Leverage

I. Catalyst

This is all because of me.

I know. Terrible way to begin. Very gauche. Very “look at me, Mother, I moved the world.”

But I did. Whether you want to admit it or not.

Look. Bryan Dawkins didn’t wake up one morning, stretch his aching little joints, kiss Kai and Nico, and decide he was ready to throw away the rest of his “career” because Ivan Stanislav hurt his feelings. That would be romantic. Dawkins is loud. Foolish. Impulsive. But romantic is a little outside his emotional register.

No.

He did this because of me. Because of what I did. Because Dawkins needed a report.

And I gave it to him.

Nobody ever thanks the man who makes the story move. Still, you’re welcome, Bryan.

The report said what Alexei Ruslan already knew and what Bryan Dawkins certainly did not. Kai wasn’t lost in some fog of war. She wasn’t a needle in some international haystack. Ruslan knew exactly where Max Kael was keeping her. He knew early. He sent people here, and there, and everywhere. But not to where she was.

He did this so Bryan could hold onto the hope that someone was actually doing something. And he’d stay in The Red Army.

To be honest? It was elegant. In the way Alexei’s cruelty was sometimes elegant. Hey, old men need hobbies too, I guess. But like most of those old Soviets, they also love their bureaucracy and their paper trails.

So, after I sent Arina packing, I found the report. Oh, don’t make that face. She had her chance. You know, I even asked her out once and she turned me down. Poor taste, obviously. If she were smart, she’d have stuck to me, and my gender. And if you don’t believe that, then you can just fuck off.

But anyway, I had the truth. I could have done something noble and stupid with the information, yes. Instead, I did something useful.

I showed Bryan.

And what a beautiful transformation I witnessed. He read it and became a new man. New spine. New morality. Suddenly, the Red Army was corrupt. Suddenly, Ivan Stanislav was the enemy. Suddenly, Bryan Dawkins, who had been perfectly willing to stand near all sorts of unpleasantness when it benefitted him, “found himself.”

Please. Bryan is old. Not Ivan old, but old enough to know what the Red Army was. It was never about overthrowing PRIME, communist revolution, or benefitting all members involved. It was about Ivan and Alexei. Period. And Bryan was perfectly happy being the subservient little lapdog.

Until I showed him the truth.

I almost applauded. Seeing him dance to my tune.

That was the original plan, in case you’re wondering. Damage Ivan from inside the house. I ran Arina out. Rose left. I turned one of his own people against him. Make the Red Army look as rotten as it was, have Ivan combust, then get out before the smoke reached my clothes.

My father had sent me into Ivan’s world because my life had become, let’s say, difficult to defend at dinner. Too fast. Too expensive. Too many calls that began with, “Maksim, what did you do?” and ended with wire transfers. Dad’s solution was Ivan Stanislav, because rich fathers love discipline when someone else has to provide it.

So there I was. Assigned to the great Soviet refrigerator.

I didn’t think Ivan could teach me anything, but you know what?

He did.

I wanted Ivan to lose, but the stubborn bastard kept winning. Even without Arina, Rose, Alexei, and Dawkins. Win after win after win.

First, it was annoying. Then, it was useful. Later, it became profitable.

So yes, my position evolved. No, I’m not loyal to Ivan Stanislav. Just invested. I’m happy to ride the tank until the tracks come off. Then, I’ll step away.

That’s what makes me better than the entire Soviet experiment in PRIME.

I don’t believe in flags.

II. Utility

I believe in doors.

Not symbolically. That’s too sentimental. I mean actual fucking doors.

Private rooms. Back entrances. Darkened holes where people judge you by the watch that wraps around your wrist.

I learned to believe in doors at Culture Shock.

By then, I thought the Dawkins matter had reached its tidy little ending. Bryan had learned the truth, made his noise, and walked away from the Red Army. Then, Ivan demolished him and took his title and I assumed that was, as they say, that.

Neat. Efficient. Profitable.

I should have known better. Americans have a vulgar attachment to failed endings and worse sequels.

I remember walking behind Ivan after the match. Behind him, not beside him. It’s an important distinction, though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. He came through the curtain with the Intense Championship in one hand and his face still red from whatever passed for joy inside that enormous head of his. Sweat darkened his shirt. One strap of his suspenders had twisted near his shoulder. He was bleeding, but he didn’t seem to care.

He’d never admit it, but he looked like money.

A production assistant nearly tripped clearing a path. Ivan didn’t break his stride.

“Starshy Praporshchik,” I said, still remaining in his wake, “you just made half the building piss themselves and the other half cry. Very efficient.”

Ivan grunted. “Efficiency is for machines, Maksim. This was a necessity.” He gripped the championship in his hand as if it weighed nothing. “Dawkins believed he could walk away. Tonight I reminded him the Red Army does not permit desertion.”

He kept walking. I remained behind. For once, I didn’t feel like I was following.

That was when I began to understand the arrangement.

I hate almost everything about why it works. I hate the uniform, the medals, and the speeches. I hate that he can say “Mother Russia” and people act like he’s done something grand.

But Ivan opens doors.

When my father first placed me near him, people looked at me with a specific expression. You know the one. The soft smile reserved for expensive disappointments. There goes Stepanov’s boy. There goes the expensive problem. There goes another reason his father is on blood pressure medication.

But with Alexei gone, and Ivan winning? That changed.

Not completely, but enough. Men now paused and made room. Calls returned before lunch. My name stopped being an apology. My father asked about progress, not my shortcomings. I’d have preferred to earn it through something more elegant than a seven-foot communist with suspenders, but dignity isn’t a serious business model.

And that is the other thing that I learned about Ivan. He’s ridiculous until he’s not.

Everyone sees the obvious, first. He’s the size of a municipal building. He laughs like a bomb detonation. He believes in flags, old songs, and the moral superiority of being impossible to ignore. It makes him very funny. Very old. Very easy to underestimate. And then?

He wins.

He wins when he should be too old. He wins when too many people have decided the story has moved past him. He wins after losing people, after bleeding, after being betrayed, after being told by every sensible person with working eyes that time has already made up its mind. Ivan listens to time the way he listens to most people. Poorly.

There’s value in that.

I’m not saying I admire him. Admiration is just a way to make observation sound noble. But he’s profitable. Most people think he’s simply a hammer, but he’s not. Still, calling him a hammer is easier. It makes my relationship with him feel, in some way, safer.

Yet here we are. UltraViolence. Ivan and Bryan again. If Ivan loses, big deal, he loses a match. If Bryan loses, he retires forever. He packs up whatever’s left of his knees, his pineapples, his bruised little sense of righteousness, and goes home to explain that the last meaningful decision of his career was agreeing to terms he was stupid enough to accept.

Beautiful. I have always liked arrangements where consequence is distributed unevenly.

And then Lindsay Troy, who cannot resist putting her thumb on anything that might otherwise be interesting, appointed Chandler Tsonda as the special referee.

That part annoyed me more than it should have.

I understand Chandler. I might even envy him on a bad day. He is handsome in that effortless way that makes people forgive his sins. He moves through rooms like the world owes him interest. Loved. Famous. Unburdened.

He will stand between Ivan and Bryan wearing zebra stripes. He will make the match look supervised and give everyone the comforting illusion that something decent has been placed in the ring to keep the old monster honest.

Very sweet.

Very optimistic.

But I have walked behind Ivan when the doors opened. I have seen hallways rearrange themselves around him. I have watched people discover, too late, that the ridiculous old man remains ridiculous only until he starts moving toward what he wants.

At UltraViolence, Bryan is what Ivan wants.

Chandler Tsonda is only the door.

Ivan has spent his entire career proving that doors built to stop him rarely do.

III. Reckoning

Hours before the match, I found him in a corridor that had no business being as quiet as it was. You could already hear the crowd. You could hear them in your bones. And where Ivan sat, on a huge equipment case others would need to climb, he hunched forward with his forearms on his knees like a man waiting for a bus that had already left.

I stood beside him.

That sounds like nothing, which is why most people miss how power actually works. Standing beside Ivan Stanislav used to be a reserved position. Alexei. Speedy. Arina, when she still had the stomach for it.

Now it was me.

He didn’t even look up.

Ivan was enormous, even sitting. Even hunched. Even for a man who had made every decision he was going to make tonight. The crowd wanted him. Even those who wanted him to lose.

That was the thing about Ivan that I had spent a long time refusing to admit. He pulled at people. Some gravitational thing that had nothing to do with merit or modernity or any quality I would have considered important for a person.

Ivan was alone in a way he had never been alone before. Alexei’s medical reports were grim, and I will not insult either of us by pretending that disappointed me. His chances of returning to Ivan were slim. Returning intact, slimmer.

There was no Ruslan coming down that corridor. Speedy wasn’t here. There was no one left who knew how to stand beside this man.

Except me. Right now. Tonight.

I reached into my jacket. “I have something for you, Starshy Praporshchik.”

He said nothing, but I knew he was listening. Now was the ultimate payoff for all my hard work.

I took the Dawkins report out of my coat and held it toward him. He looked at it before he took it. He unfolded it. Read it. And digested it. He said nothing.

I resented the fact that my body had decided this was important. “Alexei knew where Kai was,” I said. I wanted to be the one to say it out loud. “Before any of the searches. He knew exactly where Max Kael was keeping her and he sent people, wasted resources, to locations that were never going to produce anything. Just so Bryan could feel like someone was trying.”

I paused.

“Dawkins thought you were trying,” I said, “but Alexei lied to him. To you.” A pause. “To us.”

Ivan turned the page.

“I found it after Arina quit. Old administrative files.” I let that sit. “In Arina’s files. She and Alexei must have known, but both said nothing.”

Ivan read to the end. Folded the paper once along its original crease, and held it tightly. “Who else has seen this,” he asked.

“No one,” I lied. “Just you and me.”

Ivan looked at the folded report, then at me.

I took his cold stare as trying to hide his surprise.

That was generous of me, in retrospect.

I wanted to smile so badly. I could taste it. I waited for it. The anger. The volcanic recalibration. The moment where forty-plus years of brotherhood developed the first visible crack. I knew what this information could do to men. I had seen it in Dawkins. I saw it in Alexei. And now, it was Ivan’s turn. Now, I would walk through doors with Ivan Stanislav.

But he said nothing.

The paper made a small sound in his hand. That was all. No shift of his shoulders. No tightening in his jaw. No sudden breath through his nose. The corridor grew louder around him because he had become so still.

I almost asked what he was thinking. I had given him something real and he was supposed to react.

It all played out in my head as a series of unchangeable events. Ivan was supposed to grow angry. To thank me. To trust me. To believe in me. To damn Alexei. But somewhere in that sequence, something diverted from its course. Not clean. Unfinished.

I pushed him.

“I thought you should know,” I said. “Before tonight. Whatever it means to you.”

Ivan looked at me. Fully. He was quiet for long enough that I thought he might not speak at all.

“Bryan Dawkins made a choice,” he said. His voice was low and even, like concrete. “He chose to leave. He chose to beg for this match and put his career in front of me like an offering.”

He looked down at the folded report. “I don’t need a reason to finish him. I have wanted to finish him since the moment he decided I was something he could walk away from. The ring will be enough.”

His mouth tightened.

“And if Tsonda decides friendship matters more than counting, then he has chosen his place beside Dawkins.”

He paused.

“Maksim. Tonight I will hurt him in ways that will follow him into whatever life he thinks he is returning to. Not because Alexei did something. Not because of Kai. Not because of any report.” He looked at me again. “Because I want to. Because I will enjoy it. And because when it is over, Dawkins will spend the rest of his miserable life understanding exactly what he gave up when he decided to make me his enemy after I made him my friend.”

For a few seconds, I had no idea what to do with that.

I had not come here to be surprised. I had come here with a document and a very reasonable expectation that Ivan Stanislav would behave like Ivan Stanislav.

Which was irritating, obviously.

Rage. Accusation. A great red collapse of feeling and history. Alexei’s name turned into a curse. Arina’s absence made useful. Me, standing close enough to be mistaken for necessary.

Instead, Ivan had taken the whole beautiful construction and stepped over it.

Not around it. Over it.

Alexei was still guilty. Arina was still gone. Every piece was exactly where I had placed it, and somehow none of it had moved him where I wanted.

That should have made him less impressive. It did not. For a moment I almost admired him. I shoved the feeling away. I realized that tonight, Ivan didn’t need reasons. He didn’t need me. He simply wanted to destroy the man.

Bryan still needed things to mean something. He needed righteousness, redemption, a story where his pain had purpose. Ivan did not.

Strip away the anthem, the medals, the motherland, the speeches, and there was something in him I understood perfectly well. He wanted. He took. He punished. Clean. Honest in its brutality.

For the first time, I realized I respected that more than Dawkins’ desperate need for meaning.

I had always assumed that when Ivan Stanislav finally spoke plainly to me, it would feel like progress. It felt like something else entirely.

And then?

“Thank you, Maksim,” he said.

That was it.

No confession. No fracture. No brotherhood collapsing under the weight of one ugly document. Just gratitude, if that was what we were calling it.

I straightened my jacket and walked down the corridor the way I had come. Past the noise and away from a man I refused to call complicated, regardless of what I privately suspected. I had gone in there to give Ivan something. Intelligence. Proximity. A reason to keep me close. And he had taken it and said thank you and looked at me in a way that I was still, three minutes later, not entirely able to categorize.

The honest version of what I had seen in that corridor was not comfortable, so I did what I always do with uncomfortable truths.

I put it away.

He was going to walk out there tonight and pour himself into destroying Bryan Dawkins because he wanted to and because he could, and I was going to watch from somewhere with better lighting and collect whatever came next.

That was the arrangement. It had always been the arrangement.

I told myself that was enough.

I almost believed it.

What I wish I had understood then was the reflection I walked past without seeing. A monitor across the hall, switched off, its black screen catching the corridor behind me like a warped little mirror.

Ivan was not looking down at the report.

He was watching me from behind.

Not confused. Not wounded. Not grateful.

Quietly angry.

Completely angry.

At me.

That was the part I missed. The rage had been there after all. Not for Alexei. Not for what the report said. Ivan knew Ruslan too well for that.

The report had told him something about me.

He had decided I did not deserve to see what he meant to do next.

IV. Calculus

Anyway.

People believe in all sorts of things right before those things embarrass them. Justice. Momentum. Love. The idea that a referee shirt can civilize a ring full of competitors who have already agreed to hurt each other for applause.

I prefer math.

And the math, whatever I had seen in that corridor, remained excellent.

A broken Dawkins. A motivated Ivan. A ring. A career placed on the table by the only man foolish enough to think sacrifice was heroic.

Clean numbers.

Then there was Chandler Tsonda. The variable.

I hate variables.

Tsonda was not dangerous because Lindsay Troy trusted him. That was the “easy” complaint. Convenient to shout into a camera.

No. Tsonda was dangerous because Dawkins trusted him.

Worse, Dawkins loved him in that saccharine sentimental American way.

And Ivan knew it.

Still, Chandler was something else. History. Not mine, but Ivan’s. A name from 2025 that still had weight. One of the few men who had stood opposite Ivan Stanislav and remained himself afterward.

No wonder Ivan hated him.

Chandler Tsonda was every quality Ivan loathed, assembled into one man. Small. Handsome. Quick. Beloved.

So yes, he complicated the room. But the situation remained.

One man had everything to lose.

The other was Ivan Stanislav.

And between them stood a friend, an enemy, and a variable in stripes.

The numbers were still clean.

They were simply less certain.

V. Consequence

All of this, as I said, was because of me. The puppets had been dancing. Yes, Chandler Tsonda was a wrinkle I hadn't expected. But Ruslan wasn't waking up anytime soon. Ivan would keep winning. I would keep profiting.

Yes, fine, Ivan should have reacted more dramatically. I will grant you that. A curse. A chair through a wall. One visible crack in that ridiculous old brotherhood he and Alexei built out of blood, habit, and shared delusion. Something I could use.

But old men are strange. Russians are stranger. Ivan most of all.

Maybe he was saving it for the ring. Maybe he understood the report so completely that he had no need to perform surprise for my benefit. Maybe that was what power looked like when it got tired.

Maybe I should have considered his glare behind my back?

No. It was only a matter of time before I took Alexei Ruslan's place.

Everything was as it should be.

INSIDE The bunker was what remained when Alexei Ruslan had nowhere else to go.

It had been losing power for months.

One corridor first. Then another. Offices. Archives. Communications. Maps left glowing beneath glass until the bulbs failed and the borders disappeared into dark.

Still, something remained.

Deep inside, one red light continued its patient work. Small. Stubborn. Rude in its refusal.

The machines kept their time.

A line rose.

Fell.

Rose again.

Then faltered.

One second. Then another.

Beside the bed, Alexei Ruslan's USSR peak cap waited on a metal chair, red star dull beneath the failing light.

The line rose again. Sharper this time.

Alexei opened his eyes.