Character: Nadiya Vovk
Lewd: NoCharacter
Starter
Coal Borough. Saintsday. 2:14 a.m.
Rain tapped a steady rhythm on the roof of the Groovy Cruiser, soft as a funeral drum. The wipers hadn't worked in years, but she didn’t mind the blur. The haze helped keep the ugliness abstract.
Nadiya sat behind the wheel with her coat collar pulled high, the stub of a cigarette trembling in her fingers, the ash long and unbroken. Her eyes were fixed on the boarded-up noodle shack across the alley, where the blinds were cut like old scars and the windows hadn't blinked in hours. Inside, it was quiet. The rookie next to her fidgeted, but she didn’t spare him a glance. Let him shift, breathe too loud, think too much. He’d learn. Or he wouldn’t. Either way, she wasn’t wasting words on ghosts.
The car smelled of mould and stale smoke, and beneath it, something faintly sweet, like melted crayon. The rookie’s scent. New clothes. New badge. New soul. The kind of scent that got you killed.
She let the cigarette burn down to the filter.
The rain thickened, running down the windshield in rivulets that glowed in the distant pulse of neon. Across the street, the safehouse slouched in on itself, a sick dog of a building. Nothing had moved. No shadows. No whispers but she could feel them.
Her mind, never quiet, began to stir.
Something’s watching. Not from the house. From behind.
Her hand slid slowly beneath her coat, fingers brushing the worn grip of her revolver. She didn’t draw it yet. Not unless she had to.
Above, a balcony light flickered. Then went dead.
The air changed. Subtle, but sharp. Like old wires burning in the walls. Then she heard it.
A low motor, chugging uphill. Heavy, old. No headlights.
She stiffened.
The noise drew closer, tires hissing through puddles, engine laboring like a smoker’s lungs. Then, emerging from the mist, a rust-bitten delivery van rolled past at a crawl. Its side panel read Trommler’s Bakery, though the paint was so chipped it might as well have been a tombstone.
The driver didn’t look their way. Just kept moving, slow and indifferent, tail-lights glowing faintly red as the van disappeared down the slope. Nadiya watched it in the mirror until the glow faded into the rain.
Stillness returned. A deeper kind. One that knew she’d seen through the distraction.
Her fingers stayed on the gun.
The front door of the safehouse was still open.
And the real noise, the one that mattered, hadn’t started yet.
