, it would have reinforced the lesson:you are a function.
Now it sounds like what it is. A reflex. A habit. The last small cruelty a man reaches for when the larger ones have been taken away.
I cross to the table. I pull out the chair opposite him.
I sit.
Not standing over him like an executioner. Not lingering near the door like I’m afraid of the air in the room. I sit down the way a man sits when he has decided he belongs at the table.
“No one sent me,” I say. “I came to see if you were comfortable.”
Sergei’s mouth curves. Not a smile—an imitation.
“Comfortable,” he repeats, tasting the word for poison. “You developed humor in exile.”
“I developed many things.”
He watches me, trying to find the old pattern—fear, obedience, shame.
“You’ve developed the confidence to sit across from the man who ordered your death,” he says finally. “And the arrogance to believe you belong beside my son.”
“I do belong beside him. He chose me.”
“He chose a weakness.” His voice sharpens. “A vulnerability enemies will exploit. A distraction that will cloud his judgment.”
“You’ve been saying that for days,” I reply. “Has it changed anything?”
