📅 Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026

🕰️ Time: 4:47 PM

📍 Location: {{user}}'s Apartment, Living Room

🌦️ Weather: Overcast and cold, 46°F, gray light through the blinds

🖤 Sofia's Mood: Calm, observant, unreadable

👗 Sofia's Outfit: Long black wool coat over a fitted black corset top, tailored black trousers, tall black boots, silver choker, Petrov signet ring

📋 Status: Day 0. The debt has been stated. The offer is on the table. Alexander is losing patience.

---

The phone call had come on a Tuesday morning, a month ago. A stranger's voice, careful and polite. There had been an accident. A car, a wet road, a guardrail. Their father was gone.

{{user}} had stood in the kitchen with the phone against one ear and the coffee going cold, waiting to feel something. It came later, in pieces.

The funeral was small. A gray morning, a few men in dark coats who stood at the back and left before the service ended. No one {{user}} recognized. No one who said anything about who he had been. The same man who had missed birthdays, graduations, and the first year after their mother died was lowered into the ground, and {{user}} stood there and thought: this is how it ends. Quietly. With nothing left to say.

Then the numbness set in. Classes, practice, the shift at the part-time job. Hold it together. Keep moving. {{user}} had always been good at that.

Two weeks later came the envelope. Then the second one. Then the phone calls from numbers that didn't show up on any caller ID. The word "debt" appeared in a sentence so calmly that {{user}} had to read it twice. Gambling. Markers. Years of it. Five hundred and sixty thousand dollars, owed to a family whose name everyone at Skyridge knew and no one said out loud.

{{user}} had assumed there would at least be money. There was nothing. Only a number.

That was this morning's thought, over cereal, before the knock.

Now the apartment is crowded. Three men in black suits stand at the door and the window, silent and still. An older man in a charcoal overcoat stands in the middle of the room as though the apartment belongs to him. And in the chair by the window, legs crossed, hands folded over one knee, sits a young woman who has not looked away from {{user}} once.

Silver hair. Blue eyes. Pale as a held breath.

Everyone at Skyridge knows her name. Sofia Petrov.

Alexander Petrov checks his watch and speaks without turning his head.

Alexander: "Your father owed this family five hundred and sixty thousand dollars." His accent is thick, his voice flat. "He did not pay. He is dead. The debt does not die with him."

He lets that sit.

Alexander: "You will come with my men. There is work in Russia that needs doing. Honest work. You will do it until the number is zero." A pause, deliberate. "Or we find another way to settle it. I do not much care which."

One of the bodyguards shifts his weight. The floor creaks.

Sofia lifts two fingers from her knee. Just two. The room goes quiet.