Chapter 10 Maksim
MAKSIM
The hallway is short.
A few steps from Ivan’s office to the elevator. A strip of carpet that never quite lies flat at the seam. A camera in the corner that sees the whole length if you know where it’s pointed. A wall with paint so smooth it feels slippery under my shoulder.
I’ve stood here enough that I can picture it with my eyes shut.
Right now my eyes are open, and I’m still using the wall.
I shouldn’t.
I don’t lean when I’m doing my job right. I don’t sink weight into anything. I don’t give the body permission to soften.
But the adrenaline that kept me moving all night has bled out of me in the elevator, and the ache that was background noise in the car has climbed to the front. Every breath pulls at my ribs. Every small shift drags pain through my side like a hook. My knees keep trying to unlock at the wrong time.
If I stand away from the wall, I can feel the slow tilt of myself starting. Not dramatic. Not a collapse. Just the body making an argument I don’t have the strength to win.
So I press back. I borrow the wall’s steadiness.
The file is still in my eyes.
Not the folder itself—there’s nothing in front of me but painted drywall—but the words sit behind my eyelids like they were burned there. I blink. They’re still there. I stare at a blank spot on the wall until it fuzzes. They don’t move.
Do not praise.
Keep him hungry.
Proximity as reward.
His handwriting is the worst part. That neat, controlled script I’ve watched carve decisions into the world for years. I’ve seen it on orders, on security notes, on the clean signatures that turn a conversation into a command.
I used to take comfort in it.
If his pen touched it, it mattered. If he wrote it down, it would be handled. Clean. Exact. Contained.
Now that same handwriting is chewing through my throat.
I try to do what I’ve always done when something tries to crawl into my head and live there.
Breathe slow. Count the inhale. Count the exhale. Let the mind step back. Let the body become something separate—something you operate instead of something you are.
It worked in the Kennel. It worked in rooms with locked doors and one boy walking out. It worked on nights when blood dried under my nails and I had to sleep anyway.
It doesn’t work now.
My hands tremble no matter what I tell them. I press my palms hard to my thighs. The shake doesn’t stop—it just changes shape, moving inward, vibrating under my ribs as if something inside me is trying to claw free.
Because the place that taught me to survive is the same place he used to learn where to press.
I see it again, too clear.
Ivan stepping out to the balcony with his phone. The door sliding shut behind him. The office going quiet in that way it does when he leaves, like the room is still waiting for him to breathe before it breathes again.
Files spread across the desk. Paper in neat piles. His safe open. The air faintly scented with espresso and old paper and the soap we both smell like now, whether I want to or not.
I wasn’t supposed to look.
That rule is older than me. It’s the kind of rule that keeps people alive in this world. You don’t pry into your principal’s thoughts. You don’t touch what isn’t handed to you. You don’t give yourself reasons to become a problem.
But there was a folder with my name on it.
Not my name in the way a friend would say it. Not my name as a person.
My name the way a file says it.
ORLOV.
My fingers moved before my mind finished warning me. The old reflex: see your designation, confirm the threat, gather the information.
I wish I hadn’t.
Not because I didn’t have the right. Not because I violated the rule.
Because I can’t go back to not knowing.
The first page didn’t hurt yet. It was observation. Notes about how I stood in the selection room. How I didn’t speak unless spoken to. How my eyes stayed steady when the other candidates performed like dogs begging at the table.
He saw everything. That part isn’t new.
What I thought was new was what it meant.
I’d told myself his attention was different. That he looked at me and saw something worth keeping.
The next page made my mouth go dry.
Not what I did—what I was. The places I bent. The places I’d been cracked open so early I stopped noticing the cracks were there.
It wasn’t curiosity on the page. It wasn’t admiration.
It was a map.
A map of hunger.
A map of how to use hunger.
Withholding approval creates heightened motivation to perform.
I read that sentence and my stomach tightened so hard it felt like I’d been hit.
Four years.
Four years of silence that I explained away as his nature. Four years of doing the work and waiting for a word that never came. Four years of thinking the coldness was something I had to earn my way through, like a winter you survive until spring finally shows up.
It wasn’t winter.
It was a hand on a valve.
Open it just enough to keep him breathing. Close it again to make him crawl closer.
I remember standing in the shower last night with steam in my lungs and blood under my nails, and his fingers on my jaw turning my face the way he wanted. I remember his voice rough with something I believed was real.
You are mine.
I believed him.
That’s the part that makes my skin feel wrong now.
I believed there was something between us that wasn’t built on duty. That the last week—locked doors, sleepless nights, him too close, his hand on my neck, his eyes holding mine—had made something new.
Something human.
I thought: So that’s what it is. That’s what men ruin themselves for. That’s why boys in the Kennel reached for each other even when it got them punished.
Then I read the end of the file.
Not poetic. Not emotional.
Finished.
Complete.
Dependency established.
Extension of will.
My chest went hollow when I read it. Like something dropped out of me and left only the shape.
Everything snapped into place with it.
The long quiet stretches weren’t just his personality. They were training.
The way I watched his face for approval I never got wasn’t love. It was starvation.
Even the shower—him stepping in fully clothed, the cloth against my back, the way his hand stayed on my ribs—part of me wants to pretend it was intimacy.
But intimacy doesn’t get written down and filed away like maintenance.
The humiliation creeps in after the shock.
Because I responded exactly the way the file said I would.
I leaned into his touch like a man who hasn’t been warm in years. I looked at him like he was a door opening. I almost gave him everything right there under the water—
And I pulled back.
For years I told myself the pullback was discipline. Control. The thing that kept me from crossing a line that would ruin us.
Now I wonder if it was something uglier.
Waiting for permission. Waiting for reward. Waiting like I’ve been trained to wait.
My hands shake harder. My ribs tighten around my breath. I swallow and it scratches, like my throat is lined with sand.
The worst part isn’t that he did it.
The worst part is that it worked.
The worst part is that I liked who I became under his hand, because that version of me felt useful, and usefulness is the closest thing to love I’ve ever been allowed to keep.
The elevator chimes.
A staff member steps out with folded linens and slows when she sees me pressed to the wall.
Her eyes flick over me. Quick. Careful. Curious in a way that makes my skin prickle. Not contempt like the estate guards. Not fear.
The look someone gives when the house shows a crack it wasn’t supposed to show.
I push off the wall and straighten.
The movement costs me. Pain flares along my side. The air catches in my throat for half a beat. I don’t let it show on my face. I don’t let it reach my eyes.
She lowers her gaze and walks past.
I don’t acknowledge her. I’m not here for that kind of contact. I’m not a man in a hallway. I’m a piece of the house that happens to move when needed.
When she’s gone, I do what I know how to do.
I step back inside myself.
Not in a poetic way. Not a declaration.
A practiced motion. Like locking a door.
I put the hurt somewhere I can’t reach it. I press it down and hold it there until it stops pushing.
The shaking eases.
The words don’t vanish, but they get quieter. Like a radio turned down until it’s just hiss.
I become useful again.
I become blank again.
The office door opens.
I turn toward it automatically.
Ivan steps into the hallway and his eyes go straight to mine, fast and sharp, like he’s been looking for me before he even opened the door. His face is controlled, but there’s tension in it, a carefulness that wasn’t there earlier.
“Maksim,” he says.
His voice is enough to make my body want to respond the way it always has.
The old way.
The eager way.
I don’t let it.
“I need to make calls,” he says. “Come into the main room. I want you close while I work.”
“Yes, sir.”
The words come out flat. Correct. Clean.
I see the moment he hears the difference.
His gaze tightens. A small movement at the corner of his mouth. His eyes search my face like he’s looking for the bruise he caused and can’t find.
He says my name again, slower.
“Maksim.”
“Sir?”
“Is something wrong?”
The question almost makes me laugh. Not because it’s funny.
Because it’s too late.
“No, sir,” I say. “Nothing is wrong.”
He keeps looking, like he doesn’t believe the answer.
“You seem… different.”
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m doing my job.”
The words land hard between us. I see something shift in his expression—frustration, maybe, or surprise, or something he doesn’t want to show.
He turns toward the main room.
“Now.”
“Yes, sir.”
I follow him.
I keep the distance I’m supposed to keep. Close enough to move if someone comes through the elevator. Far enough that I can see the whole space. My steps fall into rhythm behind his without thought. That old synchronization.
I used to mistake it for connection.
Now it just feels like training showing itself.
The main room is bright with morning light. The glass makes the city look sharp and cold, like it could cut you if you pressed a palm to it.
Ivan moves to his chair by the window. I take my position by the door.
He starts making calls.
Lieutenants. Captains. Men who answer his voice the way I do. He gives instructions about Boris, about the restaurant, about tightening routes and shifting coverage. His tone is calm and controlled, the voice of a man used to shaping the world by speaking.
Including the part of the world that is me.
Hours pass. I don’t move unless I have to. I don’t speak unless spoken to.
When he asks if I want water, I say, “No, sir.”
When he asks if I need rest, I say, “No, sir.”
When his eyes catch on me and linger—searching for the man who looked at him like he mattered—I keep my face empty.
At some point he sets down his phone and crosses the room.
I track him the way I track any approach. Not fear. Not aggression.
Just awareness.
He stops close, close enough that his heat reaches me faintly through the air, close enough that my skin remembers his hand on my jaw.
He doesn’t touch me.
“Maksim,” he says quietly. “What happened?”
“Sir?”
“Something changed.” His voice goes careful, like he’s stepping around broken glass. “Between the office and now. Tell me.”
The honest answer would tear open the locked room inside me. It would spill everything onto the floor.
The honest answer would say: I saw it. I saw what you wrote. I saw what you did on purpose.
But I don’t give him that.
I give him what the version of me he built would give.
“Nothing changed, sir. I’m doing what you asked.”
His eyes sharpen.
“Last night,” he says, and there’s a rough edge to it now. “In the shower. That was real.”
Something behind my ribs stirs. The locked room shakes once, like someone inside it kicked the door.
I don’t let it show.
“If my behavior crossed a line,” I say, “it won’t happen again.”
His face shifts like he’s been struck.
“That’s not what I’m—” He stops, restarts. “I’m not asking for an apology. I’m asking if it was real. What you felt. What we almost—”
“Sir,” I cut in, polite and final. “You have work. Your security needs my attention.”
A boundary, put back into place.
Professional.
He stands there for a long moment, staring at me like he’s trying to find the crack where he can get his fingers under the edge of what I’m doing.
Then he nods once and walks back to his chair.
He doesn’t try again.
Ivan finishes his calls and sits by the window, staring out at the city through the glass.
I remain at the door, still and present and useful.
When he turns his head and looks at me again—longer this time, searching—my face gives him nothing back.
Not because I want to hurt him.
Because I don’t know how to stand in front of him as a man anymore.
So I stand there as the thing he trained.
And I wait.