He wanted screams.
I didn’t care who the man was. Didn’t matter if he had a badge or a Bible. He was just another job. Another future headline that would never get written.
“Fine,” I said.
Pakhan gave a single nod. “We’ll talk after.”
I turned and walked out, folder tucked under my arm.
Test accepted. This wasn’t about the kill. It was about the way it would echo. He wanted me to drag it out—make it hurt. Make it loud. And he’d picked the right man to do it.
He was called Alexey Ostapenko. Name sounded like a fucking puppy. The kind of guy who probably brought homemade sandwiches to work and smiled at neighbors. According to the file, he got home by nine like a good boy and never went out. Routine. Predictable. The kind that made him easy to erase.
Boring.
I was already parked across the street, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cigarette, smoke curling through the cracked window in slow, uneven spirals.I tapped ash into the stale air, the streetlight flickering across the windshield. For a moment, I wasn’t looking at the house across the street anymore. The silence, the stillness—something about it opened a door I hadn’t touched in years. And there it was: the memory I never chased but never really left behind. My first kill.
I was eighteen. By then, the softness had long been carved out of me. Regret wasn’t in my vocabulary. The order came from my boss in Kyiv, bored-sounding, almost lazy: take care of Oleksandr. No explanation needed. Everyone knew he wasslipping—dipping into product, stealing from the stash, pissing away loyalty like it was cheap vodka.
The fucked-up part? He was the one who found me first. Pulled me out of the orphanage in Kharkiv. Gave me my first ride, my first job, showed me how to throw a punch without breaking my thumb. A few years later he was the one who brought me to Kyiv with him too—said there was real money there if I was smart enough to survive.
And none of it mattered. Not to the boss. Not to me.
I waited for him near an alley off the back of a convenience store—one of his usual drop points. When he showed, hunched and twitchy, I already had the gun in my hand. He smiled when he saw me. Maybe he thought we’d talk. Maybe he thought I was still that kid from the bunk bed below his.
I didn’t say anything. Just raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
There was a flicker of something inside me—something sharp and bright and gone before I could name it. Then just silence. The gun was warm in my hand. His body folded to the concrete, blood leaking out fast and angry, painting the cracks beneath him.
I took the money out of his pocket and walked away. Didn’t run. Didn’t look back.
It didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt like recognition. Like I’d just stepped into the life I’d always known was waiting for me.
The sound of footsteps crunching across the pavement stirred the present back into focus, slicing through the haze of memory like a blade. My hand found the wheel again. The clock read 21:02.
And there he was. Trudging up the steps with grocery bags like this was the most normal night of his life.
Pakhan’s words echoed like an afterthought:I don’t like noise.
Well. Time to silence it.
The job was a joke—low-level, clean, quiet. No guards. No gang ties. Just a mid-tier cop who didn’t know when to back off.
I waited. Let the door close behind him. Gave it ten minutes. Then I stepped out.
The front door was one of those heavy metal slabs with a busted keypad. Most people just buzzed the entire panel and waited for some babushka on the fifth floor to let them in. I did the same. Pressed every button except his. Someone always answered.
Bzzz.
The door clicked. I slipped inside, past the chipped mailboxes and broken elevator, up the stairwell with its peeling green paint and burnt-out bulbs.
The front door of his apartment offered no resistance. There was no alarm, no extra locks—just a single deadbolt that gave way too easily under my hand.
Inside, the place was warm. Lived-in. The soft buzz of a flatscreen echoed from the living room.
I moved silently, every footstep calculated. I passed what looked like a home office—photos on the wall. Dozens of them.
I didn’t stop walking.
