Chapter 14 Maksim
MAKSIM
The Kennel finds me in my sleep.
I am fourteen again, standing in the training yard with snow falling around me and blood freezing on my knuckles.
Instructor Voronin is speaking, but his words come from far away, muffled by the ringing in my ears and the cold that has seeped into the marrow of my bones.
There is a body at my feet—a boy whose number I cannot remember, whose face has already blurred into the dozens of others who did not survive the culling.
The yard smells of copper and frost. The other boys watch from the edges, their breath forming gray clouds in the frozen air, their eyes empty because they have learned that caring gets you killed.
I am one of them. I am all of them. I am the boy on the ground, the boy standing over him, and the instructors making notes on clipboards as if we are livestock being evaluated for slaughter.
I did not want to kill him. I never want to kill any of them. But the instructors do not care about want; they care about function. And my function is to survive.
The snow turns to rain. The yard dissolves into darkness. Somewhere in the distance, a voice is calling my name.
"Maksim."
I wake gasping.
The room is unfamiliar for a moment; the shadows are wrong, the sounds foreign.
Then the storm registers—rain hammering against the windows in sheets, wind howling through the pine trees outside—and I remember where I am: the cabin, the lake house, Ivan's secret sanctuary, three hours from the city and a thousand miles from everything that has been trying to kill us.
My shirt is soaked with sweat. My hands are shaking, tremors running from my wrists to my fingertips. The nightmare is fading, but its echo remains, the weight of all those bodies pressing against my chest like something I will never be able to set down.
"Maksim."
Ivan is in the doorway.
I did not hear him come in. I heard nothing over the storm and the pounding of my own heart.
But he is there now, silhouetted against the dim light from the hallway.
I can see the tension in his shoulders as he registers my state.
He is wearing sleep pants and nothing else, his chest bare and pale in the gloom.
"I heard you," he says. His voice is quiet, careful. "From my room."
I should tell him I am fine. I should reassure him that the nightmare was nothing, that I have had worse, that a few hours of bad sleep do not compromise my ability to perform my function. That is what Subject 43 would do. That is what the conditioning requires.
But I am so tired of being Subject 43.
"The Kennel," I manage. My voice comes out rough, broken like glass. "I was back there."
Ivan does not respond immediately. He lingers in the doorway for a moment longer, and I can see the calculation happening behind his eyes. He assesses how to approach this situation, how to manage the asset that has shown signs of distress.
Then he crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
He does not touch me. He simply sits there, close enough for me to feel the warmth radiating from his body, and he waits.
The rain continues to pound against the windows. Lightning flashes in the distance, followed by a low rumble of thunder that shakes the frame of the house. The storm worsens, pressing in around us, sealing us inside this space where no one can reach us.
"Tell me," Ivan says.
I do not know how to explain. The nightmares are not stories with beginnings and endings. They are fragments, sensations, the accumulated weight of a childhood spent learning how to kill.
But Ivan is waiting. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I want him to understand.
"We were given numbers instead of names," I say. The words come slowly, dragged from somewhere deep within me. "The instructors said names created attachment. Attachment created weakness. So we were numbers until we proved we deserved to be people."
Ivan listens without interrupting. His presence is steady, solid—an anchor in the darkness of the room.
"The culling matches happened every winter. They would put two of us in a room and lock the door. Only one came out." I stare at my hands, at the scars that map the history of violence across my knuckles and palms. "I survived eleven matches before they decided I had earned my name."
"Eleven." Ivan's voice is soft. Something shifts behind his eyes—perhaps horror, or something else.
"I did not want to kill any of them. But I wanted to survive more than I wanted them to live.
" I look up at him, and the truth spills out before I can stop it.
"That is what the file does not tell you.
The conditioning did not make me capable of violence.
The Kennel made me capable of violence. All you did was give me a reason to use it. "
The words hang between us. The storm rages outside, and inside this room, something shifts in the air—a density, a charge.
Ivan reaches out. His palm cups my jaw before I can pull away. His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. The touch is gentle, careful—nothing like the commands he usually delivers. He is not telling me what to do; he is taking something he wants.
"You said I was conditioned to want this," I say. My voice is steadier now. The nightmare has faded, replaced by the heat of his hand against my skin.
"I said you were conditioned to obey." His eyes hold mine in the darkness. "Wanting is different."
"How do you know?"
"Because I did not condition myself." His thumb stills against my cheek. "And I want you anyway."
The words land in the center of my chest like a detonation. I have spent the past week trying to untangle what is real from what was manufactured.
But Ivan is not a subject in a file. He is not a system to be decoded or a strategy to be analyzed. He is a man sitting on the edge of my bed, his hand on my face, telling me that what he feels was never part of the plan.
I could pull away. I could retreat into the safety of Subject 43, the empty shell that feels nothing and wants nothing. That shell protected me for the past week. It could protect me now.
But I am tired of being protected. I am tired of hiding behind walls that keep out everything, including the things I want to feel.
I kiss him.
It is not gentle. It is not careful. It is a collision, a claim, four years of denied desire crashing through barriers that were never strong enough to hold it.
My hands fist in his hair as I pull him toward me, and his mouth opens against mine with a sound that might be surprise or might be relief.
He tastes like the whiskey he drank earlier.
His lips are softer than I expected, yielding under the pressure of mine in a way that sends heat flooding through my veins.
His body is warm and solid as I drag him closer, pulling him onto the bed and feeling the weight of him pressing me into the mattress.
For a moment, the positions are wrong. He is above me, and the old conditioning tries to assert itself, the training that says I should be beneath him, that I should accept whatever he chooses to give.
But something in me rebels against that pattern.
Something in me needs to prove that what is happening here is not obedience.
I roll us over.
I pin him beneath me.
I feel the surprise ripple through his body as I take control of the kiss, the position, everything.
"Maksim—" He tries to speak, but I swallow the words, kissing him harder, deeper, claiming territory I have wanted to claim since the night he pressed his fingers to my throat and counted my heartbeat. I bite his lower lip, hard enough to taste copper, and he groans into my mouth.
He is still for a moment. Processing. Adjusting. Then his hands move to my sides, sliding beneath my sweat-soaked shirt, and the touch of his skin against mine sends electricity cascading through my nerve endings.
I pull back just far enough to strip the shirt over my head. He looks at me in the darkness, at the scars that map my torso, at the evidence of every fight I survived before he found me. His expression is something I have never seen on his face before.
Hunger. Reverence. Want so naked it makes my breath catch.
"You are extraordinary," he says. The words echo what he told me after the restaurant, but they carry different weight now. "Do you know that? You are the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen."
I do not let him finish the thought. I pull his sleep pants down just enough to expose his hips, my fingers digging into his skin.
His skin is smooth where mine is scarred, unmarked by the violence that shaped me. I drag my tongue across his collarbone, tasting salt and heat, and his hands fly to my hair, gripping hard. The sound he makes—low and desperate—goes straight to my cock.
This is new. This reversal. Ivan is always in control, always the one giving orders, always the hand that wields rather than the weapon that is wielded. But beneath me now, with my weight pressing him into the sheets, he is yielding. Surrendering. Letting me take whatever I want from him.
The power of it is intoxicating.
I work my way down his body, mapping every inch with my mouth.
I kiss the hollow of his throat. I run my tongue down the center line of his chest. His nipples harden under my tongue, and he arches off the bed, gasping.
His stomach muscles clench when I bite the soft skin below his navel.
By the time I reach his waistband, he is shaking, his hips lifting in silent plea.
I look up at him. His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, his lips parted and wet from our kisses. The composed heir, the cold prince of the Baranov empire, is gone. What remains is raw need.
I work his pants down his thighs, kicking them off the bed. His cock springs free—hard, flushed, already leaking at the tip. It twitches against his stomach.
I wrap my hand around the base. It is thick, hot velvet in my palm. I squeeze and watch his whole body jerk.