Chasing Shadows 02: Forged in Fire

Even the largest shadows have small beginnings.

Lavrovo, Rameshkovsky District, Tver Oblast, 1981

My cries echoed down the polished hallway as I was dragged past a sign that read “Штрафной изолятор/Isolation Ward” in cold, painted Cyrillic. Comrade Petrovna and her icy smirk hovered over me as the guards took me there my hands and legs in chains. As I was dragged down the corridor, Nadia and some of the other girls stood over me, their eyes falling across me in judgement as Nadia spit a bloody wad of saliva across my chest. I didn’t mind though as her face bore the signs of my fury.

As the guards prepared to hoist me into the isolation cell, a miserable little box with no light and a dank, damp, floor, I screamed at Petrovna, screeched threats, promises, and pleas for release but she was unmoved. Just before they shoved me in, she reached out, gripped my necklace, and ripped it from my neck like she was tearing out my soul.

I saw her put the necklace in her pocket and as she did, I felt the last of my childhood, my spirit and my family being snatched away. Had Russia not taken enough from me? Now it had taken everything.

“Maybe now,” Petrovna sneered, “You will learn what honor costs, it is not given freely without sacrifice, without consequence for one's actions. And maybe in this hole you will realize I gave you everything and by the time you come out you will decide if you want to work for the good of your country of the good of Sonja.”

“You know your name,” she added coldly, “Rozhenko,” she said letting my family’s name hang in the air, memory of my father, a Russian soldier stationed and later killed in Angola lingering in my memory. “It means Descendant of the Rye Grower, for you are of minimal origins, your name bears the shame of a farmer, a pauper, a nothing, in Mother Russia, you serve others just as you will learn to serve me and your country. Think of that while you rot in this hole,” she said her voice shot through with cruelty as the heavy door slammed shut.

Let them go, I thought, Let them think I was caged. Let them walk away thinking they’d won.As I heard their footsteps disappearing down the corridor, I managed to spit up the hairpin I held in my throat, thankfully this teacher’s pet paid extra close attention when it came to lock picking in Comrade Beshnova’s course. I released the shackles around my wrists and quickly made work at the ones chaining my legs. Wrapping the freed chains around my fists as weapons I went to work picking the lock to the cell. As I pushed it open I saw two guards at the end of the hallway and the half empty bottle of vodka sitting between them, this would be too easy. I began slowly and quietly making my way down the hall moving like a ghost.

Daddy once told me, 'The chameleon looks all around before it moves.' So I moved like a ghost—slow, deliberate, invisible. He always stressed to be aware of one’s surroundings, akin to the silent and unobtrusive nature of a ghost and so in his honor I haunted the corridors looking for my way to Petrovna’s office for I would reclaim what’s mine, exact my revenge and leave this wretched place. I approached Petrovna’s office like smoke, moving slowly, deliberately almost as if I were unfurling across the highly polished floors ready to asphyxiate my enemy. Her lights were off which means she must have left for the night. I began gently picking the lock and once inside I began looking through desk drawers and anywhere else I could think she might have put my necklace. After looking high and low it became obvious it was not here. I remembered her putting it in her pocket and it became clear that a woman this demented and cruel would not just be satisfied enough to put me in an isolation cell, she had to take a piece of me with her. I looked out across the courtyard towards the staff wing and I saw the lights from the officer quarters. The old witch undoubtedly had my necklace in her barracks probably stashed away with untold other treasures she had taken from the souls of other girls she had crushed.

As I entered the barracks wing, I saw lights on in many of the officer barracks. I began moving slowly, methodically, checking the nameplates on each door following each alphabetically until I came to a nameplate with Nazarov, surely Petrovna’s was just ahead. As I did so, I felt a feeling behind me like the air in the room had shifted, I heard the distinctive clip of boots on tile. Realizing I had nowhere to go in this darkened hallway, I had to figure out what to do and where to run. I saw a surface mounted pipe running up the wall and across the ceiling of the hallway, I quickly moved my body closer to the pipe wrapping my small body around it and began climbing as fast and silently as possible. As I reached the ceiling, I expanded out and wrapped my body around the pipe over Nazarov’s door. I held tight like my life depended on it, each and every muscle in my body quaking, screaming and burning. But the burn only made me more resolute.

I thought of momma’s necklace, I thought of Petrovna’s cruelty, and I thought of what I would do to get it back and teach Petrovna what true honor costs and how it is not given freely without sacrifice, without consequence for one's actions. I’d show her what the consequence was for crossing The Black Russian and I’d make sure she’d never forgot it. I held onto the pipe as Petrovna passed under me and opened the door to her room. As soon as she did, I slid down the pipe as silent as a stalking predator on the plains of Angola and crept towards her door as it closed behind her. She thought the closing door made her safe. She had no idea how wrong she was. I contorted my body and managed to move through the door as it slowly shut, my body moving lithely and quietly as if I were nothing more than shadow, a forgotten echo that danced along the dark walls of this godforsaken hellhole. Petrovna sheared off her stiff, ugly green clothes and discarded them by her bed. As she opened her matronly blouse, I saw it, momma’s pendant glinting in the moonlight as if she were calling to me, crying out for me to avenge her. As Petrovna picked her disgusting teeth and tugged at her sagging bra in the vanity mirror, I made myself low on the cold tile floor slithering like a mamba under Petrovna’s sagging metal framed bed. It was here I would lie in wait to take my revenge. I laid there for what seemed like hours before I had summoned my strength to take what was mine.

As the bed in front of my face sagged and creaked and I knew the old bitch was laying in it, I slowly and quietly slid out coming to stand above Petrovna as she slept. As if sensing I were there, Petrovna’s eyes flicked open as she whispered nothing more than a frightened, “Чёрная тварь”/Black Demon.”

It was then that I used their training against them delivering a Jaw Strike to Petrovna with a firm palm strike to the jaw. As I did so, I heard her moan some as she meekly pleaded for me to stop but I was a monster unleashed, I locked my arm around her throat. A sharp twist. A crack. She went limp as I could as I felt the vertebrates I had studied so closely as a “Заучка, Zauchka, Teacher’s pet” crack under my pressure as Petrovna’s body went rigid and then limp. I released her disgusting, heaving body and as I did so, momma’s necklace caught the moonlight, I snatched the necklace from her neck, affixed it to mine and then I did what I did so well, I ran, as I ran from the school that night through the frigid forest, my feet, bare, naked and aching as I touched at my necklace and remembered my last day with momma as 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 hurt, away from my pain and towards a future I couldn’t quite see yet. I was running away from a prison and I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I’d do when I got there but I was on my way there. One thing I did know? The Black Russian was free and the world was waiting for me.

32 Gansevoort St, New York, NY, 1988

I stepped out of Star Deli on 9th Ave. at the corner of Little West 12th and began heading toward our apartment. As I walked down Little West 12th, my shoes crunched over the syringes, vials, and other discards that stuck out from between the cobblestones. Sometimes, I thought maybe even I had emerged from those little spaces—forgotten, invisible, discarded. Relegated to living in the cracks.

To the outside world? The characters of Little West 12th looked like freaks, outcasts, human waste. But to me? These were my people. Like recognized like. They didn’t look at me the way other Americans did when they caught the hint of a Russian accent, or stared too long at a girl who was “too pretty” or “too exotic-looking.” And when they did? Their eyes narrowed in that quiet, judgmental way that said more than words ever could.

Since my days running from Russia, this was the closest I’d ever felt to home—living among the freaks, the discards, the ones no one looked at too closely. Here, I could hide. Here, I could carry out my work in peace.

I was just another American girl wearing American clothes, listening to American music, riding the subway. Just one of them. Except I wasn’t. I harbored a dark secret. I wasn’t here in New York living the dream life of a city girl—I was living at ground zero for assassins. If Tokyo was known for sushi, Paris for macarons, and London for tea, New York was known for blood. This was the international capital of death, practically an open-air market for settling scores, killing rivals, or just plain old malice.

After brief stints in Prague, Vienna, and Berlin as a hired gun, I found the work too close to the world I’d left behind. The Cold War raged across Europe, and those cities became increasingly Soviet-influenced—like my old life was catching up to me.

So naturally, New York was the next best thing. I’d established quite a reputation as The Black Russian here—and with a fee to match. Along the way, I’d even found a kind of sisterhood. Fellow young assassins just trying to make it in the big city. Katy, Liza, Rachel, Nancy, and Holly—we shared a Greenwich apartment we had no business affording, but pooled together, we lived well enough.

Not for nothing, we still loved the full New York experience: riding the subway, eating takeout, dining at Katz’s, ice skating at Rockefeller Center every Christmas. Our eyes still lit up every time we saw the holiday displays at Barney’s, like it was the first time—every time.

Make no mistake—we were not your typical “Women of the ’80s,” the kind romanticized in magazines in shoulder pads and power suits. We didn’t live in boardrooms—we lived in brutality. But in these fleeting moments, we got to pretend we were normal. And in that search for normalcy, we weren’t fighting for corporate power. We were fighting for survival, for blood, for the freedom to build our own futures.

We didn’t climb the corporate ladder. We climbed fire escapes.

In Russia, we were taught—even as children—that survival, not just personal survival but that of the nation, was built on everyone contributing to the greater good. And yet here I was, in the land of freedom, falling into the same pattern. We had unshakable identities, but we were united. We contributed to each other’s goals and lives—one slice of New York pizza at a time.

As I walked back from Star Deli, the little tink-tink of beer bottles in the plastic bag echoed with each step. My suitcase dragged behind me. I’d landed at JFK earlier today, drained from a job that left me bruised and worn. I called the apartment from a payphone, and Katy answered, ebullient, fresh off a lucrative job of her own.

“This calls for a celebration!” we squealed in stereo.

So I transferred from the J and Z lines to the D train toward West 4th Street, planning our night of well-earned girl time.

The job? A moving target. Staked out with my trusty sniper rifle. I hadn’t braced right and the kickback slammed into my shoulder, leaving a deep, aching bruise—a rookie mistake.

I thought of Fabian, the kind Austrian who took me in after I fled Russia. He saw something in me. He and his wife, Marie, helped me heal and hone my skills. Fabian—former assassin turned mentor—helped me turn my Russian training into a modern commodity. He used his farm to help me refine my sniper work. I could practically hear him in German,

“Drück die Schulterstütze fest in die Kuhle deiner Schulter, Kleines/ Lean forward and pull the buttstock firmly into the pocket of your shoulder, little one.”

I owe everything to Fabian and Marie. They taught me how to commoditize my pain—how to fuel a life with purpose, not regret.

Even as my shoulder ached, the memory of them warmed me—almost as much as Marie’s kasnocken, those cheese dumplings that tasted like warm hugs, bursting with cheese and topped with crispy onions. I could see them in my mind’s eye. I could almost taste the sour cream.

My stomach rumbled. Time to focus.

Once I got off at West 4th, I’d grab takeout at Arches—my greasy American guilty pleasure. Extra fries, of course.

A few Astro Arches, fries, those addictive apple pies and cookies. Then a stop at Star Deli for cigarettes, beers, and maybe a bottle of wine or two.

As I prepared to get off at my stop, the subway shuddered. The lights flickered. Faces disappeared in the flicker—only outlines remained.

In that flicker, I felt a presence. A face I’d never forget.

No.

It couldn’t be.

I reached for the gun tucked in my waistband.

The train stopped. I stood, collected my bag and suitcase, and turned to step off. That’s when I smelled it.

A scent I could never forget.

No matter how many showers I took, it lingered. It clung to memory and skin.

I climbed the stairs to street level. The city rushed in around me—crowds in every direction. I was just a lost pebble in the current.

And yet the smell remained.

I turned onto 9th Ave. The smell, the feeling—it haunted me. I looked back at the faceless crowd, clutching my chest.

Softly, I whispered, “Nadia…”

The door chime rang at Star Deli.

Alexi looked up from his copy of The Post.

“Comrade,” he greeted, voice slithery as ever.

“Как там жизнь, не слишком давит, товарищ? / How’s life, not crushing you too much, comrade?”

Alexi grinned. “Я в порядке, дорогой, знаешь, по этим улицам летает много слухов на крыльях… / I’m good, darling, there are many rumors on wings flying through these streets…”

He was the NY Post for assassins. A gossip king with ties to every Russian adjacent in the city.

“По городу ходят слухи о очень важном контракте, который кто-то на родине хочет выполнить. / Rumor is there’s a big contract. Someone back home wants it done.”

“Хочешь вписаться? Слышу, платят хорошо! / You want in? Good money, I hear!”

“Можешь попросить их слить информацию в мой дропбокс… И еще, дай мне две пачки Silver Platinums и вот это. / Have them drop the info in my dropbox. Also, two packs of Silver Platinums and these,” I said, placing the beer on the counter.

Alexi rang me up, gave me that look—the one that always said more than words. I thanked him again and headed home.

837 Washington St, New York, NY, 1988

The apartment was already in full swing. Bananarama’s Venus blared from the stereo.

Nancy came bounding out of her room in high-rise jeans and a matching jean jacket, covered in buttons, sparkles, and electric pink lipstick. Her hoop earrings were neon and ridiculous.

“How do I look?” she asked, nervously seeking approval from a room full of trained killers.

I cracked open the beers, passed one to Rachel and Holly.

“Thanks, babe. How was Istanbul?”

Wiping foam from my mouth and opening my Arches bag, I said, “Get this—the guy they wanted was in a motorcade. Busy street. Moving fucking target. Crosswinds. Overwatch. You name it.”

“But you got him, right?” Holly asked.

“Boom.” I mimed an explosion as I reached for a handful of fries and smeared ketchup across the wrapper of my Mega Arch Burger.

“Enough about me. Katy—tell us about this big payday.”

“Big client. Sent me on a test run… which I aced. And it’s not a one-time gig,” she beamed. “Looks like retainer work.”

A collective gasp. In our world, retainers were gold.

“Hey girls,” I said with a mischievous glint. “You want to really celebrate?”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Rachel asked, eyes lighting up.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

Palladium, 126 E 14th St, New York, NY, 1988

We emerged from the subway at 14th Street, we made our way through the bustling streets to the Palladium. The line outside was its usual chaos—humanity pressed against the velvet rope, each person desperate for entry.

But I had an ace up my sleeve.

“Don’t you look like a hot number,” Liza said, admiring my tailored black blazer and pants. I did look damn hot. I strode up to the bouncer, chest forward, confidence blazing.

I held up the black card with the white lion outline. The bouncer smiled.

“Right this way, ma’am.”

Inside, spotlights cut across the room like prison lights over Siberia. Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf blasted overhead.

As we moved toward a private table, we passed mounds of white powder—more than a Moscow winter.

“Ladies! There’s my little black diamond,” Luka Novak called.

He was our club host—slick, lean, sharp cheekbones, always in black. Rumored Yugoslavian mafia. Never confirmed.

He called us his “deadly little darlings.” Gave us job tips, gossip, and sometimes, high-value targets.

In return? We gave him loyalty. Sometimes. Depending on the day.

“I wanna dance!” Rachel shouted as Bizarre Love Triangle kicked in.

Katy handed me an icy Black Russian with a wink. She knew—it was me in a glass.

I sipped, then let Rachel drag me onto the dance floor.

The lights flashed. Faces emerged from the dark.

And there—there—was hers. The face from my nightmares.

I reached for my waistband—empty.

I scanned the floor, found a sweating champagne bottle in a bucket. Heavy. Cold. Potential weapon.

Backing away, I held my breath. Club lights strobed like heartbeats. Music pounded like a dirge.

Then I heard it— A whisper, sharp as a blade:

“Скоро…товарищ./Soon…Comrade.”

I froze. Gripped by terror. But alive.

For now.