ORLOV.
Maksim.
I gather the papers and bring them to the desk.
I remember the selection room with unsettling clarity. My father insisted I choose from the program he funded—the one designed to produce men for close protection. Men trained to obey quickly and act faster. The candidates stood in a line under harsh fluorescent lights, clean uniforms, and clean faces trying not to show hunger.
Most of them talked too much. They sold themselves with lists of skills and tales of violence. They smiled when they shouldn't. They attempted to charm me.
Maksim stood at the back and watched.
When I asked him what he was good at, he didn't perform.
"Following orders."
Two words. Flat. No plea for approval.
I chose him, then I did what I always do: I verified until there was nothing left to doubt.
The facility sent his records: medical notes, training evaluations, psychological profiles—the kind of documents designed to reassure men like my father that the weapon they were buying wouldn't misfire.
I read all of it.
Then I wrote my own notes.
My handwriting stares up at me from the top page—sharp, controlled, the voice I use when I want a result and don't care about the collateral.
He needs structure. He clings to it.
Praise softens him. Soft is dangerous.
Withhold approval and he sharpens. Keep him hungry and he stays close.
Make proximity the reward.
I turn the pages, and the words keep coming—cold instructions to myself, written as if I were programming a machine.
Do not reward too often. Do not feed pride.
Give responsibility in small increments. Let him feel the weight of it.
He will read proximity as approval. Use it.
I read it all without flinching, and then my fingers tighten on the paper, hard enough to wrinkle the corner.
Not because I regret it.
But because the language is too clean for what it truly was.
Some men would call these notes cruelty. They'd reach for moral language and wrap themselves in it. They'd label it exploitation, pretending they live in a world where those you rely on aren't first broken by someone else.
They wouldn't understand what the facility did to Maksim before I ever met him.
They didn't create a man; they shaped a tool. They stripped away the parts that pull a boy off-task—desire, curiosity, self-preservation—and handed him to us, calling it success. A tool that doesn't question.
A weapon without direction doesn't become noble; it becomes loose. It breaks in the wrong place.
I gave him direction.
