Chapter 17

Under My Skin.

Sage Flashback

I was fourteen the first time I thought maybe there could be more than this. More than blood-soaked blades and bruised knuckles and waking up every morning wondering if today was the day Yakov decided I wasn’t worth the effort. His compound wasn’t a home. It was a war camp for children. Future killers. No birthdays. No lullabies. Just drills. Sparring. Precision. If you bled, you cleaned it up yourself. If you cried, you paid for it in bruises. But there was

feel… almost human. Nikolai. He was sixteen, fast, smart, sharp with a blade and sharper with his wit. He used to sneak me extra one boy who made protein bars from the kitchen and once broke a guard’s nose when he caught him pushing me too hard during training. We weren’t anything. Not really. We couldn’t be. But in the stolen moments between drills and missions, when we’d sneak onto the roof and stare at the stars we couldn’t touch, he’d talk like there was something better out there. For us. A life beyond the kill orders. He made me want more. Made me believe I could be something other than what Yakov carved me into. And then Yakov found out. We were lined up in the pit the next morning, boots on the dirt, breath misting in the cold air. The entire compound was there. Watching. Silent. Yakov stood in the middle, his black coat fluttering in the wind, eyes like dead coals as he dragged Nikolai into the center. “This is what weakness looks like,” he said.

I stepped forward. “It was me,” I lied. “I distracted him.”

Yakov smiled. Not kindly. Never kindly.

“That’s the problem with you. You feel too much. You care. It makes you sloppy. And it makes him…” he nodded at Nikolai, who met my eyes without blinking “dead.”