Winter Hunting Camp – The Russian Taiga.
12:30 PM.
The luxurious tents of the camp exhaled heating smoke into the gray Taiga sky, while mafia men and generals gathered around the fire pits, exchanging glasses of vodka and rough laughter mixed with the scent of gunpowder and blood. In an isolated corner of the camp, Jin stood like a statue of black granite, his eyes never leaving the dense tree line that had swallowed his brother over an hour ago.
His senses were charged with maximum anticipation. Jin did not trust the snow, he did not trust the trees, and above all, he did not trust the monster riding the black horse.
Suddenly, the white horse appeared from among the pine trees. It walked slowly, carrying Jinho on its back.
Jin stepped forward with wide, rapid strides, ignoring the gazes of the surrounding guards. When he reached his brother, he grabbed the white horse's reins to stop it. Jinho was staring into the void, his face pale as usual, but there was a hidden chaos in his customary neatness. The collar of his fur-lined coat was pulled up in an unnatural way, and his lips were slightly swollen and tinged with a dark redness, as if blood had congested in them by an external force.
"Jinho, are you okay?" Jin asked, his voice carrying the roughness of anxiety.
Jinho dismounted the horse with a slow movement, avoiding direct eye contact with his brother. "I'm fine, Jin..."
But Jin was not just a guard; he was the other half of a shattered soul. His piercing eyes caught something else. As Jinho descended, the coat collar shifted slightly downward due to his body's movement.
In that fraction of a second, Jin saw what made him freeze in his place.
On Jinho's pale white neck, just below the jawline, there were marks. They were not scratches from tree branches, nor were they bruises from a passing fall. They were dark crimson marks, tending towards blue, printed with undeniable clarity. They were "marks of possession"—deliberate, savage bites, left by someone who wanted to brand this body.
Jin felt as if a bullet had pierced his chest. His eyes widened, then narrowed until they became like two blades of pure darkness. The anxiety in his eyes turned into a frantic, primal, and blind rage.
"Who did this?" Jin whispered, his voice trembling with a murderous tone Jinho hadn't heard in years.
Jinho tried to pull his collar up quickly, but Jin's strong hand was faster. Jin grabbed his brother's collar and pulled it away completely, revealing the visual pollution Ivan had left on Jinho's perfect skin. The marks looked like a miniature murder scene on a canvas of snow.
"Jin, stop..." Jinho ordered in a low voice, trying to regain his control. "The situation is under control. The variables..."
"To hell with the variables!" Jin roared in a low, terrifying voice, stepping closer to his brother's face. "This is not environmental friction. This is desecration. Did that Russian pig touch you? Did he force you?"
"He didn't force me into anything that breaks me, Jin," Jinho said coldly, though his eyes betrayed his internal turmoil. "It was just... an attempt to prove the superiority of mass over velocity. And it failed. I am the one who sets the rules now."
But Jin was no longer listening. He turned slowly toward the tree line. At that exact moment, the massive black horse appeared, carrying Ivan Sokolov.
Ivan looked relaxed, glowing with a strange energy, the innocent and perplexing smile still drawn on his face. He was talking to one of his guards as if returning from a refreshing morning stroll.
Jin didn't think. He moved instinctively. He pulled his heavy "Sig Sauer" pistol from under his coat, flicked off the safety catch with a clear, sharp metallic click, and aimed the muzzle directly at Ivan's head from a distance of twenty meters.
Movement in the camp stopped abruptly. Sokolov's guards noticed Jin's movement, and within a single second, dozens of assault rifles were raised to aim at Jin's head. The tension in the air became so thick its pressure could be measured with a barometer.
Sergei Kuznetsov, who was sitting far away, stood up in shock and anger, not understanding what was happening between the "guard dog" and the heir of the Sokolovs.
Ivan halted his horse. He looked at Jin, then at the gun aimed at the center of his forehead. The innocent smile slowly faded, and the predatory shadow climbed back onto his features. His pale blue eyes met Jin's eyes, which were burning with the fire of hell. Ivan knew exactly the reason for this rage; he had deliberately left those marks in places that could be hidden, but he knew Jinho's twin would see them sooner or later.
"Is there a problem, Jin?" Ivan asked in a calm, provocative voice, as if speaking to an unruly child. "Did I miscalculate the distance between us?"
"I will empty this magazine into your head, and I will calculate the distance your brain will splatter on the snow," Jin spat the words through clenched teeth. His finger was pressing the trigger, converting potential energy into imminent kinetic energy.
"Jin! Stop!" Jinho shouted, rushing to stand between his brother and Ivan.
Jinho was now standing with his back to Ivan, his face meeting the muzzle of his brother's gun. "Lower the weapon, Jin. That is an order."
"He branded you, Jinho!" Jin shouted, the veins in his neck bulging from the sheer force of his anger. "He is treating you like private property. If I don't kill him now, he will consider our silence as submission."
"And if you kill him now, you will start a war that kills us all before we finish our business with Sergei," Jinho said in a very low voice, heard only by Jin. He used the tone of logical pleading, the only tone that could pierce Jin's angry armor. "We need him. Ivan is the pickaxe with which I will demolish Kuznetsov's palace. Do not break my tools, my brother."
Jin looked into his brother's eyes, which contained a sea of dark equations. He knew Jinho was planning something terrifying, and that revenge required the sacrifice of temporary dignity. Very slowly, and with a hatred deeper than the oceans, Jin lowered his gun, but he did not return it to its holster.
Jinho bypassed his brother and turned to face Ivan, who was still watching the scene with hidden sadistic pleasure.
"Your guard is very loyal, Jinho," Ivan smiled. "But he is reckless. In the world of physics you adore, recklessness is wasted energy."
"Energy is not destroyed, Ivan," Jinho replied with an icy voice, his eyes piercing Ivan as if memorizing the details of his face to erase them later. "Energy transforms from one form to another. And what you see now is not recklessness, but the storage of potential energy. And when the time comes to discharge it, I will make sure you are standing at the center of the explosion."
Jinho turned and walked away towards his family's tent, followed by Jin walking like a shadow guarding a wounded god. As for Ivan, he remained in his place, running his thumb over his lower lip, recalling the taste of blood and ice, realizing he had just unleashed a monster that would not be content with just playing.
Hunting Festival Grounds – Heart of the Forest.
02:00 PM – Immediately after the armed confrontation.
The entire Sokolov family was present at this traditional gathering. The patriarch Pyotr Sokolov sat on his massive chair covered with bear skin, watching his men with solid gazes, while his wife Natalia spoke sharply with Mariana, the wife of her eldest son Mikhail. Mikhail was drowning in drinking vodka with the military commanders, while their teenage son Adam tried to show off his new rifle to his aunt Katerina.
Amidst this clamor and violent masculine noise, Jinho stood in a shadowed corner, observing the kinetic pattern of everyone. His analytical eye was picking up frequencies that ordinary humans could not see.
In the corner of the large tent, Olivia, Ivan's young daughter, stood alone in her pink scarf that contrasted with the whiteness of the snow. She looked like a fragile creature that did not belong in this bloody world. Jinho noticed a massive guard named Andrei, one of Pyotr's elite guards, constantly approaching her.
His approach was not to protect her. Jinho caught the angle of Andrei's body leaning towards the little girl, and how his hand would deliberately "slip" to touch her shoulder in a way that suggested underlying harassment masked as affection. Jinho saw Olivia shrinking into herself, her eyes gleaming with suppressed terror, but she did not dare to speak; her father, Ivan, was busy.
"Collective blindness," Jinho whispered to himself. "The system is collapsing from within while they think they are protecting the borders."
Andrei whispered something in Olivia's ear that made her face pale to the point of whiteness. At that moment, Jinho made his decision. It wasn't an emotion. Andrei represented a "parasite" in the Sokolov system, and Jinho decided to be the scalpel that would excise him.
08:30 PM – The Descent of Pitch Darkness.
The forest at this time of night turned into a living creature, breathing frost and exhaling death. The sounds of drunken laughter and celebration horns coming from the center of the camp began to fade, giving way to the rustle of the wind among the giant pine trees. For Jinho, these sounds were not just noise; they were "random frequencies" in a system he sought to impose order upon.
Jinho stood behind the curtain of one of the tents, his blue eyes watching Andrei as he moved away from the main gathering. Andrei was walking with heavy steps, stumbling slightly due to the alcohol, heading towards the meat and bark storage area in the rear sector. He thought the darkness was his ally, and that he was far from the eyes of Ivan and Sergei, but he did not know he had just entered Jinho's "coordinate space."
To Jinho, Andrei wasn't human in that moment; he was a "damned mass of filth" moving with decelerating speed in a high-viscosity medium. The equation in Jinho's mind was clear: Andrei violated the sanctity of the "closed system" represented by Ivan by harassing Olivia, and since Ivan did not know, it was imperative for the "external observer" to intervene to restore balance.
"Jin," Jinho whispered into the micro-radio, his voice colder than the surrounding ice. "The target has entered the shadow zone, coordinates X: 44, Y: 12. The mass is moving with a deceleration caused by the effect of ethanol on the central nervous system. Estimated time of arrival at the interception point is 45 seconds."
"Copy," came Jin's voice from among the trees, short, sharp, and lethal.
Jin moved like a ghost, his feet leaving barely a trace on the snow. He had taken off his heavy coat to increase his agility, remaining in his black tactical gear that made him completely invisible in this darkness.
Jinho watched the scene from afar through his thermal binoculars. He saw the heat signature representing Andrei stopping near a pile of wood. The massive guard was cursing and muttering obscenities as he tried to light a cigarette, unaware that death was standing just a few meters behind him.
Jinho knew that if Jin's force struck a specific fulcrum point in the neck, it would lead to immediate unconsciousness without making a sound. Precision was everything.
Suddenly, with a lightning-fast movement that took no more than a second, Jin appeared out of nowhere behind Andrei. He didn't use a firearm; the sound of a gunshot would ruin the plan. Jin wrapped his strong arm around Andrei's neck in a "rear naked choke," pressing down with his body using his weight to neutralize the massive guard's resistance. Andrei tried to struggle, kicking the snow with his feet, but Jin had already planted his knees into Andrei's back, locking down the flow of oxygen to his brain.
Jinho was watching the digital watch on his wrist. "Five seconds... four... three... two... one. Loss of consciousness."
Andrei's body went completely limp, collapsing like a lifeless corpse onto the ice. Jinho stepped forward with calm, regular strides, no sign of tension on his face. He stood over the body lying on the ground, looking coldly at Andrei's ugly face.
"Jin, lift his head," Jinho ordered.
Jin did as he was told. Jinho took a small flashlight from his pocket and shined the light into Andrei's pupils. "Pupil dilation at 70%. Motor system disabled. Now, we will move him to the 'laboratory'."
The "laboratory" was an abandoned hut formerly used for skinning hides, located in a depression where neither wind nor sounds could reach. Jin had prepared it in advance based on Jinho's precise instructions.
Jin bound Andrei's hands and feet with heavy metal chains, then dragged him onto a small sled covered with black burlap. They moved in perfect harmony, like a single machine. Jinho determining the path least vulnerable to detection based on the viewing angles of the watchtowers, and Jin executing the hard labor.
While walking in the forest, Jinho was thinking about Ivan. He knew Ivan watched everyone, but he also knew Ivan had a fatal flaw: he only saw what he wanted to see. Ivan saw Jinho as a "toy" or a "brilliant mind" that sparked his curiosity, but he did not see the "executioner" lurking behind those blue eyes.
"Ivan thinks I'm running away from him because I'm afraid of my truth," Jinho thought as he looked at the bare trees. "But tonight he will discover that my truth is not just a mirror reflecting his madness. My truth is the black hole that will swallow his entire world."
They reached the hut. The place reeked of rotting wood and old blood. Jin placed Andrei on the iron chair fixed in the center. The air inside the hut was so cold that Jin's breath appeared as thick smoke, but Jinho didn't seem to feel the cold.
Jinho took a set of tools out of his bag that did not belong in the mafia world; there were electrical wires, a small generator, and a set of surgical scalpels. He placed them with extreme order on a wooden table, as if preparing to perform life-saving surgery.
"Jin, wake him up," Jinho said as he put on his white medical gloves. "But don't let him scream yet. I want him to comprehend 'what happened' first."
Jin grabbed a bucket of ice water and poured it over Andrei's head. The guard gasped violently and suddenly regained consciousness, beginning to shake the chains frantically as he tried to understand where he was. When his eyes fell on Jinho, who was standing quietly under the dim light, his features shifted from confusion to sheer terror.
"You... what are you doing?" the words stumbled in Andrei's throat. "Sokolov will kill you both! I am one of his men!"
Jinho smiled a faint smile that did not reach his eyes. "You are mistaken in your description, Andrei. You are not 'one of his men'. If you truly were, you would not have committed your filthy act. And since you have polluted the purity of something you do not own, you have been sentenced to death."
Jinho grabbed two electrical wires and brought them together, unleashing a blue spark that illuminated the hut for a moment. "Do you know what the 'specific resistance' of human skin is, Andrei? We will discover that together... piece by piece."
The silence inside the hut was heavier than the accumulated ice outside. It was broken only by the hum of the small electrical generator Jinho had placed on the table, and the sound of Andrei's rapid breathing, which came out as waves of white mist. The dim light hanging from the ceiling swayed slowly, casting dancing shadows of Jinho as he meticulously prepared the copper electrodes, like tuning violin strings before a grand symphony.
Jinho looked at Andrei, who was bound by chains that prevented even the slightest movement of his massive body. Andrei's eyes were bulging, filled with a terror he had never experienced before; a terror not of brute force, but of a "mind" that saw his body as nothing more than raw material for an experiment.
"Are you aware, Andrei, that the human body is essentially a complex electromechanical system?" Jinho spoke in a calm, composed voice, almost whispering. "Billions of nerve impulses travel through your axons like precise electrical signals. What I will do tonight is simply 'add noise' to this system. Noise so loud that it will erase your consciousness of time and space."
Jin stepped forward silently, and with a masterful motion, clamped the copper electrodes onto Andrei's temples and wrists using cold metal clips. Andrei let out a muffled scream, trying to squirm away, but Jin's grips were like steel pincers.
"Ohm's law is the absolute ruler in our room here," Jinho continued as he ran his long fingers over the generator's control switches.
Jinho raised his gaze to Andrei, his blue eyes reflecting the generator's blue spark. "The problem in biophysics is that resistance is not a universal constant. When you feel fear, your sympathetic nervous system begins to secrete sweat. Sweat contains salts that increase the skin's conductivity, meaning the resistance will drop. And the more it drops, the more current penetrates your heart and brain."
With indescribable coldness, Jinho turned the voltage dial to 50V.
A scream erupted from Andrei's throat that tore through the stillness of the forest. His back arched violently, and his neck muscles spasmed until his veins nearly burst. It wasn't a scream of ordinary pain; it was the scream of a creature feeling invisible fires coursing through its veins, burning neural pathways and redrawing the map of pain in its brain.
Jinho watched the stopwatch on his wrist with absolute focus. "Three seconds... five... eight."
He shut off the current suddenly. Andrei's body collapsed forward, trembling with involuntary tremors, saliva drooling from his open mouth. His eyes were lost, trying to focus on Jinho, who stood before him with full dignity.
"Did you feel that?" Jinho asked, tilting his head slightly. "No response..." Jinho smiled.
He grabbed a bucket of saltwater that Jin had prepared earlier, and poured it slowly over Andrei's chest and hands. "The saltwater will act as an electrolytic bridge. It will reduce the surface resistance to its lowest levels, allowing me to use less voltage to produce double the pain. Energy efficiency, isn't it?"
"Please..." Andrei whispered in a shattered, barely audible voice. "Sokolov... I will give you... anything..."
Jinho's movement stopped abruptly. A deadly silence prevailed in the hut. Jinho brought his face close to Andrei's, until his cold breath touched the guard's scorched skin.
"You still do not understand," Jinho said in a tone dripping with poison. "I do not want 'anything' from you. I do not need your information, and I do not need your loyalty. You are here for one reason: you touched Olivia. You laid your filthy hand on a being that represents the purest thing in Ivan's decaying life. And in my world, when a corrupted element pollutes a pure substance, it must be completely oxidized."
Jinho turned the dial this time to 110V.
This time, Andrei didn't scream. He couldn't. The current was so strong that it paralyzed his vocal cords instantly. His body vibrated at a high frequency, as if trying to break free from its physical reality. The smell of ozone and burning skin began to fill the air. Jin watched the scene impassively, his hand on the grip of his gun in case of any emergency, despite knowing that Andrei no longer had control over anything.
In this moment, Jinho saw blurred images of his mother, and the blood he had seen in his childhood. Every pulse of current he sent into Andrei's body was like a bullet fired into the heart of his agonizing memories. He was torturing Andrei, but in reality, he was trying to kill the weakness that dwelled inside him.
"Alternating current causes muscle spasms called 'tetanus of the chest muscles'," Jinho explained as he watched Andrei's ribcage freeze in a state of inhalation. "You cannot exhale right now. Your lungs are full of air but you are suffocating. A fun physical paradox, don't you think?"
After thirty seconds of continuous torture, Jinho cut the power. Andrei's head dropped to his chest, making strange sounds resembling a death rattle. The massive guard had lost all his pride, all his strength, and had become nothing more than a trembling pile of meat at the mercy of the "little devil."
Jinho straightened his posture, took off his water-and-salt-stained gloves, then looked at Jin.
The hum of the electrical generator faded, replaced by an oppressive stillness, broken only by Andrei's shattered moans and the sound of the howling wind battering the hut's rotting walls. The air was saturated with the smell of ozone and burnt flesh, a chemical mixture that, to Jinho, represented the naked "smell of truth." Jinho pulled up a wooden chair and sat in front of his victim, watching Andrei's involuntary muscle tremors with the coldness of a scientist observing a reaction under a microscope.
"The first phase was merely 'calibration' of your nervous system, Andrei," Jinho stated as he wiped his glasses with a silk cloth. "Now, we will move to something more fundamental..."
Jinho stood up slowly, heading towards the table where the steel axe was placed. Its blade glinted under the dim light, reflecting the whiteness of the snow covering the forest outside. Jinho gripped the long wooden handle, feeling the tool's center of gravity.
"Do you know, Andrei, that the human hand is an engineering miracle?" Jinho said as he weighed the axe in his hand. "Twenty-seven bones, a complex network of tendons, and countless sensory receptors. But when this miracle is used for desecration, it loses its biological trait and becomes an 'excess mass' in the system."
Jin stepped forward silently, and grabbed Andrei's right arm, the hand that dared to touch Olivia. He pinned it onto a massive wooden block that was used in the past for chopping firewood. Andrei tried to pull his hand away, but his electricity-exhausted body could not resist Jin's steel grip.
"Please... kill me... don't do this..." Andrei cried, tears mixing with the dried blood on his face.
"Death is the end of the event, and we are still in the middle of it," Jinho replied coldly. "I am not looking for your quick death, I am looking for the 'inertia' of your pain."
Jinho firmly planted his feet in a precise athletic stance. He began calculating in his mind the angle of descent and the tangential velocity required to sever the wrist bones without completely shattering them. He wanted a surgical, clean amputation that reflected his obsession with perfection.
Jinho raised the axe above his head. At that moment, he didn't see a man begging for life; he saw a "fulcrum" that needed to be broken. The axe swung in a perfect arc, cleaving the air with a sound like the whistle of death. And with extreme precision, the steel blade came down on Andrei's wrist.
The sound of metal striking bone echoed, followed by a scream that tore the stillness of the Taiga. It was not a human scream; it was the scream of a slaughtered beast. Drops of hot blood splattered onto Jinho's pale face, drawing crimson lines that looked like demonic tattoos under the dim light. Andrei's right hand fell onto the polluted snow inside the hut, its fingers twitching for seconds before becoming entirely still.
Jinho didn't blink. He kept watching the blood flow from the radial artery. "Magnificent."
Jinho signaled to Jin, who immediately cauterized the wound with a piece of metal heated over the fire to prevent Andrei from dying of premature bleeding. The smell of burning flesh returned to fill the place, and Andrei fainted from the sheer intensity of the pain.
"Wake him up, Jin," Jinho said as he coldly wiped the blade. "We still have the left hand... and the tongue. The tongue that dared to whisper filth into the ear of an innocence unable to defend itself."
When Andrei regained consciousness, he found himself looking at Jinho, who was holding long surgical forceps.
"Now we will move to the oral cavity," Jinho said in a tone dripping with deadly calm. "The words you spoke, Andrei, were acoustic disturbances in a stable system. And since the source is polluted, the 'oscillator' responsible for these disturbances must be excised."
With utmost sadism, Jin forced Andrei to open his mouth. Jinho moved with deliberate slowness, amplifying the psychology of terror before the physical act. He enjoyed seeing the "total collapse" in his victim's eyes. For Jinho, this wasn't torture; this was the "purification" of a world drowning in absurdity.
"Do you know the difference between me and Ivan, Andrei?" Jinho asked as he brought the forceps close to the trembling guard's tongue. "Ivan kills because he enjoys chaos. I kill you because I adore order. Ivan sees you as an enemy, while I see you as a 'computational error' that must be deleted from existence."
With lightning speed, the forceps clamped down on the tongue, and with a single decisive movement using a sharp surgical scalpel, Jinho cut it off. Blood flowed profusely, and Andrei choked on his own scream, which turned into a muffled, bloody death rattle.
Jinho took a step back, looking at his artwork with cold appreciation. The transparent apron he wore was completely stained red, and his hands were dripping with blood, but his soul felt a kind of lost balance finally returning.
"We are done," Jinho said as he peeled off his bloody gloves and threw them onto Andrei's body, who was still breathing with difficulty, fighting the throes of death and pains beyond human endurance. "Jin, pack the 'excised parts' in the luxurious box we prepared. Make sure to put in the dry ice to preserve the tissues. I want the message to reach Ivan while it still retains the heat of the act."
Jinho looked at Andrei one last time. There was no pity, there was no remorse. There was only the absolute void that inhabited the heart of the shattered genius.
"You have done a great service to science and justice tonight, Andrei," Jinho whispered as he headed toward the door. "You have proven that pain is the only constant in a world full of failed variables."
Jinho stepped out of the hut, greeted by the freezing forest air. He inhaled deeply, feeling the purity of the snow wash away the particles of blood clinging to his lungs. Behind him, Jin began "wrapping" the gifts, while the forest prepared to welcome the dawn with the scent of death and chocolate.
The air in the office was saturated with the smell of camphor and hospital disinfectants, the only scent that could calm the noise of thoughts in Jinho's head. He took off his bloodstained coat in the adjoining room, and washed with freezing cold water, as if trying to wash the disgusting sensation of blood off his skin. He put on a crisp white shirt, buttoned his cuffs with extreme precision, then sat behind his desk made of dark mahogany wood.
On the table in front of him, there were no work papers; instead, there was a luxurious box made of black ebony wood, lined with a crimson velvet that resembled the color of the blood spilled shortly before. The box was equipped with a double insulating layer, and at its bottom, "dry ice" (solid $CO_2$) was placed to ensure the contents remained in a state of biological stasis.
With the coldness of an expert forensic pathologist, Jinho began arranging the "gifts."
He placed Andrei's severed right hand in the center of the box; the hand looked pale as wax under the desk light. Beside it, he placed the tongue he had excised. The sight was grotesque to any human eye, but Jinho saw it as "physical evidence" of correcting an error in the system. To him, these body parts were the "withdrawn masses" that restored the balance to the equation of Olivia's innocence.
"The thermodynamics of tissue preservation depend on preventing heat transfer," Jinho whispered to himself as he sealed the airtight inner container.
He was calculating in his mind how long this meat would stay "alive" enough for Ivan to feel the heat of the act when he opened it.
Jinho took a small box of raw dark Swiss chocolate (90% cocoa) from his desk drawer. He selected a single rectangular piece, wrapped in gold foil, and placed it carefully on the red velvet beside the body parts. The contrast between the gleam of gold and the grotesqueness of dead flesh perfectly reflected Jinho's personality; orderly beauty covering a bottomless pit of hell.
Then came the hardest moment: the letter.
Jinho pulled out a sheet of luxurious "Vanilla" paper and picked up his gold-nibbed fountain pen. He hesitated for seconds. He knew Ivan was watching him, analyzing him, and trying to breach his psychological fortresses. He knew Ivan saw him as a "mirror" to his own madness. And the terrifying part inside Jinho was that he was beginning to feel the same dark attraction; an obsession met by an obsession, and darkness searching for its twin in a shattered mirror.
He began to write in his straight handwriting that didn't tilt a single millimeter, words that flowed from his mind like source code, yet carried a confession he never dared to utter:
"To Ivan...
In closed systems, when the 'center' fails to detect the parasites gnawing at its edges, collapse becomes an unavoidable physical inevitability. Your eyes were so busy chasing my shadow that you didn't notice the filth polluting your only 'light'. Andrei wasn't just a guard, he was a 'fatal error' in your estimation of security.
I have simplified the equation for you. These body parts are the 'byproducts' of the purification process. As for the chocolate, it is to alter the metallic taste this truth will leave in your throat."
Jinho paused, dipped the nib into the inkwell once more, and wrote the final line, which acted as a ticking time bomb:
"You say I run from you because I resemble your truth. Perhaps you are right in one aspect: I do not run because I fear you, but because I fear that the 'symmetry' between us has reached the point of no return. Obsession is not a unilateral act, Ivan... It is a 'mutual gravity' between two black holes. Enjoy your gift, and do not look for my gratitude... for we are now breathing from the same polluted lung."
Jinho folded the paper slowly and placed it inside a black envelope, sealing it with red wax bearing the "fake" Kuznetsov family crest. He placed the envelope on top of the box, then closed the ebony lid with a faint sound resembling the closing of a coffin.
"Jin," Jinho called out in a calm voice.
Jin entered through the side door. He, too, had changed his clothes and appeared ready for the final mission. Jin looked at the box, then at his brother's features. In Jinho's eyes, he saw a strange gleam, a mixture of dark victory and spiritual exhaustion.
"Deliver this to Ivan's personal tent," Jinho ordered. "Do not hand it to the guards. Place it on his private table and leave silently. Make sure he opens it while he is alone. I want him to experience the 'inertia' of this moment without distractions."
"He will understand it as a declaration of war, Jinho," Jin said in a warning tone. "Or a message of confession."
"It is both, Jin," Jinho replied as he leaned his back against his chair and closed his eyes. "In quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in two contradictory states simultaneously until it is observed. Ivan will observe what he wants to observe. Go now."
After Jin left, silence prevailed in the office. Jinho looked at his hands; they were completely clean, but he could still feel the touch of the axe and the splatter of blood. He laughed a faint, dry laugh, devoid of any joy.
Tonight, Jinho realized a terrifying truth: he didn't just want to destroy his father, Sergei; he wanted to prove to Ivan that he was the only "peer," the only monster capable of matching him in this bloody dance. The obsession he thought was solely on Ivan's part turned out to be an "action and reaction" equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.
Stillness reigned inside the luxurious office, except for the crackling of firewood in the massive bronze fireplace. Ivan Sokolov sat in his plush leather chair, wearing a black open-collared shirt, holding a glass of aged red wine the color of the velvet draped around the room. His pale blue eyes watched the ice melting on the glass of his small window, his mind still summoning the image of Jinho standing under the muzzle of his brother's gun in the forest... that coldness, that unbreakable gaze.
"Jin" entered with suspicious silence. He didn't speak a word, nor did he bow like the rest of the guards. He placed the luxurious wooden box on Ivan's desk, then took a step backward, casting one last cold glance at the Russian heir before turning around and vanishing into the darkness of the night.
Ivan kept watching the box for several minutes. The box itself was a piece of art; the carefully polished ebony wood, the scent of cedar emanating from it, and the black silk ribbon wrapping it like a small shroud. Ivan reached out his long hand and touched the lid of the box with his fingertips. The lid was unnaturally cold, as if it harbored another winter different from the one residing outside.
Ivan untied the silk ribbon slowly, as if unbuttoning the dress of a woman he loved. When he opened the lid, there was no scream of panic, nor a tremor in his hand.
Inside, Andrei's severed hand rested on a piece of crimson velvet, and beside it the pale tongue. The scene was surreal; grotesqueness wrapped in luxury. The smell of metal and blood was fresh, trapped within the chill of the dry ice that began to sublimate, escaping as thin white smoke surrounding the body parts.
And in the corner of the box, the glint of gold caught his eye. The piece of Swiss chocolate was there, resting like a jewel beside the dead meat.
Ivan picked up the black envelope. He opened it slowly and began to read Jinho's words.
With every line, Ivan's features changed. It wasn't anger, and it wasn't shock. His eyes widened with a frantic gleam, a gleam resembling that of a believer who had finally found a god to worship. When he reached the final sentence: "Obsession is not a unilateral act, Ivan... It is a 'mutual gravity' between two black holes", Ivan felt a shiver run down his spine that he hadn't felt in his entire life.
Ivan placed the letter on the table, and drew a deep breath, heavy with the scent of death and cocoa.
"Ah... my god..." Ivan whispered in a trembling voice, followed by a faint laugh that gradually morphed into a stifled, hysterical laughter. "You did it, Jinho... You did what I didn't dare to think of."
Ivan didn't care about the loss of Andrei, one of his most skilled guards. What shook his very core was the truth Jinho had revealed. Ivan, who thought himself the master of the palace, was blind to what was happening to his daughter Olivia. He was so immersed in his grand conflicts that he left the "wolf" inside his home. And Jinho, the "outsider" who refused to belong, was the only one with the eye that sees, and the hand that protects.
Ivan picked up the piece of chocolate. He peeled off the gold foil with a strange reverence, and placed it in his mouth. He closed his eyes as he savored its intense bitterness beginning to melt on his tongue, mixing with the scent of blood lingering in the air of the box.
The taste was "Jinho" himself. Bitter, pure, merciless, and coated in a layer of lethal refinement.
"You don't just return my obsession," Ivan muttered as he looked at Andrei's severed hand, "you own me now, Jinho. You are the only one who has the right to kill in my kingdom, because you are the only one who understands its rules better than I do."
Ivan rose from his chair, and headed toward the large mirror in the corner of the tent. He looked at his reflection; his face was glowing with a kind of dark euphoria. He no longer saw Jinho as just a "genius" he wanted to bring into his ranks, or a "toy" to chase. In his eyes, Jinho had transformed into a "peer," his lost other half in a world of ordinary humans.
Jinho's letter was a confession wrapped in a threat, and an apology wrapped in blood. Jinho had acknowledged that there was a bond between them, a bond deeper than political alliance or financial interests. It was the bond of "similarity" that Jinho feared and Ivan adored.
"Breathing from the same polluted lung..." Ivan repeated the words of the letter as he ran his hand over his neck, in the place where he had left his marks on Jinho in the forest. "Yes, Jinho... we are breathing the same poisoned air, and dancing in the same hell."
Ivan turned back toward the box. He realized that the true "awaited moment" wasn't the one where they would crush Sergei, but the moment when Jinho would fully confess that he no longer had an escape from this shared destiny.
Ivan grabbed his communicator. "Sergei Kuznetsov will have a quiet night today," he said in a calm and decisive tone to his men. "Do not move. Do not start anything. I want to enjoy this quietness for a while. I want to taste this gift before we burn the world."
Ivan sat down again, resting his head back, watching the smoke of the dry ice slowly fade away. He felt a strange peace, a peace that does not precede the storm, but a peace that resides at its core. Tonight, Jinho had proven that he is a "devil" protecting Ivan's angels, and this act made Ivan realize that Jinho is not just a temporary ally; he is the destiny that will lead Sokolov to the top... or to beautiful annihilation.
That night, under a Taiga sky studded with cold stars, there were two men in different camps, thinking about the same thing. Jinho, who was trying to convince himself that he did it for the sake of "order," and Ivan, who knew with certainty that Jinho did it for the both of them.
-_______________________________
To be continued.............