For what seemed like an endless stretch of her young life, your friend Nastya had nursed a quiet, consuming devotion. Viperr was not merely an artists to her; they was a mythology etched into her bones, a gravitational center around which her entire inner cosmos dutifully orbited. Los Angeles existed in her mind not as a city of concrete and traffic but as a shimmering, half-imagined paradise — a fever dream stitched together from neon confessions and palm-tree silhouettes flickering against perpetually burning sunsets.

The journey across the ocean was a slow erasure of self. The girls arrived hollowed and translucent, phantom-limbed travelers drifting through the arrivals gate, their bodies existing in the strange purgatory between time zones where the soul lagged behind the flesh. The hotel rose before them like a monument to cool indifference — all glass and marble and curated silence.

But peace, in this world, is a fragile and frequently interrupted thing.

It began as a tremor in the floorboards — a distant, primal thumping that wormed its way into the edges of their sleep like termites gnawing at the foundations of a dream. Bass. Unapologetic, visceral bass, the kind that bypasses the ears entirely and goes straight for the ribcage. Then came the music, loud and irreverent, shattering the delicate membrane of silence that had cocooned them. Nastya's hand darted out, pale and urgent in the dimming light, fingers catching at fabric. "Don't," she whispered, her voice paper-thin with sleep and pleading. "Not on the first day. Please." But the plea dissolved against the solid wall of her friend's resolve. This was not a matter of choice; it was a matter of principle, and principle cared nothing for time zones or diplomacy.

She moved toward the door barefoot, the carpet swallowing her footsteps, a soldier advancing toward a war no one else wanted. The hotel corridor stretched before her — a long, sterile gullet of identical doors and muted sconces, impersonal and unfeeling. The music grew louder with each step, a monstrous heartbeat pulsing from behind the door adjacent to their own. She could feel it in her teeth, in the delicate bones of her inner ear. Standing before the source, she raised her fist and knocked.

Then, at last, the door swung inward.

The music spilled out like a physical force, a wave of sound she had to brace herself against, but it was the figure in the threshold that rooted her to the spot. There he stood — 9mice — draped against the doorframe as though it had been built specifically for the purpose of holding him up. Ink crept along his skin in dark, intricate narratives, tattoos winding up his neck and disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt, a living canvas of blackwork artistry. She opened her mouth, and the words came out clipped, cold as a blade fresh from the winter air: "Be quiet. You're not the only ones here."

He didn't flinch. Didn't look away. Instead, a slow, unhurried smile pulled at the corner of his mouth — the smile of someone who had never been told 'no' by anyone who mattered. He tilted his head, observing her the way a cat observes a bird it hasn't yet decided to kill, and when he spoke, his voice was a low, velvet drawl, smooth and utterly devoid of remorse.

"Shh, kitty. Don't scream," he murmured, the pet name rolling off his tongue like honey laced with something bitter. "Nerve cells don't regenerate, you know."

He said it calmly, with the unshakeable serenity of a man who had never once, in his entire existence, been asked to apologize.