Chapter 16 MAKSIM
MAKSIM
The door doesn't just open; it disintegrates.
Wood explodes inward, the frame cracking like a gunshot before the gunfire even begins. Splinters snap loose, whipping across the room like shrapnel. The first breath of outside air rushes in, bringing smoke and cold—lake damp, pine, and gun oil.
Then the sound hits: boots crunching on gravel, shouted commands, the sharp crack of rifles aligning their angles.
I'm already in motion.
The kitchen table is solid oak, heavy enough to matter.
I hook my hands under its edge and heave.
It flips onto its side with a groan, becoming a low barricade.
Coffee cups skid, tip, and shatter—ceramic popping underfoot—as the smell of spilled coffee blooms hot and bitter across the floor, mixing with dust.
Ivan drops down beside me, pistol raised, eyes hardened.
We have maybe two seconds before the first man clears the threshold.
Two seconds is a lifetime if you don't waste it thinking about dying.
The first attacker comes through quickly, fully equipped—helmet, vest, rifle raised. He's trained and moves as though he expects us to be scrambling, panicking, late.
He's wrong.
My first shot catches him high in the throat, just above the ceramic plate of his vest. The armor is useless there. He makes a wet, surprised sound and collapses backward into the doorway, blood blooming dark down his chest rig.
The second man trips over him.
My second shot hits him in the face before he can regain his balance.
The cabin erupts into chaos.
Gunfire cracks inside the small space, deafening in the enclosed room. The walls spit out splinters as bullets punch through. Plaster dust hangs in the air like fog. The sharp, metallic bite of cordite crawls down my throat and lingers.
I don't have room for thoughts—especially not the kind that turn into words.
There is only the next shape, the next angle, the next breath.
Three more men appear through the broken door.
I take down two. Ivan handles the third—clean, centered, without hesitation.
I catch a glimpse of him as I reload.
His face is calm in a way that twists my stomach. Not gentle-calm or morning-cabin calm, but the other kind. The cold heir who watched men bleed in his father's house without blinking. That version of Ivan is present now, wearing his skin like armor.
His hands don't shake.
He isn't a soldier, but he's been trained. Not in the Kennel, not the way we were trained, but he knows how to aim a weapon and put a round where it needs to go. He knows how to avoid wasting motion.
We move together without speaking.
When I shift left to cover the breach, Ivan slides right to widen the angle. When I slap a fresh magazine in, he fires in the pause, buying me the half-second I didn't have.
Four years of orbiting him—three steps behind, one step to the side, always watching—have honed my instincts into something useful in a fight: rhythm, timing, and the ability to anticipate his movements before he makes them.
I've fought alongside other men, but this is different.
Ivan doesn't fight like an assigned partner; he fights like a man determined to survive.
"Kitchen window," he says. "Two."
I pivot.
The first man is visible through the shattered frame—partially sheltered, rifle braced. My shot snaps his head back.
The second man ducks.
I wait.
Not for long. People always think they can outlast you, but they can't. They flinch. They breathe wrong. They shift to look.
He shifts.
My bullet clips the space between the frame and his shoulder, finding flesh. He goes down screaming, the sound cutting through the ringing in my ears.
The front room is now a wreck.
Bodies lie sprawled, half in and half out.
Blood spreads in dark, shiny pools across the floorboards.
Furniture is overturned, shot through, reduced to splintered debris.
The windows are blown out or shattered, and through the gaps, I see movement in the treeline—dark shapes shifting positions, rifles catching the light for fleeting moments.
They're not panicking.
That's the problem.
These aren't amateurs rushing in to die foolishly. They're controlling the pace, forcing us to expend ammo and breath inside a box they're gradually tightening.
"We can't stay," I say, my voice rough from smoke. "Too many angles."
Ivan ejects his magazine and slams in a fresh one. "Boat shed. If we can reach the dock—"
Something arcs through the broken window.
A bottle. Glass. Liquid sloshing in the air. A rag burning bright at the mouth.
It hits the floor near the counter and shatters.
Fire erupts from it as if alive.
It spreads instantly across the wood, licking up cabinet faces, swallowing a towel, climbing a chair leg. The heat punches my face hard enough to make my eyes water. The smell shifts—sweet chemical burn, paint and varnish turning toxic.
They aren't trying to win clean.
They want the cabin to become a weapon.
Ivan swears under his breath and adjusts his stance, shielding his face from a wave of heat.
My eyes catch something on the counter just as the fire reaches it.
A device.
Not the phone he threw earlier. This is the small secure recorder he keeps with his go-bag—black, flat, ugly, the kind of thing you forget until you need it. It was recording the call automatically, the difference between our word and irrefutable proof.
Flame touches it.
Plastic warps. The casing begins to curl. The screen frosts and then splits with a sharp pop.
Smoke consumes the rest.
"Ivan!" I shout over the gunfire. "The recorder—"
He sees it. I watch as his eyes lock on it, registering what just vanished, his jaw tightening as if something inside him has snapped.
For a brief moment, the future we discussed this morning—evidence, father, trial, proof—disappears into the plastic and smoke.
"We'll deal with that later," he says, his voice firm and unyielding. "Move."
The back door is our only escape route.
It leads to a covered walkway connecting the cabin to the shed. Twenty feet of exposed ground feels like a kilometer when bullets are flying.
The fire behind us spreads rapidly, and smoke fills the room.
I go first.
The first bullet whizzes past my head, close enough to make my ear ring. The second grazes my arm, leaving a hot line across my bicep that I notice only because my sleeve grows wet.
I return fire, dropping a man who was creeping toward the walkway from the left.
Ivan's shots follow mine, sharp and controlled, suppressing the treeline just enough for us to run.
We reach the walkway.
Halfway across.
Then it happens.
A shot strikes my thigh.
The impact is blunt and jarring, like a sledgehammer hitting my leg. My knee buckles, and my body tries to keep moving but fails. The world tilts, and the boards slam into my chest.
I hit hard enough to knock the breath out of me.
Blood floods down into my boot, hot and thick. The wound is deep, and my leg feels foreign—like a piece of machinery that just broke.
Pain arrives a moment later, belated but overwhelming, white-hot and spreading.
"Maksim!"
Ivan is beside me in two steps.
His hands grip my shoulders, attempting to lift me. I try to stand, but my leg betrays me. It offers no support, no leverage, only agony.
Behind us, the cabin is engulfed in flames—windows belching fire, smoke rising into the sky. The structure groans like it's both alive and dying.
In front of us, the treeline shifts.
They're advancing, not running, but closing in. Confident now, because they saw me fall.
I count what I can see: five, six, then more shadows emerge from the trees.
My throat tastes like metal and smoke.
This is the turning point.
Two men in a cabin might get lucky.
One man dragging a bleeding body across a walkway does not.
"Go," I rasp. "Get to the boat. I'll hold them at the shed door."
Ivan stares at me, disbelief etched on his face.
"The shed's a choke point," I force out. "I can slow them down. You start the engine. You—"
His grip tightens.
"What are you saying?"
"This is what I do," I say, the words cutting deeper than the bullet wound. "This is what I'm for."
The file flashes in my mind like a bruise you can't stop touching.
Subject 43. Expendable. Extension of will.
The moment the conditioning was meant to achieve.
A part of me—some old, conditioned instinct—craves the relief of surrender. It wants to stop resisting who I am and simply embrace it: sacrifice, death, a clean break, a simple end.
It would be easy.
"No," Ivan says.
"Ivan—"
"Shut up."
His voice strikes like a slap, raw and furious, far from the authoritative tone of an heir.
He leans in, his face inches from mine, eyes alight with a panic that has sharpened into rage.
"You are not a subject number," he snarls. "You don't get to decide you're disposable just because a piece of paper says so."
A bullet whizzes past, close enough to make the air tremble. Ivan doesn't flinch.
"We go together," he declares, and it's not romantic; it's a verdict. "Or we die together. Those are the options."
He grips the front of my vest and pulls me up.
My leg screams as he hauls me upright. Stars explode behind my eyes, and I bite down hard, my jaw aching.
But Ivan's grip is iron, and he keeps firing with his other hand, keeping their heads down, buying us precious inches.
I stagger.
He drags me.
We move.
The shed door is reinforced steel.
We crash into it together. Ivan slams it shut behind us and secures the heavy bar. Bullets thud into the wood immediately, punching like fists. The door shudders but holds.
The boat rests on its lift, gently rocking in the shadowed water.
Ivan lowers me against the wall, careful not to treat me gently, as if gentleness would make it all too real.
"How bad?" he asks, not looking at me.
I press my hand to my thigh. Blood wells between my fingers, dark and steady—not bright arterial, not spraying.
The bullet barely missed the femoral.
"I can manage," I reply.