"Understood," I hear myself say. "I will process the disposal immediately."
Ivan studies my face. I do not know what he sees there.
"Alexei." His voice softens slightly. "The Kennel produced you to be the best we have. Do not let a single compromised operation define your career. Execute the disposal, take a week of leave, and return to baseline. This can be contained."
"Yes, sir."
I turn and walk toward the door. My footsteps maintain their rhythm. My posture remains correct. My hands do not tremble.
I have one advantage: Ivan expects compliance.
I am lying to the man who owns my existence. I am planning to disobey a direct order. I am becoming the thing the Kennel trained me to hunt.
A defector.
The fear should be paralyzing. Instead, it clarifies something. I am not choosing Nikolai over the organization. I am choosing myself—the version of myself that exists when I am with him—over the version the Kennel manufactured.
I am becoming a defector because his hand on my scar felt like the first human contact I have experienced in seventeen years. Because when he looks at me, I feel like something more than a weapon waiting to be aimed.
The walk back to the private room takes longer than it should. I am calculating variables, running scenarios, trying to construct a plan from components that refuse to fit together. Escape routes. Resource requirements. The logistics of disappearing two people from the most surveilled building in the city.
The calculations keep failing. My mind keeps returning to the same irrelevant data point: his hand on my scar.
The door to the private room opens at my biometric command. The lights are at ten percent, the warm spectrum I configured for his comfort. He is lying on the cot with his eyes closed, his breathing slow and even.
He looks peaceful. He looks human. He looks like something worth destroying my entire existence to protect.
I stand in the doorway and watch him sleep. By morning, I am supposed to end his life.
Instead, I am calculating how to save it.
I have until dawn to exploit the gaps in the Tower's security before anyone realizes what I've done.
I cross to the cot. I crouch beside it, bringing my face level with his.
"Nikolai."
His eyes open slowly, blinking in the dim light. It takes a moment for recognition to register, and then his face transforms with that relief I have seen so many times now.
“Alexei.” His voice is rough with sleep. “Is something wrong?”
Yes. Everything is wrong.
“We have to go,” I say.
He blinks. “Go? Go where?”
“Away from this facility. Away from the organization.” I keep my voice level, clinical. “Ivan has ordered your disposal. The timeline is dawn. We need to leave now.”
His face cycles through confusion, fear, understanding. He pushes himself upright on the cot, his weakened muscles trembling.
“Disposal,” he repeats. “They’re going to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re... what? Refusing the order?”
“Yes.”
