By the time I turned fifteen, I had already killed more people than most soldiers do in a war.
I didn't count them anymore. My father told me once that numbers made you weak, that memory softened the blade. But the faces never fully went away. Some came back in dreams. Others in silence, when I caught my reflection in water or steel.
The boy who had bled in the train yard was gone. In his place stood someone leaner, sharper, and more dangerous than even I understood.
My training no longer came only from my father. He brought others now—men from the Spetsnaz, mercenaries who owed him debts, even killers whispered to have ties to Moscow's darker networks. They weren't mentors; they were wolves let loose on me. My survival was the lesson. If I failed, I bled. If I hesitated, I broke.
And I broke many times.
Bones fractured under strikes meant to teach me how to move faster. Blades cut deep when I misread a feint. Once, a man twice my size drowned me in a frozen river until I blacked out. When I woke, coughing blood and ice, my father only said, "Next time, you will not come back."
Pain stopped mattering.
I learned to read every twitch of muscle before it became a strike. To move through shadows so quietly I could hear the breath of men before they heard mine. To make weapons out of anything: rope, wire, broken glass, my own teeth if I had to.
At night, I lay awake staring at the cracked ceiling of the house I'd grown up in. My hands ached constantly, knuckles swollen, joints raw. The scars on my arms itched like they were still open. Sometimes I pressed a blade against my skin just to remember I was still alive, that I could still bleed.
But I never cried. Not anymore.
By sixteen, my father stopped testing me with "trials." He no longer needed to. I had become one.
---
The first time he took me on a mission outside our land, I thought it was another test. A way to see if I could follow. It was late autumn, the trees stripped bare, the air carrying the smell of firewood and decay. We crossed into territory that didn't belong to us, moving silent through old smuggling routes I hadn't known existed.
Our target wasn't a man, but information. Hidden in a warehouse that looked abandoned but wasn't. I remember crouching on a rooftop, the cold seeping into my bones, watching as trucks pulled up one after another. Men unloaded crates, speaking in hushed Russian mixed with accents I didn't recognize.
Inside those crates wasn't food, or supplies. It was weaponry. Enough to arm a militia. Enough to burn a city.
My father's voice was in my ear, low and steady. "Count them. Every guard. Every rifle. Every blind spot."
I counted. I memorized. I mapped.
When he finally said, "Move," I did. My heart hammered but my hands were steady. I slipped down from the roof, into the dark between trucks. Boots crunched gravel too close. A flashlight swept across rust and concrete.
My first kill on foreign soil wasn't clean.
The guard spotted me when I moved too early. His shout split the night, his hand reaching for the pistol at his hip. I lunged before he could draw, knife sinking into his throat. Warm blood sprayed across my face as I drove him into the dirt, hand clamped over his mouth to choke the sound.
He gurgled once, twice, then went still. His pistol slid from his hand.
I froze, shaking, crouched over his body. My knife dripping. My breath ragged.
You can't stop now.
I forced myself to move. Forced myself to drag his body behind the truck. Forced myself to breathe as if he'd been nothing. Just another cut in a long line of them.
The mission went on. My father took the lead, dismantling guards with brutal efficiency, leaving me scraps—opponents to test myself on. Each one harder than the last. Each one teaching me what hesitation would cost.
When it was done, we left with the information we'd come for. I left with blood on my hands that I couldn't wash off, no matter how many times I plunged them into the river on our way back.
---
That night, back at our fire, my father handed me a flask of vodka. Not as reward. As expectation.
"You are no longer training," he said. "You are working."
I drank. The burn in my throat was nothing compared to the burn already inside me.
It was then I realized: there was no line between childhood and the life ahead. No moment where I would grow into something else. I had already become it.
I wasn't his son anymore. I was his weapon.
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The missions multiplied.
At first, they were simple insertions: recon, surveillance, silent eliminations when required. By seventeen, they were no longer tests. I was being used. My father didn't say it out loud, but I could see it in the way he handed me dossiers instead of lessons, in the way he began to speak to me less like a son and more like a fellow operator.
The world was larger than I imagined, and dirtier than I'd hoped.
We moved through border towns in the dead of night, villages that smelled of wood smoke and fear. Sometimes we crossed into Eastern Europe, sometimes deeper. Always shadow to shadow, never drawing notice.
The missions weren't clean anymore.
I remember one in particular — a deal between smugglers and a rogue military faction. We'd been hired to disrupt it, though I never learned who paid. Maybe Moscow. Maybe someone else. That was the way of it: money moved faster than loyalties.
We waited in a bombed-out church that leaned like an old drunk against the night sky. My father crouched beside me, his eyes cold, his knife sharper than anything the smugglers carried.
"You see them?" he whispered.
I nodded. Through the broken stained glass, I could see four men unloading crates, two more standing guard.
"You take the sentries," he said.
It wasn't a suggestion.
I moved without thought, my body remembering what my mind refused to linger on. The first guard was humming under his breath, cigarette glowing at his lip. I came up behind him, arm around his throat, pulling him back into the shadows. He clawed at me, heels dragging over broken stone, until the last breath rattled out of him.
The second turned at the wrong moment. He saw me. Our eyes met.
For a second, he looked younger than me.
Then I slit his throat.
Blood sprayed the wall behind him, dripping over faded paintings of saints.
When it was done, I wiped my blade on his coat and swallowed bile. My father's voice was behind me, quiet but cutting:
"Hesitation will kill you. They are not men. They are obstacles."
I wanted to believe him.
---
Word of our effectiveness spread. My father was careful, never leaving a trace, never staying long. But people talked, and whispers grew. They called him The Ghost of Volgograd. They didn't know my name. Not yet.
But I was earning one.
On a mission near the Black Sea, I overheard men in a safehouse whisper about me. "The boy with the eyes of frost," one said. Another called me Sidorov's shadow.
I didn't correct them.
The nickname stuck.
---
The cracks began then.
It wasn't the killing. That had become second nature, muscle memory. It was what came after.
We passed through a village once, somewhere in Ukraine. I don't remember its name, only the smell of fresh bread from a bakery, the sound of children playing in the dust. For a moment, I was just… human. My hands weren't weapons, my eyes weren't dead.
A boy not much younger than me ran past, kicking a ball of rags. He laughed, a sound so pure it made me freeze.
I thought of what my life could have been.
Then I thought of what I had become.
That night, I dreamed of the train yard. Of the man whose blood had stained my hands first. But the face kept changing — sometimes it was the guard, sometimes the boy from the village. Sometimes it was my own.
I stopped sleeping well after that.
---
By eighteen, I was trusted with missions alone. My father sent me into enemy ground without his shadow, without his hand ready to pull me out. And I delivered. Always. I left bodies in alleys, burned documents, crippled supply lines.
But I also began to question.
Who paid us? Who decided these people had to die? Who were we serving — Russia? Or only ourselves?
My father never answered. When I asked, he said only, "Loyalty is to the mission. Not the cause."
I hated that answer. But I obeyed it.
Because the alternative was to break.
---
One night, in a safehouse in Bucharest, I sat cleaning my knives when my father came in. He didn't speak at first, just stood there watching me sharpen steel against stone. Finally, he said:
"You are better than I ever was at your age. But you are softer."
I looked up, anger sparking. "Softer?"
"You hesitate," he said flatly. "Not enough to fail. Not enough to die. But enough to think. That will destroy you."
I said nothing. My hands shook, though I kept sharpening.
And in that moment, I knew something he didn't.
He was wrong.
The hesitation wasn't weakness. It was the last piece of me that was still mine.
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By nineteen, the world felt smaller.
Not because I had seen it all, but because everywhere I went looked the same: burned-out houses, steel crates full of weapons, men whispering about money and power. Blood stained the same no matter which country it spilled on.
I told myself I was used to it. That I could survive forever in the cycle of missions, violence, silence. But something was shifting.
It began with a mission that should have been simple. A transfer.
We were meant to intercept a courier on the border between Romania and Moldova. A man carrying a briefcase with documents valuable enough for my father to insist on handling it personally. He brought me along, not because he needed me, but because he wanted me to learn.
The plan was clean. Watch the man. Wait for isolation. Eliminate. Extract.
But when the night came, and the courier stepped into the shadow of an alley, everything went wrong.
I was first to move. I dropped from the roof, landing silent, knife ready. The man barely had time to gasp before I had the steel pressed under his jaw. His hands trembled, the case clutched tight.
Then the gunfire started.
Not from him. From behind us.
My father swore, shoving me aside as bullets shredded the wall. Three, no—five men poured into the alley, rifles raised, their movements disciplined. Not smugglers. Not mercs. Soldiers.
But not our soldiers.
The courier crumpled in the chaos, the briefcase tumbling to the ground. My father went for it, but the shooters weren't aiming for the courier. They were aiming for us.
I remember the sting of brick dust in my mouth as bullets tore into the wall inches from my head. I remember lunging forward, tackling one man into the ground, driving my blade through his neck before he could bring his rifle around. Blood sprayed across my hands, hot and slick.
Another swung the butt of his weapon into my ribs. Pain cracked through me, but I twisted, snapping his arm before he could fire. My knife found his chest, deep and sure.
My father fought like a storm, moving through them with the precision of a man who had survived too many wars. But there were too many of them, and they weren't improvising. They were coordinated. Prepared.
One shouted something in Russian, not Romanian. Russian.
That chilled me more than the bullets.
These weren't enemies. These were predators sent for us.
The firefight ended as quickly as it started. Three dead in the alley. Two retreating into the dark. The courier's body cooling in the gutter, the briefcase gone.
My father leaned against the wall, chest heaving, blood dripping from a cut above his brow. His eyes burned with something I had never seen before—fear.
"They knew we were coming," I said.
He didn't answer.
"They knew."
Still nothing.
That silence told me everything.
We hadn't been attacked by chance. We'd been betrayed.
---
Days later, I found the symbol.
We were back in one of our safehouses, patching wounds, sharpening blades, pretending the failure hadn't mattered. But while searching through gear stripped from one of the fallen, I found it: a patch, small and red, stitched inside the lining of his jacket. A black widow spider.
The sight of it made my blood run cold.
I'd heard whispers before, among mercenaries and smugglers. Of a program buried deep in Russia's shadows. A place where children were broken and rebuilt into something worse than soldiers. Something worse than me.
The Red Room.
The men who had ambushed us weren't freelancers. They were operatives.
And they hadn't come for the courier. They'd come for me.
---
That realization haunted me.
For weeks, I barely slept, every creak of the floorboards sending my hand to the knife under my pillow. I trained harder, moved faster, killed quicker. But it didn't matter. Because now I knew.
Someone out there knew my name.
Not the world. Not yet. But the Red Room.
They had seen the shadow my father had carved, and they wanted to claim it.
---
The day I turned twenty, my father sat across from me at a fire. His face looked older than it should have, lines etched deeper by years of blood and regret.
"You are stronger than I ever dreamed," he said. His voice was low, tired. "But they will come for you. You understand this?"
"Yes."
"They will not stop. The Red Room does not stop."
I nodded once, my jaw tight. "Then I won't stop either."
He looked at me for a long time, as if seeing something I couldn't. Then he said, almost to himself:
"You are not my shadow anymore. You are something else. Something even they will fear."
I wanted to believe him.
But I knew the truth.
No matter how sharp the blade, there is always something sharper waiting.
And the Red Room's eyes were on me.
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