The safe house on Erevan Street became a crucible — a sealed world of two souls, where one man was broken down to nothing and another was built into something that had never existed before.
For Jake, everything beyond those four walls stopped mattering. The party headquarters, Kamo's anxious movements, the ticking clock of Shaumian's impending trial — all of it faded into background noise. His entire being narrowed to a single, obsessive point of focus: the work inside that room.
He was not saving a man. He was building one.
The process began with destruction.
Pyotr Dolidze, the drunkard, had to be erased.
Jake stripped him of everything — his filth, his stench, his name. Kamo's men bathed him, shaved him, and dressed him in clean, simple clothes that matched, in outline and tone, those worn by Luka Mikeladze in the faded photograph pinned to the wall.
Water and black bread — that was all Pyotr was allowed. The tremors of withdrawal wracked his body for days. Jake watched with the detached patience of a man tending a furnace. The weakness had to burn out before anything could be shaped.
On the third day, when Pyotr was little more than a shaking, hollow figure, Jake gave his first command.
"Look at him."
Pyotr sat on the cot, facing the photograph on the wall. Luka's face stared back at him — lean, steady, resolute.
"This is not a picture," Jake said, pacing behind him. "It's a mirror. This is who you are. The man you were is gone — he died choking on cheap wine. This is your resurrection."
Pyotr's eyes filled with tears. Jake ignored them.
"See the eyes," he continued, his voice calm and precise. "Worn down by worry. Feel that worry. It's yours now. His head — tilted slightly left. Do it."
Hour after hour, Pyotr was forced to stare. At first he wept, then he begged, and finally he just stared — empty, pliable, malleable.
The next phase was reconstruction.
Jake had gathered what fragments of Luka's life he could find — letters to his wife, a diary, scraps of verse copied from Georgian poets. These became the scriptures of their strange religion.
Jake read them aloud, his voice flat, impersonal. "My dearest Elene, the nights are cold, but I keep warm with the thought of your smile…"
Then he handed Pyotr a pen. "Now you," he said. "Write it. From memory. Not the words — the feeling."
The first attempts were nonsense. Illegible scrawls soaked in tears. Jake said nothing. He took the page, crumpled it, and dropped it. "Again."
Days bled into each other. The man wrote until his hands cramped, until his eyes blurred. He learned Luka's handwriting, Luka's cadence, Luka's hunger for something pure.
Jake taught him how Luka walked — the faint limp from an old injury. He drilled it into him until Pyotr's steps naturally faltered, left knee first.
"Again," Jake would say. "You're favoring the wrong leg. The pain is dull, constant. Feel it."
When the conditioning took hold, Jake changed the rhythm. The lessons turned brutal.
He became the interrogator.
He would burst into the room at random hours, his voice like a gunshot.
"What is your name?"
"Luka Mikeladze," Pyotr would gasp.
"Liar!" Jake would snarl, slamming him against the wall. "You're Pyotr Dolidze, a thief and a drunk! Who was your mother?!"
The first times, Pyotr broke instantly — sobbing, confessing, collapsing. Each time Jake waited for the crying to stop, then began again.
"You are Luka Mikeladze," he said evenly. "You dedicated your life to the revolution. You faked your death. You seek protection. That is your truth. There is no other. Again."
It was no longer training. It was reprogramming — a demolition and reconstruction of identity through sheer repetition and fear.
Kamo, standing guard outside, began to dread the sounds behind the door. The weeping. The shouting. The endless, mechanical questioning.
He had seen Soso kill men without blinking. He had watched him orchestrate bombings and purges with ruthless precision. But this was something else. Something colder.
To Kamo, it felt like dark sorcery — the kind of work that changed not just the victim, but the man wielding the knife.
A week in, something shifted.
Pyotr's sobbing faded. His hands steadied. His eyes — once vacant — began to burn with a quiet, eerie focus. The shape of his face, drawn tight by exhaustion, now faintly resembled the photograph on the wall.
He spoke of Elene — Luka's wife — as though she were his own. He described her smile. Her voice. The way she folded her hands when she worried.
Then, one afternoon, as Jake quizzed him on Luka's early years, Pyotr looked toward the small window and began to speak softly, unprompted:
"And the day will come when the tyrant's throne
Crumbles to dust, and we are not alone…"
It was a verse Jake recognized — one of Luka's favorite poems. But Pyotr recited it with such weary conviction that it no longer sounded learned. It sounded remembered.
Jake stared at him — and felt something stir. Not guilt. Not pity. Something colder, deeper.
It was power.
He had taken a wreck of a man and was forging him into something new. Not merely shaping a lie, but breathing life into it. The act filled him with a heady, dangerous satisfaction.
He wasn't just surviving history anymore. He was writing it.
A slow, thin smile touched his lips. He was no longer becoming Stalin. He was becoming something greater — a creator.
The spell broke when Kamo burst in, eyes grim.
"Soso," he said. "Word from the citadel. They're moving Shaumian. The indictment comes tomorrow."
He looked past Jake to Pyotr — the hollow man sitting on the cot, calm, steady, eyes clear. The resemblance was uncanny now.
Kamo's voice dropped. "We're running out of time."
Jake turned to him, expression unreadable. "Then let them hurry," he said softly. "Let them build their stage and set their trap."
He glanced back at Pyotr — the ghost he had made.
"The audience expects a tragedy," Jake murmured. "We'll give them a ghost story."