Chapter One: The Calculus of Life and Death

The Moscow air bit with a late-November chill, sharp as a scalpel. Dr. Lucien Armand stepped out of the hospital’s automated doors, the sterile warmth clinging to his coat for a moment before the cold stripped it away. His shift had ended precisely seven minutes ago. Every second of the five hours and fifty-three minutes of sleep that awaited him was accounted for.

The city was a smear of black and gold, but Lucien saw only the geometry of the shortest path home. He didn’t hear the frantic horns at first; they were just another layer of the city’s chronic disorder. It was the crimson bloom against the grey asphalt that snagged his attention—a splash of color so violently out of place it felt like an insult.

An accident. A grotesque sculpture of twisted metal, with human forms as its centerpiece.

He didn’t slow his pace. His trained eyes, however, automatically catalogued the scene: two men in cheap suits, likely bodyguards, sprawled and bleeding on the asphalt. One was conscious, moaning. Amateurish. The other was too still. A lost cause.

His gaze then fell on the main attraction. A man was being carefully extracted from the wrecked back seat of a black Mercedes by a panicked police officer. Even from a distance, Lucien could see the quality of the woolen coat, now ruined by blood. The man’s head lolled back, revealing a strong jaw and a shock of dark hair, pale against the officer’s sleeve.

Lucien’s steps faltered, not out of concern, but out of professional annoyance. The disruption to his schedule.

“Officer,” Lucien’s voice cut through the chaos, calm and flat. “What is the meaning of this obstruction?”

The officer, a man with a weary face and a too-tight uniform, glanced up, harried. “Accident, Doctor. A bad one. We’re trying to get him to the hospital.” He grunted as he adjusted his grip on the unconscious man. “This one… they say he’s Dmitri Morozov.”

The name landed not with a bang, but with the chill of finality. Morozov. The Gentleman Wolf. The syndicate heir who had turned his father’s bloody empire into something polished, corporate, and infinitely more dangerous.

Lucien’s lip curled, a minute, almost imperceptible gesture. “Morozov,” he repeated, the name tasting like ash. “And you are expending medical resources on a man whose profession is the creation of corpses. Let the streets clean their own. It is more efficient.”

The officer’s eyes widened, then darted around as if the shadows themselves might be listening. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “Doctor, please. Be careful with your words. We are all paid to do a job. Some of us by the state, some… by other masters. The result is the same. We do the work.”

A cold, cynical smile touched Lucien’s eyes, but not his lips. “I see. So the government is well-fed by its strays. How… pragmatic.” He delivered the line not as an accusation, but as a clinical observation, a diagnosis of a sick society.

The officer flinched as if struck. “Yob tvoyu mat… Just… be on your way, Doctor. This one… he’s trouble you don’t want.”

“That is the first intelligent thing you’ve said tonight,” Lucien replied, his tone utterly devoid of emotion. He turned, the brief, unwelcome calculus of life and death complete in his mind. Morozov’s survival probability was irrelevant. He was a variable that had been efficiently removed from Lucien’s equation.

He walked away, the image of the man’s limp, powerful form and the scent of spilled blood filing itself away in the cold, archival part of his mind. A curiosity. Nothing more.

His penthouse was a sanctuary of silence and clean lines. Every surface was bare, every object positioned at a perfect right angle. He shed his clothes, placing them in the laundry chute with ritualistic precision, and stood under a shower so hot it turned his skin pink, washing away the hospital and the street.

Sleep found him instantly. It was a black, dreamless void, a necessary system reboot.

The sound that shattered it was a violation.

The insistent, shrill ring of his private mobile phone drilled into the silence. The digital clock glowed 3:17 AM. He had been asleep for four hours and twenty-four minutes.

He answered. He did not greet.

“Dr. Armand?” The head nurse’s voice was strained, a tight wire of panic. “I am so sorry to call, but we have an emergency. A VIP, a thoracic trauma from a car accident. He’s crashing. Dr. Volkov is in surgery, and you are the only—”

Lucien cut her off, his voice a low, sleep-roughened whisper that held more menace than a shout. “My shift ended at 10:07 PM. The hospital’s lack of foresight is not my emergency.”

“But, Doctor, it’s Dmitri Morozov! The Morozov family is here, they are insisting—”

He didn’t let her finish. The name, appearing twice in one night, was no longer a curiosity. It was an irritant. A variable that refused to be eliminated.

“Let him die,” Lucien said, the words absolute and final. “Or find another surgeon to assist. I require my precious sleep. Do not call this number again.”

He ended the call. He set the phone to silent. He lay back in the absolute darkness, the perfect geometry of his room restored.

But as he closed his eyes, the image that returned to him was not of a nameless criminal, but of a specific, powerful man with a jawline sharp enough to cut, and a faint, silvery scar visible just beneath it.

Sleep did not return as easily as before.

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