“I can manage. With assistance.”
“You’ll have it.” Nikolai turns from the scanner, his face set in a look of grim, absolute resolve. “I’ll carry the weight. That’s the deal now. We trade roles until you’re functional.”
It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact.
I find myself nodding. The machine is no longer in control of the mission. The man is.
“Dawn,” I agree.
Nikolai returns to the scanner, his eyes fixed on the screen, building the final picture of the world we are about to re-enter.
I sink back into the chair, the firelight warming my skin. The broadcast continues in the background—a litany of deaths, of frozen accounts, of an empire tearing itself apart.
I watch the man who was supposed to be my victim stand guard over my life. I realize the Kennel’s most fundamental error. They taught me that love was a vulnerability. They taught me that connection was a handle for the enemy to grab.
They were wrong.
The connection is the only reason I am still breathing. The weapon I created is the only thing standing between me and the end of the world.
And for the first time in my life, I am content to follow.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
NIKOLAI
The blizzard hitsus two hours into the descent, turning the world into a featureless white lung.
One moment, the road is a visible thread of gray cutting through the frozen banks. The next, it vanishes entirely. The windshield becomes a wall of screaming static, the wipers thudding against an accumulation that rebuilds faster than the rubber can sweep. I slow the Lada Niva to a crawl. Ten kilometers per hour. Then five. The engine labors, a guttural, protesting roar that vibrates through the floorboards and into the soles of my feet. The old Soviet transmission grinds as I downshift, the gear stick fighting me, cold-locked and stubborn.
The headlights are useless, their beams reflecting off the swirling flakes and throwing the light back into my eyes. I can see perhaps three meters ahead. Beyond that, there is only the void.
The steering wheel shudders, a living thing trying to wrench itself from my grip. The tires slip on a sheet of black ice, the chassis tilting toward the precipice. My heart attempts to hammer its way through my ribs, but I don't let my hands jerk.I breathe through my nose, a shallow, controlled intake, and counter-steer until the rubber bites again. The margin for error is no longer measured in meters; it is a game of centimeters played against a mountain that wants us dead.
“Keep left,” Alexei’s voice rasps.
It’s a dry, ravaged sound, thick with the fever that has been rising since we left the cabin. I glance at him. He is slumped against the door, his skin the color of a wet sidewalk. He shouldn’t be talking. He should be conserving what little metabolic energy his body has left to fight the infection that has turned his wound into a furnace.
“The road curves right in twenty meters,” he continues, his eyes fixed on the white-out with a terrifying, mechanical focus. “The guardrail was removed in the seventies. Don't trust the edge.”
I adjust the wheel, shifting our weight toward the rock wall on the left. The Niva’s fenders scrape against a frozen outcrop with a screech of tortured metal, but we stay on the shelf.
He is mapping terrain he has never seen, reading the ghost of a road through the chaos as if he were back in the observation room. He is fighting his own systemic failure with the same surgical coldness he brought to my unmaking.
I’ve been behind this wheel for six hours. The first four were simple—the mechanical monotony of navigation. The last two have been a descent into a white hell. Beside me, the man who broke me is now the only reason I haven't driven us into a ravine.
He drifts. Sometimes he is the operative, delivering clipped tactical observations about wind shear and thermal gradients. Sometimes he is somewhere else entirely, murmuringfragments of the Kennel’s code—numbers, designations, protocols for disposal. I listen to the syllables of his trauma, and I realize I am no longer afraid of the Monster. I am only afraid of the silence that will follow if he stops breathing.
I should feel a sense of poetic justice. The captor is now the captive of his own failing biology. The Prince of Moscow is now the one changing the bandages and navigating the storm.
But there is no triumph in it. There is only a heavy, possessive ache in my chest.
He is mine. He is the only thing in this world that isn't a lie or a transaction. Every kilometer we put between us and the Carpathians is another stitch in the new skin we’re growing.
Three hours before dawn, the blizzard finally breaks. The wind dies down to a mournful whistle, and the snow thins to a light, crystalline powder. The road levels out as we reach the foothills of the Moscow Oblast, transitioning from the jagged mountain pass to the long, straight stretches of the rural highway.
I pull over at an abandoned fuel station. The pumps are rusted skeletons, their glass faces smashed, but the overhead canopy offers a shield against the sleet. Alexei is deep under now, his forehead burning against the glass of the window. I need to move fast.
I retrieve the analog radio from the back seat. The metal casing is so cold it feels like it’s biting through my skin. I set it on the hood of the Niva, my fingers fumbling with the antenna. My movements are jerky, my fine motor skills degraded by the cold and the lack of sleep.
