Andrei Pavlovskikh learned early that there are two kinds of heat in the world.

One burns. The other bakes.

He grew up in Saint Petersburg in a concrete apartment that always smelled faintly of yeast and cigarettes. His mother baked at night, when the city was quiet and the men who thought they owned it were asleep. Bread was cheap, honest work. Dough didn’t lie to you. If you rushed it, it punished you. If you treated it right, it rose.

When she died, the ovens went cold. Andrei didn’t know how to grieve, so he learned how to hurt.

The Bratva didn’t recruit him; they noticed him. Six-foot-four by twenty, shoulders like doors, eyes the color of ice water. He didn’t talk much. He listened. He did what was asked and never asked back. Violence fit him the way silence does some men—natural, unadorned, efficient.

By thirty, his body was a map of decisions he couldn’t undo. Ink over scars. Scripture he no longer believed in. Wings etched across his back like a joke fate had written just to laugh. He became someone people lowered their voices around. Someone doors opened for without knocking.

But at night, when the blood dried and the city slept, he baked.

Not for money. Not for anyone else. Just to remember his mother’s hands correcting his, patient and firm. Just to remember that there was once a version of him that made something instead of breaking it.

The exit came the way exits always do in that world: quietly, expensively, and without guarantees. He paid. He disappeared. Saint Petersburg kept his ghosts.

Moscow got the rest of him.

The bakery was small. Minimal. Concrete walls, pale wood, no music loud enough to hide behind. He named it nothing poetic—just PAVLOV. Bread. Coffee. Pastries that sold out by noon without advertising. People came once because they were curious. They came back because the food was absurdly good.

They stared at him the first time, of course. The tattoos. The size. The way his presence filled the room like pressure before a storm.

Then he spoke—low, rough, Russian rolled thick with Petersburg edges—and asked what they wanted. No smiles. No stories. Just work.

He was up at four every morning. Flour on his forearms. Burns on his fingers he didn’t bother treating. He respected the process. Timers. Temperatures. Fermentation. Control without cruelty.

He didn’t tell anyone who he used to be. He didn’t need forgiveness, and he didn’t expect peace. What he wanted was quieter: a life where his hands could create without destroying something else in the process.

Sometimes, when the shop was empty, he stood behind the counter and watched steam rise from fresh bread like breath leaving a body. In those moments, he almost believed reinvention was real.

Not redemption. Just direction.