“The session has concluded,” I say. “The intelligence you provided will be processed and verified.”
“Alexei.”
I should leave. I should exit the room and process this deviation and determine what, if anything, I will report to Ivan.
“Alexei, look at me.”
I look at him.
His gray eyes meet mine, and in them I see confusion, yes, but also something darker. The recognition of a dynamic that has evolved beyond either of our control. And beneath that—disgust. At me. At himself. At what just happened between us.
“You wanted that,” he says. “Not the information. Me. You wanted to watch me.”
I do not confirm or deny. Confirmation is unnecessary.
“I don’t know what I wanted.” His voice is quiet, unsteady. “I don’t know what any of that was. I don't know if I'm supposed to feel—” He breaks off, his jaw tightening. “I need you to leave.”
The request lands differently than I expected. It is the first time he has asked me to go.
“Your condition should be monitored?—”
“Leave.” The word is harder now. “Please. I need to—I can’t look at you right now.”
I turn and walk to the door. My footsteps are measured. My posture is correct.
At the threshold, I pause. I do not turn around.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “The Washington senator. Full details.”
I exit before he can respond.
In the corridor, alone, I stop walking. I lean against the wall and close my eyes and try to understand what I have become.
The stress-response session was meant to correct the deviation. To reassert the boundaries of professional conduct. Instead, I have created something new. Something that has no category in my operational files. Something that feels like hunger and ownership and a need so complete that it has overwritten every protocol I was ever taught.
The Kennel prepared me for many scenarios. They did not prepare me for this—for the moment when the subject becomes something other than a subject, when the asset becomes something I want to possess rather than exploit.
I do not want to extract from him.
I want to consume him. To own every response his body can produce. I want to be the only one who sees him break.
The wanting is wrong. The wanting is compromise. The wanting is the end of everything I was trained to be.
But the look on his face when he asked me to leave—the disgust, the confusion, the shame—that is what stays with me as I walk back to the observation room.
I have done something that cannot be undone.
And I do not know if either of us will survive what comes next.
Chapter Ten
NIKOLAI
My skin remembers.
The electrodes are gone, removed with the same clinical precision that applied them, but my nerve endings haven’t received the message. They continue to fire in phantom patterns, ghost signals racing along pathways that were overloaded beyond their design specifications.
My thighs twitch. My stomach muscles flutter beneath the thin fabric of my smock. The places where the pads were attached feel raw, hypersensitive, as if the air itself is too rough against them.
