The chair scrapes against the concrete.
“You will not be executed,” I say. “Ivan decided your death would create more problems than it solves.”
“How merciful.”
“It isn’t mercy,” I tell him, and I move toward the door. “It’s efficiency.”
I pause with my hand on the handle.
“You are being relocated,” I say. “A dacha in the Urals. Comfortable. Staff. Gardens.”
Sergei’s expression tightens.
“No phone,” I continue. “No computer. No news. No visitors. No contact with anyone from the organization, ever again.”
For the first time, genuine emotion breaks through his control.
Horror.
“You cannot?—”
“We can. We are.”
I step closer to the table again, not threatening, simply ensuring there is no distance he can hide behind.
“You will have food. Warmth. Clean sheets. Everything a body could want. And you will have no power. No influence. You will watch the world move forward without you, and there will be nothing you can do but exist inside it.”
His throat works. Swallowing something he can’t swallow.
This is not death. Death would let him write a final narrative.
This is erasure in slow motion.
“You have learned cruelty,” Sergei says at last. The contempt is gone. What’s left is bare acknowledgement. “I underestimated you.”
“You underestimated a lot of things,” I say. “Including your son.”
A flicker—anger, pride, grief—crosses his face. Human. Ugly and real.
I open the door.
“Maksim,” Sergei says behind me.
I stop.
“He will destroy himself for you,” Sergei says. The words are heavier now—less insult, more warning. “Ivan. If you’re taken from him again, he will burn everything down to get you back. He will become the monster I always feared he might be.”
I breathe once, slow.
He isn’t wrong. I’ve seen what Ivan becomes when the world threatens to remove me.
“Perhaps,” I say. “But I don’t intend to be taken from him again.”
I step into the corridor.
The guards straighten automatically. The door will close behind me. The locks will engage. Sergei will stay contained until the transport is arranged.
But for one moment, he sits in that room with the door open, watching the man he called a dog walk away without looking back.
