Aria Ferretti had two very distinct skills: reading people, and making catastrophically bad decisions that felt entirely reasonable at the time.
The shortcut through the Vostok district had seemed reasonable. It was twenty minutes shorter than the main road, her feet hurt from heels she should never have worn to the faculty dinner, and it was barely midnight — practically early by her standards.
Her friend Giulia had texted: take the main road, Ari, the Vostok district smells like crime.
Aria had replied: you're dramatic and kept walking.
She had been thinking about her thesis — Nabokov, narrative unreliability, the space between what a narrator tells you and what they reveal without knowing — when she heard the voices. Low. Russian. Coming from the loading bay of what looked like an abandoned cold-storage warehouse.
She should have kept walking.
She was constitutionally incapable of keeping walking.
She told herself she just wanted to confirm it was nothing. A logistics company. Night workers. Something mundane.
It was not mundane.
She had seen enough through the two-inch gap in the side door — the man on his knees, the circle of suited men, the one in the middle who stood with the stillness of something that had never needed to move fast because nothing had ever dared make it run — before something in her brain finally overrode her curiosity with raw, ancient, animal fear.
She had pressed herself to the wall outside and made herself breathe and made herself think and had been in the process of deciding which direction to run when the door had opened.
And now she was looking at him.
Him.
The one in the middle. Up close, he was — she needed a word for it. Not handsome, though he was that too. Carved. Like something that had been made deliberately sharp, left out in cold weather, and had only gotten harder for it. Ice-grey eyes. Dark hair. A jaw that had never softened in its life.
He looked at her like she was a problem he was calculating the solution to.
She had said the thing about the essay because her mouth had a long history of operating independently of her survival instincts, and because some part of her had understood, in a flash of terrible clarity, that if she showed him she was afraid, she was already finished.
The large one to his left — younger, with a coin in his hand and the energy of someone who found the universe consistently entertaining — made a sound she refused to examine too closely.
The man in the middle — the one they'd called Pakhan, she'd heard it through the door, she knew enough Russian cultural vocabulary to know what that meant — said nothing.
Just looked at her.
Then: Bring her inside.
Aria Ferretti, literature student, thesis enthusiast, maker of catastrophically bad decisions, took one breath, and walked back into the warehouse.
