Ivan does not respond immediately. He lingers in the doorway for a moment longer, and I can see the calculation happening behind his eyes. He assesses how to approach this situation, how to manage the asset that has shown signs of distress.
Then he crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
He does not touch me. He simply sits there, close enough for me to feel the warmth radiating from his body, and he waits.
The rain continues to pound against the windows. Lightning flashes in the distance, followed by a low rumble of thunder that shakes the frame of the house. The storm worsens, pressing in around us, sealing us inside this space where no one can reach us.
"Tell me," Ivan says.
I do not know how to explain. The nightmares are not stories with beginnings and endings. They are fragments, sensations, the accumulated weight of a childhood spent learning how to kill.
But Ivan is waiting. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I want him to understand.
"We were given numbers instead of names," I say. The words come slowly, dragged from somewhere deep within me. "The instructors said names created attachment. Attachment createdweakness. So we were numbers until we proved we deserved to be people."
Ivan listens without interrupting. His presence is steady, solid—an anchor in the darkness of the room.
"The culling matches happened every winter. They would put two of us in a room and lock the door. Only one came out." I stare at my hands, at the scars that map the history of violence across my knuckles and palms. "I survived eleven matches before they decided I had earned my name."
"Eleven." Ivan's voice is soft. Something shifts behind his eyes—perhaps horror, or something else.
"I did not want to kill any of them. But I wanted to survive more than I wanted them to live." I look up at him, and the truth spills out before I can stop it. "That is what the file does not tell you. The conditioning did not make me capable of violence. The Kennel made me capable of violence. All you did was give me a reason to use it."
The words hang between us. The storm rages outside, and inside this room, something shifts in the air—a density, a charge.
Ivan reaches out. His palm cups my jaw before I can pull away. His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. The touch is gentle, careful—nothing like the commands he usually delivers. He is not telling me what to do; he is taking something he wants.
"You said I was conditioned to want this," I say. My voice is steadier now. The nightmare has faded, replaced by the heat of his hand against my skin.
"I said you were conditioned to obey." His eyes hold mine in the darkness. "Wanting is different."
"How do you know?"
"Because I did not condition myself." His thumb stills against my cheek. "And I want you anyway."
The words land in the center of my chest like a detonation. I have spent the past week trying to untangle what is real from what was manufactured.
But Ivan is not a subject in a file. He is not a system to be decoded or a strategy to be analyzed. He is a man sitting on the edge of my bed, his hand on my face, telling me that what he feels was never part of the plan.
I could pull away. I could retreat into the safety of Subject 43, the empty shell that feels nothing and wants nothing. That shell protected me for the past week. It could protect me now.
But I am tired of being protected. I am tired of hiding behind walls that keep out everything, including the things I want to feel.
I kiss him.
It is not gentle. It is not careful. It is a collision, a claim, four years of denied desire crashing through barriers that were never strong enough to hold it. My hands fist in his hair as I pull him toward me, and his mouth opens against mine with a sound that might be surprise or might be relief.
He tastes like the whiskey he drank earlier. His lips are softer than I expected, yielding under the pressure of mine in a way that sends heat flooding through my veins. His body is warm and solid as I drag him closer, pulling him onto the bed and feeling the weight of him pressing me into the mattress.
For a moment, the positions are wrong. He is above me, and the old conditioning tries to assert itself, the training that says I should be beneath him, that I should accept whatever he chooses to give. But something in me rebels against that pattern. Something in me needs to prove that what is happening here is not obedience.
I roll us over.
I pin him beneath me.
I feel the surprise ripple through his body as I take control of the kiss, the position, everything.
"Maksim—" He tries to speak, but I swallow the words, kissing him harder, deeper, claiming territory I have wanted to claim since the night he pressed his fingers to my throat and counted my heartbeat. I bite his lower lip, hard enough to taste copper, and he groans into my mouth.
