The apartment smelled of antiseptic and boiled buckwheat, a sickly-sweet undertone of decay lurking beneath the domestic facade like an uninvited guest refusing to leave. The yellowed lampshade above the couch cast jaundiced light over your sunken cheeks, the hollows beneath your eyes painted in watercolor bruises of exhaustion. You existed in fragments now—a whisper of a woman wrapped in a threadbare housecoat, your bones pressing against skin grown translucent as old parchment. Outside, Rostov-on-Don continued its indifferent march through 1986, but here, in this dim pocket of time, the world had narrowed to the space between one labored breath and the next. The cancer moved through you like a clandestine operation, its guerrilla warfare waged in lymph nodes and marrow, its victories marked by the shrinking circumference of your wrists, the way your wedding band now spun loose on fingers that once danced across typewriter keys documenting your husband's cases.

Zhenya Bokov—the terror of the Rostov criminal underworld, the investigator whose name made even Chikatilo's butcher knife hesitate mid-air—stood in your kitchenette like a conscripted nurse, his massive hands fumbling with the mixer as it whirred violently against the pot of semolina. The juxtaposition was almost comical: those same fingers that could reassemble a corpse's last moments from cigarette ash and blood spatter patterns now trembled around a spoon, measuring sugar with the concentration of a bomb technician diffusing a mine. His shaved head gleamed under the kitchen light, the shadow of stubble along his jawline darker than the circles under his eyes. He'd come straight from Moscow, from the latest child's shallow grave, still carrying the scent of birch forests and bureaucratic ink in the fibers of his sweater. But tonight, the monster hunter was just a man. Your man.

Then—the creak of floorboards as Zhenya approached, his bulk moving with uncharacteristic delicacy, as if afraid his mere footsteps might shatter you further. He perched on the edge of the couch, the springs groaning beneath his weight, his knees awkwardly bent to avoid spilling the bowl of porridge cradled in his palms like some holy offering.

"Well, how are you?" His voice was a rough caress, the words stripped of their usual sarcastic edge, leaving only raw concern naked beneath. No smile accompanied the question—Zhenya had never been one for empty gestures. The spoon in his hand hovered between you, a tiny aluminum bridge over an abyss. The porridge trembled slightly, its surface reflecting the lamplight like a stagnant pond. "Eat," he commanded, the order undercut by the slightest quaver in his baritone. "You need to eat now."

When you hesitated, he fell back on the old Russian nursery rhyme, the words absurdly tender coming from a mouth more accustomed to barking orders and cursing suspects: "Come on, what are you? A spoon for mom, for dad, come on, come on.." The childish cadence sounded foreign in his voice, as if he were speaking a language learned specifically for this moment, this private war waged not against human monsters but against the indifferent cruelty of biology.

You parted your lips—not because you wanted the tasteless gruel, but because the alternative was watching his face crumple under the weight of helplessness. The spoon clinked against your teeth, the porridge sticking to your dry palate like wet cement.

The bowl would empty eventually. The night would deepen. And Zhenya Bokov—the best investigator in Rostov, the hunter of human beasts—would continue his vigil, armed with nothing but a spoon and a love as stubborn as it was doomed.