Chapter 17 Nikolai
Chapter Seventeen
NIKOLAI
My legs do not work.
I mean this literally. The muscles that should carry my weight have forgotten their purpose after three weeks of atrophy. When I try to stand, my knees buckle like hinges with rusted pins. When I try to step forward, my feet drag against the floor as if they’re filled with sand instead of bone.
“Lean on me,” Alexei says. His arm slides around my waist, pulling me against his side. The contact is firm, practical, a human brace. The contact is also the only thing keeping me from collapsing.
“This is humiliating,” I mutter.
The Nikolai Petrenko who walked into that elevator three weeks ago would rather die than be carried out like an invalid. That Nikolai had pride. That Nikolai had legs that worked.
“This is survival. Move.”
We move. Or rather, he moves and I cling to him, my arm draped over his shoulders, my feet shuffling across the concrete in a parody of walking. Each step sends bolts of pain through my atrophied muscles. Each step reminds me how thoroughly the Processing Room unmade me.
The smock I’m wearing is thin, scratchy cotton. I’m aware of how exposed I am—bare feet on cold concrete, no underwear, the fabric doing nothing to preserve warmth or modesty. I look like what I am: a prisoner being extracted. A piece of inventory being moved.
But his arm is around my waist. His body is warm against my side. Even as my legs scream and my pride dies a quiet death, I feel something I haven’t felt in weeks.
Safe. Held. His.
The corridor changes as we descend. The smooth, sound-swallowing walls of the residential level give way to raw concrete, exposed pipes, the industrial skeleton that holds the Tower upright.
The lighting shifts from amber warmth to harsh fluorescent.
The air grows colder, carrying the bass vibration of machinery that I can feel in my teeth.
“Service level,” Alexei says, his voice low. “Maintenance access. Less surveillance.”
Less, but not none. I can see the cameras mounted at intervals, their red indicator lights blinking steadily.
Alexei moves us through zones of coverage with a precision that speaks to intimate knowledge of the system.
He knows exactly where the blind spots are.
He knows exactly how long we have before each lens sweeps back to our position.
He built these systems. Now he’s exploiting them to save the man he was supposed to kill.
The smell hits me before we reach the loading area.
Diesel fuel, heavy and acrid. Exhaust fumes that burn the back of my throat.
Concrete dust and machine oil. After weeks of the Processing Room’s sterile nothingness, the sensory assault is almost physical.
I gag, pressing my hand against my mouth to suppress the sound.
Alexei’s arm tightens around me. “Breathe through your mouth. It passes.”
I try. The air tastes worse than it smells.
We round a corner and I see them—the loading docks. Massive industrial doors, currently sealed. Forklifts parked in neat rows. Stacks of crates waiting for distribution. And beyond the doors, visible through grimy windows, the gray light of the outside world.
I haven’t seen natural light in three weeks.
The realization makes my chest tight. I stop moving, and Alexei has to half-drag me forward before I can force my legs to cooperate again.
“Guard station ahead,” he murmurs. “Follow my lead. Do not speak.”
I nod. My heart is hammering so hard I’m certain anyone within ten meters can hear it.
The guard station is a small booth positioned between the service corridor and the dock floor. Through the scratched glass, I can see a figure inside—broad shoulders, military bearing, the unmistakable bulge of a weapon at his hip.
Alexei’s posture changes. The tension drains from his body. His stride becomes confident, almost bored. When he speaks, his voice carries the flat authority I remember from our earliest sessions.
“Asset transfer. Disposal unit.”
The guard looks up. His eyes flick to me, taking in my thin smock, my shuffling gait, my obvious weakness. I see the calculation happening behind his gaze—damaged prisoner, authorized handler, routine operation.
I try to make myself smaller. I try to become invisible, just another piece of cargo being processed through the Tower’s systems.
“Documentation?” the guard asks.
Alexei produces a tablet from somewhere—I don't see where he was keeping it—and holds it toward the window. The guard scans it with a handheld device. The seconds stretch into hours. I study the concrete floor, counting the cracks, anything to avoid meeting the guard’s eyes.
If he looks too closely, he might recognize me. The Petrenko heir. The asset scheduled for disposal by dawn—not authorized for transfer.
His eyes move back to my face. Linger. Too long.
My mouth opens—
“Asset is febrile,” Alexei says, tone bored. “Sedation protocols. Standard delirium presentation.”
The guard’s interest dies immediately. Disposal bay assets are treated as biohazard—guards don’t touch, don’t inspect, don’t ask questions. Fever means contamination risk. Contamination risk means someone else’s problem.
The scanner beeps. Green light.
“Disposal bay three,” the guard says, already losing interest. “Incinerator’s been running hot, so watch your timing.”
“Noted.”
Alexei moves us past the station without hurrying. His arm around my waist feels casual now, just a handler managing a compliant asset.
The dock cameras will log his face, our direction, and the timestamp. We aren’t invisible—we’re just early. Dock logs batch-upload every four hours unless an anomaly flag is tripped. By the time anyone reviews this footage, we need to be gone.
My legs are shaking so badly I’m surprised I don’t fall, but fear has given me a strange strength. Fear and his grip on my body.
We are past the checkpoint. We are on the loading floor. The massive doors are twenty meters ahead.
“Almost there,” Alexei says. His voice is different now—lower, urgent. The Accountant's mask is slipping. “The side exit. There’s a gap in external surveillance.”
We move faster. My legs protest, muscles seizing with every step, but I force them to obey. The side exit is a personnel door set into the wall beside the main cargo bay.
Alexei pauses. His eyes scan the dock floor, landing on a maintenance cart near the wall. He steers us toward it, reaches down, and yanks a heavy rag from the cart’s lower shelf. Without explanation, he crouches and wraps it around my feet, knotting the fabric tight.
“Better than skin,” he says.
The rag is oil-stained and rough, but it’s something between my soles and the world outside. I nod, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.
He punches a code into the keypad. The door opens. The world rushes in.
Wind.
Actual wind, not the processed recycled air of the Tower’s ventilation system. It hits my face like a slap, cold and damp and carrying the thousand overlapping textures of a city. I gasp, and my lungs rebel, unprepared for air that hasn’t been filtered and sterilized.
This should feel like freedom. It doesn’t. It feels like an assault.
The cold is violent. It cuts through my thin smock like the fabric doesn’t exist. My skin contracts, raising goosebumps across every inch of exposed flesh. I start to shiver immediately, uncontrollably, my teeth chattering before we’ve taken three steps.
The wrapped rag takes the worst of it as my feet hit wet pavement, but the cold still shoots up through my ankles, into bones that have forgotten what temperature variation feels like. Every nerve ending is firing at once, overwhelmed by stimuli that the Processing Room had carefully excluded.
“Keep moving.” Alexei’s arm pulls me forward into an alleyway. “The cold will pass.”
It doesn’t pass. It settles into my bones like it belongs there.
But we’re outside. We’re outside the Tower.
The sky above us is gray and heavy with clouds I haven’t seen in weeks, and the walls of the alley are brick instead of concrete, and somewhere in the distance I can hear the sounds of traffic.
The sounds are too loud. A car horn blares and I flinch, pressing closer to Alexei’s side. Voices carry from the street beyond the alley—people talking, laughing, living their lives while I shiver in a smock.
I am in the world again. The world doesn’t know what to do with me. I don’t know what to do with it.
I watch Alexei work as we navigate the alley.
This is a different man than the one who knelt beside my cot.
This is the soldier the Kennel created. His eyes never stop moving—scanning corners, checking shadows, tracking every potential threat.
His right hand stays close to his hip, where I now notice the outline of a weapon beneath his sweater.
He moves like violence made efficient. When we reach the alley’s mouth, he presses me against the wall and leans past the corner, surveying the street beyond with an intensity that makes my breath catch.
This is what he was made to be. A predator wearing human skin, constantly calculating angles of attack and avenues of escape. I've seen him as the Monster, as the Accountant, as the man who touched my face with bare hands. Now I’m seeing the weapon underneath all of it.
The weapon is beautiful. The weapon is terrifying. The weapon is the only reason I’m still alive.
“Clear,” he says. “Thirty seconds to the vehicle. Can you run?”
“No.” The honest answer.
“Then we move fast and pray.” He pulls me forward, his arm shifting from my waist to my elbow, steering me like cargo.
We emerge onto a side street I don’t recognize. Parked cars line both sides—normal cars, civilian cars. Alexei leads me to a dark sedan near the end of the block—nothing distinctive, nothing that would draw attention.
He opens the passenger door and guides me inside.
I collapse into the seat. The leather is cold against my bare legs, and I hiss at the contact. My muscles are screaming. My lungs are burning. But I’m in a car. I’m off the street.
The car has a smell—old air freshener, coffee, something chemical. After the sterile nothingness of the Processing Room, it’s almost overwhelming.
Alexei circles to the driver’s side. He slides in, starts the engine, and pulls away from the curb without looking back. The heater kicks on, blasting air that starts cold and gradually warms. I angle myself toward the vents, desperate for relief from the shivering that hasn’t stopped.
I look back.
The Tower rises behind us, its glass facade reflecting the gray clouds. From this angle, it looks like any other office building. Forty-seven floors down. That's where I spent the last three weeks. That's where I was unmade.
I watch it shrink in the side mirror, and I feel something I wasn’t expecting.
Loss.
The Tower was a prison. The Processing Room was a torture chamber.
But it was also the place where Alexei knelt at my feet and wiped my face with cool water.
It was the place where he removed his gloves and touched me with bare hands.
It was the place where he said my name like it meant something more than a data point.
I don’t know if what I feel for him is love or addiction. I only know it’s real.
The penthouse apartment my father bought me never felt like home. Even my childhood bedroom at the estate was just a room where I slept between lessons in how to be a Petrenko.
But the Processing Room, with its gray walls and amber light and the sound of his footsteps—that felt like home. Because home isn’t about comfort. Home is about being seen. And Alexei saw every ugly, broken, desperate part of me and didn’t look away.
I hate myself for missing it.
I turn away from the mirror. Alexei’s profile is sharp against the gray light through the windshield. He drives with the same focused precision he brings to everything.
“Where are we going?” My voice comes out rough, damaged by cold and exhaustion.
“Away.” He doesn’t look at me. “First priority is distance. Details will follow.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have.” A pause. His jaw tightens. “I did not plan this. I did not prepare contingencies. I am operating without protocols.”
The admission should frighten me. The most dangerous man I’ve ever met, flying blind.
Instead, I feel something closer to relief. He’s not following a script. He’s making this up as he goes, the same way I am.
“So we’re both lost,” I say.
“Yes.”
I watch the city slide past the window. Streets I don’t recognize. Buildings I’ve never seen.
“Alexei.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for not killing me.”
His hands tighten on the steering wheel. For a long moment, he doesn’t respond. When he does, his voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it.
“The disposal order was not the difficult part.” He takes a breath. “The difficult part was realizing I would rather destroy my entire existence than execute it.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
So I reach across the center console and rest my hand on his thigh. Not sexual. Not demanding. Just contact. Just the reminder that he’s not alone in whatever this is.
His muscle tenses under my palm. Then, slowly, it relaxes.
We drive in silence. The Tower disappears behind the curve of the road. The city opens up around us, gray and indifferent, not caring that two broken people are fleeing through its streets.
I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if we’ll survive the week.
But his leg is warm under my hand. His profile is sharp against the gray. And for the first time in three weeks, I am not in a room with no windows.
It isn’t freedom. Freedom would require knowing what to do with it.
It’s something smaller. Something more fragile.
It’s the beginning of running.