Chapter 23
MAKSIM
Three months.
Ninety-one days since the Estate gates closed behind me.
Ninety-one nights spent in a concrete cell with a narrow window overlooking frozen ground and a sky the color of tarnished steel.
Ninety-one mornings waking with my jaw clenched and my hands already formed into fists, as if my body is still trying to hold onto someone who isn't there.
I am learning what it means to disappear.
The facility is a Soviet relic—one of those half-forgotten monitoring stations repurposed when the organization expanded its reach across the region.
Everything about it feels like it was built for men who were never meant to return to anything softer than duty.
The walls are made of poured concrete, cracked at the corners, stained by decades of smoke and moisture.
The radiators hiss and then go cold without warning.
Some mornings, I can see my breath in my room, the air sharp enough to sting my lungs, as if winter has decided to settle inside the building.
My assignment is labeled monitoring duty.
That's what they put on the paperwork. That's what they tell themselves to make it sound useful.
But it isn't.
It's storage.
I work twelve-hour shifts, watching feeds from warehouses and depots scattered across the Volga region and beyond.
Loading docks. Perimeter fences. Aisle cameras trained on stacks of crates that only move when a man moves them.
Grainy footage cycles every thirty seconds, the same angles, the same fluorescent glare, the same men in work jackets pushing pallets and checking seals.
Nothing ever happens. That's the point. If something happened, I would be needed. Sergei Baranov doesn't want me needed.
He wants me alive. Far away. Quiet.
The men here know what I am.
Word spreads through this organization like smoke through a house: it finds every crack.
Some version of the story has reached this frozen corner of Russia—that Subject 43, the Kennel graduate, crossed a line he wasn't meant to survive.
That the heir's dog got too close. That Sergei made an example without creating a mess.
They look at me like men regard something retired but still sharp—a tool left on a bench because it cuts the hand that holds it.
A few of them mock me when they think my hearing is worse than it is.
They whisper about the heir's pet being sent back to the kennel where he belongs.
They make jokes with their mouths half-covered by their hands, like schoolboys who don't understand that some jokes are only funny until the wrong person hears them.
I don't respond.
Response costs energy. Energy is better spent elsewhere.
And besides—they aren't entirely wrong. I am a dog. I have always been a dog. The only difference is that for a few weeks, I forgot it.
Others avoid me. They time their meals so we don't share the same table, take routes through the building that keep their distance, and step aside when I pass in the corridor, as if proximity is contagious.
These people are smarter. They understand that what brought me here could also bring them here, and they want no part of a story that Sergei Baranov had to correct personally.
I don't blame them.
If I could avoid myself, I would.
The days—what passes for days here—are manageable. The facility runs on routine and habit, much like the Kennel did. You wake, eat, move when told, and work until ordered to stop. This structure is familiar enough that my body can perform it without thinking, which is dangerous.
It leaves my mind too much room.
The nights are the worst.
At night, when my shift ends and the building falls silent, when the wind presses against the concrete as if it wants in, there is nothing between me and my memories. No feeds to watch. No manifests to pull. No rules to follow except the most important one: don't break.
I dwell on that motel room in Chicago until the thought grooves into my skull.
The first thin light creeping under the curtains.
Smoke lingering in our hair from the distribution center.
Ivan's laugh—sharp, bright, startled—when I kissed him like I'd been starving.
The way he settled against my chest afterward, heavy and real, his fingers tracing slow patterns across my stomach as if he needed proof my body wasn't just a file.
I can still hear myself saying it.
In a minute. I'm not moving yet.
As if time could be negotiated.
As if the world had ever cared what I was ready for.
Then the phone rang, the warmth vanished, and by the end of that day, I was sitting in a transport vehicle with tinted windows, watching the Estate disappear behind a bend in the road.
Volgograd.
A word that isn't just geography to me. It signifies a return, a loop closing.
Cold. Concrete. Numbers instead of names. Voronin's voice explaining function while boys died behind locked doors.
I sleep under three blankets and still wake shivering, reaching out with a hand that expects skin but finds only air. Some mornings, my body reacts before my mind, muscles tensing, breath catching, as if I'm back in the cabin, the storm coming in sideways, and Ivan is beside me, alive.
The facility has ways of reminding you that you are not allowed to forget what you are.
There are no mirrors in the corridors.
The glass in my window is too high to show my reflection.
Even the water in the sink is so hard and cloudy it barely holds an image.
It's almost considerate, as if they know watching yourself become less human is easier when you don't have to see it.
Three months is a long time—long enough for hope to fray at the edges, long enough for a promise to feel less like a commitment and more like a desperate survival tactic.
Ivan said, I will come for you.
I believed him then.
Some nights, I still do.
Other nights, the thought of him forgetting me slips beneath my ribs like a blade, twisting until I have to sit up and breathe through the pain.
Sergei Baranov doesn't need to torture you to break
you; he just lets time do the work.
My shift begins as the sun sets, casting blue shadows over the snow outside.
The monitoring station is a semicircle of screens and cheap plastic keyboards, with six feeds rotating through camera IDs.
The coffee comes from reused grounds and a pot that tastes faintly of metal, no matter how much it's scrubbed.
It's burnt, bitter, and barely warm, but it gives my hands something to hold onto as the cold seeps into my joints.
Tonight, my shift partner is Dmitri—a thick neck, heavy hands, the build of someone who used to lift weights but now only sits. He doesn't mock me or speak unless necessary. We share a silence that feels almost professional.
The hours drag on.
I watch forklifts glide across concrete floors in Kazan. I see guards pace outside fenced perimeters in Rostov, their breath steaming white in the camera glare. I focus so hard on nothing that my eyes begin to ache.
Deep into the night, something shifts.
A truck arrives at Warehouse Seven.
That alone isn't unusual; trucks come at all hours. The organization doesn't respect sleep, weather, or daylight.
But the markings on this truck catch my eye.
Not wrong—old.
It bears a logistics stencil that should have been scrubbed months ago, back when the network was "restructured" after Boris's arrest. New routing codes, new vendor shells, new paperwork meant to convince Sergei that the infection had been removed.
This truck still wears the old skin.
I sit up straighter.
Dmitri grunts a question without taking his eyes off his screen. I shake my head once. He doesn't press. He knows I watch for a reason.
On the feed, the truck backs into the loading dock. Four men climb out, dressed like standard warehouse workers—work jackets, gloves, movements efficient and practiced. They unload crates onto pallets, while another team rolls the pallets inside.
If I didn't know what to look for, I might see routine.
But I do know what to look for.
There's a rhythm to legitimate movement—paperwork lag, radio calls, camera angles that capture faces for ID verification. This feels too clean, too unconcerned with process, as if they already know no one will stop them.
I pull up Warehouse Seven's manifest.
The system is slow, and the satellite link stutters. The screen freezes, then loads in chunks, as if reluctant to reveal any information.
When it finally appears, I scan the shipment log.
The truck isn't listed.
An unregistered delivery sneaks through a monitored facility as if it belongs.
That shouldn't be possible.
Not anymore.
I dig deeper.
I check the manifest history, the audit trail, and older logs.
It takes longer than it should because my clearance here is deliberately minimal—enough to observe, but not enough to investigate. Every menu feels like a shove, every access request a struggle against a system designed to keep me bored and blind.
Then I find it.
Buried in the notations—small and nearly invisible unless you're looking for it—is a string of characters that tightens my stomach.
An authentication cipher.
Boris's.
I recognize it because I spent a week delving into his operations—three raids, three laptops, ledgers, transfers, and memo fields that followed a consistent pattern.
Boris had a habit of leaving his signature in places he thought Sergei would never check.
A private mark for off-the-books shipments, those that fueled the second empire he built within the first.
The log next to the cipher is dated three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago.
Long after Boris was supposed to be "finished." Long after Sergei was meant to have cut him out and cauterized the wound.
I stare at the screen until the edges of my vision pulse.
There are only a few possibilities, and none of them are good.
Either Boris is still moving product, which means custody isn't what Ivan believed—