Now that same handwriting is chewing through my throat.
I try to do what I’ve always done when something tries to crawl into my head and live there.
Breathe slow. Count the inhale. Count the exhale. Let the mind step back. Let the body become something separate—something you operate instead of something you are.
It worked in the Kennel. It worked in rooms with locked doors and one boy walking out. It worked on nights when blood dried under my nails and I had to sleep anyway.
It doesn’t work now.
My hands tremble no matter what I tell them. I press my palms hard to my thighs. The shake doesn’t stop—it just changes shape, moving inward, vibrating under my ribs as if something inside me is trying to claw free.
Because the place that taught me to survive is the same place he used to learn where to press.
I see it again, too clear.
Ivan stepping out to the balcony with his phone. The door sliding shut behind him. The office going quiet in that way it does when he leaves, like the room is still waiting for him to breathe before it breathes again.
Files spread across the desk. Paper in neat piles. His safe open. The air faintly scented with espresso and old paper and the soap we both smell like now, whether I want to or not.
I wasn’t supposed to look.
That rule is older than me. It’s the kind of rule that keeps people alive in this world. You don’t pry into your principal’s thoughts. You don’t touch what isn’t handed to you. You don’t give yourself reasons to become a problem.
But there was a folder with my name on it.
Not my name in the way a friend would say it. Not my name as a person.
My name the way a file says it.
ORLOV.
My fingers moved before my mind finished warning me. The old reflex: see your designation, confirm the threat, gather the information.
I wish I hadn’t.
Not because I didn’t have the right. Not because I violated the rule.
Because I can’t go back to not knowing.
The first page didn’t hurt yet. It was observation. Notes about how I stood in the selection room. How I didn’t speak unless spoken to. How my eyes stayed steady when the other candidates performed like dogs begging at the table.
He saw everything. That part isn’t new.
What I thought was new was what it meant.
I’d told myself his attention was different. That he looked at me and saw something worth keeping.
The next page made my mouth go dry.
Not what I did—what Iwas. The places I bent. The places I’d been cracked open so early I stopped noticing the cracks were there.
It wasn’t curiosity on the page. It wasn’t admiration.
It was a map.
A map of hunger.
A map of how to use hunger.
