ONE MESSAGE.
I open it.
You have until dawn. Then I come myself. —I.
I look at Nikolai. He looks peaceful in the soft light of the flashlight. He looks like a man who believes he is safe.
I delete the message and set the phone on the floor.
I pick up my weapon. I check the chamber. I reset the safety.
Let him come.
For seventeen years, I was a weapon in Ivan Baranov's hand. I was the sharp edge of his will. I was the silence after the kill.
But I am no longer a weapon.
I am the man who guards the door. And if Ivan wants the life inside this room, he will have to walk through the wreckage of the man he created to get it.
I settle into the chair, my eyes fixed on the entrance, my ears tuned to the sound of Nikolai's breathing.
The countdown to dawn has begun.
I am ready.
Chapter Nineteen
NIKOLAI
I waketo a world that has stopped humming.
For a disoriented moment, my internal compass spins. The ceiling is a lattice of exposed rafters and rusted steel beams instead of the smooth, sound-absorbing gray panels of the Tower. The light is a sickly pale gray, filtering through the jagged cracks of boarded windows rather than an amber glow calibrated to ten percent. There is no white noise of an HVAC system—only a silence so heavy it contains the ghost of traffic and the whistle of a winter wind that hasn't realized I’m no longer its prisoner.
Then the memory of the escape hits me, sharp as the cold. The car. The drive through the city’s industrial gut. This frozen warehouse with its layers of dust and the taste of abandonment.
I am outside. I am no longer forty-seven floors underground.
The disorientation is a physical weight. My body still expects the chair, the restraints, the precise, clinical geometry of my captivity. Instead, I’m lying on a stained mattress that smells of damp wool. A rough blanket is tangled around my legs. Mymuscles ache with a deep, grinding throb—not just the atrophy of three weeks, but the specific soreness of the desperate, frantic coupling that happened on this very pallet before I finally collapsed into sleep.
The memory of it makes my skin feel too tight. His body against mine. The lack of barriers. The way he held me afterward, as if he were trying to keep the pieces of me from scattering across the concrete.
I could roll over. I could stand up. I could walk to the far wall and touch the brick to prove it exists. But the freedom feels like vertigo. It is a vast, open threat. I’m not sure I like it yet.
I turn my head and find him.
Alexei is in the same metal chair he occupied when I drifted off. His posture is a relic of the Kennel—spine a straight line, shoulders squared, weapon resting in his lap with the casual precision of a man who doesn't need to look to aim. But his face is a map of the night’s cost. Dark, bruised circles have carved deep hollows under his eyes. The stubble on his jaw is a thick, dark shadow. His skin is the color of old ash.
He hasn’t slept. Not for a second. He spent the entire night watching me, watching the doors, waiting for the breach that my father or Ivan would inevitably send.
I study him while he thinks I’m still under. The stillness that defined him in the Processing Room is different now. It’s no longer the silence of a predator; it’s the silence of a machine running on its last battery cycle. He is holding himself together through pure, stubborn will, forcing his body to perform functions it no longer has the chemical resources to support.
The weapon in his lap—the compact, suppressed piece I saw outlined under his sweater during our escape—is a part of him. His finger rests along the trigger guard, steady even as a fine tremor vibrates through his hand.
“You’re awake,” he says. His voice is a low rasp, stripped of its clinical polish.
“You’re not,” I say, pushing myself up on my elbows. My atrophied muscles scream in protest, a chorus of fire in my thighs and back. “When did you last sleep, Alexei?”
“Sleep is not the priority. Distance is.”
