Prologue - Harper
The world is breathing again, or at least pretending to.
It’s been a year since the Volkov–Ignatov war, and Moscow exhales in shallow, cautious drags, like a man relearning how to live after nearly drowning. The snow on the streets looks innocent, like something that doesn’t remember blood.
But I do.
Even now, as I walk up the long stone path toward the Ignatov estate, the air tastes faintly of gunpowder and wealth. It clings to the gates, to the marble lions flanking the driveway, even to the wind itself. Moscow’s winter carries memory in its bite.
I’ve learned to live in this new-old world, to adapt. To sharpen.
Survival is its own language here, one I have learned syllable by shredded syllable. I wear confidence like armor now, the kind of poise people in the Bratva mistake for belonging.
But every now and then, my heart still misfires.
Serafina Ignatov opens the front door before I even reach it, her dark hair in a messy braid and her expression so warm it fogs the cold right off my skin. She’s barefoot on marble floors because that’s the kind of power Sera has. She can afford softness.
“Finally,” she says, sweeping me into a hug that smells like jasmine and fresh ink. “You work too much.”
“I could say the same to you,” I answer into her shoulder.
She snorts. “I’m an Ignatov. Work is hereditary.”
I laugh because she expects it, because she’s the only person in this place who sees me as Harper, not Harper Quinn the Ignatov cyber asset. Not the girl who cracked military-grade encryption in the middle of a war.
Sera sees the before and the after. That’s why I came.
We wander through the hallways, the air rich with the scent of polished wood and old money.
Sera updates me on her latest project—something about expanding one of the Ignatov charitable fronts—and I pretend not to notice the guards’ eyes following us.
I’ve gotten used to that too.
Her office is a soft, quiet refuge in a house built to withstand siege. Papers everywhere, a half-finished painting on the easel, books stacked high enough to qualify as small architecture.
We chat as we drink tea. We laugh about absurd things, like how her cousin Vadim thinks Wi-Fi is a CIA conspiracy, or how the family cat has somehow learned to pick locks.
It’s the closest I can get to normalcy.
I feel the ticking of the afternoon like a pulse in the floorboards. Work is waiting; there’s always another code to debug, networks to secure, ghosts in the Ignatov systems that refuse to stay buried.
So the visit is brief, a postcard of comfort before reality calls me back.
Sera walks me to the front door, hugging me again, longer this time.
“Come back soon,” she says against my cheek. “Don’t disappear into your screens.”
“Screens don’t shoot at me,” I reply lightly.
“Yet,” she deadpans.
We both laugh, but there’s not much humor in it.
I step outside into the early winter dusk, the sky low and heavy, thick with unfallen snow. My breath frosts immediately. Cold curls around my ankles, sharp as a whispered warning.
A sleek black car idles at the gate, engine humming like a low, satisfied predator. The windows are tinted to the color of night.
And beside it—him.
