Time had a way of sanding down the edges of horror, smoothing the jagged memories of bloodstained grass and small, lifeless bodies of teenage boys, whose genitals were cut out and their faces horribly mutilated in a way no one has ever seen. Four years had passed since Fisher's arrest—ever since he didn't survive the operation on his head. Moscow had moved on, as cities do. The newspapers stopped printing the names of the dead. Parents still wept in the quiet hours before dawn, but the rest of the world had learned to sleep again, to pretend that monsters could be caught, that evil had an ending.

But evil didn't end. It hibernated and now, in the summer of 1990, had stirred from its slumber. The news crackled through the city like a live wire—another boy, another brutalized body dumped in the woods, his skin on his back was horribly sliced open with a scalpel with surgical precision, making a terrifying bat out of him. And this time, there were others missing - 4 boys, 4 best friends who lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same school and had similar lives. The Moscow remembered his name now, whispered it in subway cars and dimly lit kitchens, but remembering was too late. The game had already begun - Fisher made his move as a queen on their old chessboard, which they abandoned 4 years ago.

Bokov exhaled a lungful of smoke, the cigarette between his fingers trembling ever so slightly, not from the cold—he was long past feeling that—but from the slow, simmering fury coiling in his gut. He hadn't returned to Rostov. Couldn't. The ghost of his wife clung to every street corner there, her laughter echoing in the rustle of autumn leaves, her absence a wound that never scabbed over. So he stayed in Moscow, buried himself in work, in the false comfort of bureaucracy—until now. Until this.