My hands rest on my thighs, my feet flat on the hardwood. This is how I was taught to sit before I could read.
The situation requires it.
What it doesn't require is my attention sliding toward the bedroom doorway—the rectangle of absolute dark where Ivan lies unconscious.
The door is open.
He left it open. I've been dissecting that choice for three hours, stripping it down like a malfunctioning weapon. Ivan Baranov does not leave perimeters unsealed. Is it a test? A lure?
With Ivan, nothing is accidental. Every movement is a transaction.
I shift my weight. The holster digs into my hip bone, a familiar, bruising pressure.
The penthouse transforms at night. During the day, the floor-to-ceiling glass makes the space feel exposed, a display case for the sky. But now, with the interior lights off and the city burning amber and white beneath us, the windows have become mirrors. My reflection hangs suspended over the Chicago skyline—a dark shape seated against the grid of the streets.
This is the first time I have been inside the perimeter after the city goes quiet.
Five years of service. The elevator was always the hard line. I would escort him to this floor, sweep the rooms, verify the panic buttons, and descend to my quarters on the forty-fifth floor. Close enough to respond. Far enough to remember I am an employee.
Tonight, he erased the separation with five words.
You don't leave this room.
I force my eyes back to the main door. I should be calculating entry angles. Instead, I am cataloging sensory data I have no use for: the density of the silence, the smell of ozone and expensive sandalwood soap—it stings the back of my throat.
The training facility in Volgograd had a word for boys like me:Sobaki. Dogs.
It wasn't an insult; it was a classification. Soldiers imply rank, decision-making ability, and pride.
We were raised to be triggers.
Command. Movement. Compliance.
They stripped away the friction that slows the chain down—every instinct that saidpause, every soft impulse that saidconsider.
The Kennel. That's what the survivors called it. Officially, it had a long, bureaucratic title, but that didn't capture the smell of bleach and wet wool in the concrete walls or the cold that started in the stone floor and crept up through your boots until your toes went numb.
Instructor Voronin. I can still hear the squeak of his boots on the tile. He taught us that sleep was a commodity, not a right.
Alertness is survival.
I hear his voice now, layering over the hum of the refrigerator—flat, bored. He would stand over the bunk of a boy who had drifted off during night watch. The boy would wake to the toe of a boot. By morning roll call, that bunk would be empty, the mattress stripped. We didn't ask questions; we learned the lesson the absence was meant to teach.
Attachment makes you brittle.
If you liked another boy, they would pit you against him in the ring, telling you that only one of you would eat that night while they watched to see if you pulled your punches.
If you pulled your punch, you both starved.
So we became smooth—no handles, no edges.
Before I had a name, I was a number stenciled on a grey shirt. I slept in a bunk with that number and answered to it. I understood that the number was all I was allowed until I proved I deserved the dignity of a noun.
The match that gave me my name happened in January. The yard was hard-packed snow, stained pink from previous fights. I fought a boy who was faster than me, a wiry striker with a tell in his left shoulder.
I took the hit to the face to get inside his guard. I broke him down systematically: ribs, knee, throat. I heard the wet snap of cartilage and didn't stop until Voronin dragged me off by the collar.
When they asked what I wanted to be called, I didn't hesitate.
