Chasing Shadows 01: The Legacy of Shadows

Shadows Don't Forget

Welcome to an exclusive sneak preview of Chasing Shadows. Starting next Friday, April 4, the full story of Sonja Rozhenko will be released serially, bringing you deeper into a world where survival means confronting the shadows—and a past that won’t let Sonja go. But for now, enjoy this first glimpse into Sonja Rozhenko’s dark, thrilling journey. Secrets will unravel, alliances will shift, and the shadows will demand their due. Get ready, because the hunt is just beginning.

Lubango, Angola, 1980

Oh spirits of our ancestors,
Guide us with your wisdom.
Protect us from harm and light the path before us.

That day, I whispered the traditional Angolan blessing like I had every day since Momma left. Aline held me close as tanks rumbled past, shaking the walls of our tiny house. High above, the Christ the King statue watched over Lubango from the Serra de Leba pass. Every day since the Soviets arrived, their tanks trembled our streets and kicked up dust everywhere they went making the streets look ghostly and terrifying when the sun caught the dust.

It wasn’t the tanks that scared me most—it was the silence they left behind. A silence so heavy it swallowed the streets, broken only by the voices of men speaking in Russian, their words thick with stories of battles I had never seen. They spoke of things unknown to me, for I was nothing more than a child in a grown-up world—dreaming of childish things, letting my mind wander to escape the unseen horrors that the Soviets carried with their war and told in their words.

When I heard the familiar sounds of Umbundu and Portuguese, these were the tongues of my land, Russian voices sounded like oppressive invaders of words, thoughts and voices.

I whispered the prayer again—a prayer our city knew too well these days—and clutched the lion’s head necklace Momma gave me the day she left, the one that she told me would make me strong, make me brave. Make me more than I was - a scared child. I would be a brave warrior, a brave hunter.

Momma told me that day, “My grandfather used to take me lion hunting all the time. At one time, there were the most beautiful lions all over Angola but now they’re almost all gone,” momma said with a hint of sadness. “I would get so scared until he told me that Lions could smell my fear. He gave me this necklace and told me that in order to be a lion hunter I had to be bold and brave — to push my fears away to a place they could never smell.”

“So,” she continued as she prepared to leave me behind, “This is to remind you until I see you again that you are strong, you are bold and you are brave, for you are a hunter, it’s in your blood,” she said as she draped the necklace over my neck and affixed the clasp. As she did so and the metal touched my skin, it was as if the cold metal crackled against my flesh with intensity, maybe momma’s necklace could sense something born within me that day? A rage. A fire born that day—one that would follow me for the rest of my life. Whatever it was, it would keep me safe, keep me sharp and keep me always moving.

There was a knock at the door that day. Momma opened the door a narrow crack to see her friend, Aline, in the doorway.

Returning to the couch, momma said to me softly, “It’s time to go now, Sonja. Aline will be taking care of you until I get back.”

And so now I sat here holding onto Aline as I had most days since momma left, I found myself clinging to the memory of her, hoping she would come home but instead I found myself here at the window waiting patiently watching tanks pass by hoping that one would pass by and that momma would be standing there. But days passed, tanks passed, and momma was not behind any of them.

One day as I watched, said my prayer and held out hope for momma to appear behind a tank, a new figure appeared behind one of the tanks, she was tall, her skin looked like crumped paper and her smirk was sharp and unfriendly.

She rapped her knuckles at the door to our house. Aline answered, and the woman, holding a folder in her arms, looked at me, “Sonja Rozhenko?” She asked, her voice harshed by a brutally strong Russian accent.

“What do you want with her?” Aline cried. But the woman merely pushed her aside as two armed men entered behind her without welcome as they pointed their PM Makarov sidearms at her as Aline trembled in fear.

The trunk of a woman kneeled near me. “Sonja?” She asked as I nodded dutifully.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m here to take you away.”

“But,” I protested, “Momma said Aline would take care of me until she returned home,” I said my voice cracking.

“Your mother is not coming home, child,” the woman said, her voice laced with cruelty.

Standing and extending a hand towards me, she said with mock concern, “I’ve come to take you to somewhere where you will be taken care of — somewhere where we are all family. In Mother Russia, no one wants for anything. Your parents fought and died for Russia here and now I will honor their sacrifice by giving you new life.” She said with an almost musical lilt in her voice as her face remained a frozen mask of cruelty.

“I’m going to take you somewhere where you’ll want for nothing. New clothes, food, and lots of little girls who are excited to meet a new comrade, that sounds fun doesn’t it?” She said as I began to cry. “But I dont want new clothes and food, I want my momma and to stay here.”

“Stop crying child, dammnit!” The woman barked at me as Aline cried out, “Stop it you’re scaring her!”

“Silence,” the woman hissed at her as one of the men hit her on the head with the hilt of his sidearm.

“Grab her,” the woman commanded as the men grabbed me by the arm and began dragging me towards an idling jeep on the street. As my ankles dragged across the stone floor of the house, I cried out for Aline who reached out her hand towards me as if she were trying to grab me from afar but all I could hear were her muffled cries. As one of the men threw me into the backseat, the woman strapped me into the seat and I heard a gunshot — even my childish mind knew what had happened, I knew Aline was gone and perhaps my innocence with her. I knew not of grown up matters but in that moment, I wasn’t just dragged from the house—I was ripped from childhood itself.

It was a childhood forged in a war-torn nation, but it was still mine—still the only one I knew. But I was dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood. The men piled into the jeep holstering their sidearm and we sped away from the house. The smell of the dirt blown up by the Jeep speeding away from the life I knew caked my nostrils. The dust kicked up by the speeding Jeep filled my nostrils, thick with the stench of decay — the smell of the death of my old life. But I didn’t know that day surrounded by death, this was not an end, this was a beginning.

As we sped away, I touched my necklace and remembered my last day with momma as if the necklace were giving me the last memory as a gift, a moment to grieve, a moment to say goodbye to the life I knew — the necklace was no longer a charm, it was more - a tether to my mother, a source of strength, and a silent witness to my loss but in the here and now, my eyes flicked forward scanning the road ahead. It was in that moment remembering momma that I fled, maybe not in my body but in my mind, I was running down the road away from my house, away from Lubango and towards a future I couldn’t quite see yet. I was kidnapped but in a way, I was free, or at least, I was on my way there.

“Goodbye, my love,” momma said that day kissing the side of my head as she turned to leave.

“Be strong, be brave, my little Black Russian.”

Lavrovo, Rameshkovsky District, Tver Oblast, 1983

“Заучка/Teacher’s pet” Nadia Romanov barked at me as she forcibly pushed her shoulder into mine knocking me off balance in the highly polished floors of the hallways at the Academy.

“Обезьяна!/Monkey!” Another girl hissed at me pushing me into a brick wall that scraped the skin on my face.

One of the other girls pushed me as I stared at the blood on my fingers from the gash on my face calling out to the others, “Смотри, ты её ранил. Интересно, какого она цвета внутри/Look, you hurt her, wonder what color she is on the inside?”

“Может, нам стоит посмотреть?/Maybe we should see?” Nadia chided.

“Или, может, просто заберём её красивое ожерелье? Отбросы не должны владеть украшениями/Or maybe we just take her fancy necklace? Rejects shouldn’t own jewelry,” Nadia hissed as anger roiled inside of me.

Nadia should have known better, in the years since I had been here at Lavrovo with the other girls, we had all learned more than just books and studies, we learned how to hurt, how to deceive, how to make the smallest of motions lethal, how to make bodies more than just flesh, how to hone our movements into weapons, our breath into threats and our threats into promises. As she and the girls laughed at me and lunged for my pendant, my training sharpened itself and came rushing to the surface.

I pivoted forward throwing my weight onto my right foot as I pushed my wrist crease forcibly into Nadia’s face, the brunt of my impact landing just beneath her nose, the impact creating a sort of thwack sound as I felt the bones in her face crack and separate as I shattered her face and caused great damage. What supreme irony that the girls teased me for being a teacher’s pet and yet here I was using all I had learned dutifully at this Academy to land painful blows to my enemies as we were taught, conditioned, and expected to do. As I laid my blows against Nadia and the other girls lunging for my necklace, I was reminded of Comrade Stalin’s teachings we recited often in lesson, “We are surrounded by enemies, and we must destroy them before they destroy us.” And here I was putting the great words of our hero, Stalin to the test, my body not just fighting my enemies and deflecting their attacks, but becoming more than I was, a weapon, a force, a wraith to be feared, a figure that would haunt their nightmares and mark their skins with the scars of their impetuousness for they would not take from me the thing that made me, and, The Black Russian would not yield, not to juvenile taunts, not to any enemy nor weapon for I am the enemy, I was the weapon and I would be feared and I would be the one they saw as their enemy and the one they longed to destroy. And I welcomed them to do so for I would be waiting and when the time came for their boldness to rise to the surface, I would be ready to remind them of their weaknesses.

I would never be one of them, I would never fit into their world so I would remake the world into my own, I would own my difference from them as a badge of honor, I would become more than the legacy of shadows that followed me, I would make that honor my code, I would resolve to become more than just a weapon, I would become a force to be reckoned with, I would fully embrace my namesake, I would become The Black Russian.

For years, I was nobody. A number. A name on a clipboard. The Russian words were foreign at first, but soon, I understood them as clearly as the silence that had swallowed my mother. And in that silence, I learned to obey, to fight, to forget who I once was.