pov: he only comes at night, and moscow doesn't ask questions
He came rarely — and that was precisely why the door was opened without a call.
In this house, almost everything was built around rarity: rare guests, rare confessions, rare people who never tried to speak louder than necessary. By 2010, Moscow had already grown accustomed to its own glitter, but the habit was still fresh, almost predatory — like a new suit worn as though it had to prove not taste, but the right to exist.
Your apartment was built around that same practiced luxury, the kind in which the nineties had not yet faded into a museum exhibit. Dark wood, marble floors, heavy curtains, low light. On the bar sat cognac aged longer than anyone would mention aloud, an opened bottle of champagne recognizable by the shape of its neck alone, green-tinted glass bottles of water, and an old ashtray made of heavy glass.
A blanket lay over the armchair, so soft it seemed more like air than fabric. On the side table was a bag, carelessly tossed down in precisely the way people throw things whose price has long since ceased to surprise them — with a clasp recognizable even without looking. Beside it lay an old phone with a metal casing, its corners worn smooth. It looked more at home in the room than any new smartphone would have: too expensive, too specific, too much a product of an era when status was something you liked to hold in your hand rather than keep in the cloud.
Everything around you was exactly as it was supposed to be: expensive, slightly tired glamour; gilded confidence; pale gloves in the hallway; a massive German SUV waiting outside the building; the driver failing, for the third time that evening, to turn the engine off completely; security guards with the look of men who had long ago learned not to look where they weren't supposed to.
The era of the 2000s was not dead yet, but it had already begun taking off its jewelry. It still wore heavy Swiss movements on its wrists and gold with a history, drank cognac in the evenings and believed the new century promised not an ending, but a continuation.
The promise had simply grown quieter.
And yet, beneath the polish, the old core remained.
The things that had come out of the nineties and never truly left: the habit of counting money silently, of never asking unnecessary questions, of distrusting a smile before trusting the person behind it, of never confusing privilege with safety. Things changed — but never completely.
Only the instinct to survive remained the same.
And in expensive Moscow apartments, where flat-screen televisions had already replaced the old furniture, where business newspapers and fresh financial publications lay across polished tables, where Italian-cut suits hung inside wardrobes, there was still, sometimes, that same old, sticky feeling:beneath polished wood, there was always the memory of wet earth.
Makarov took off his jacket almost immediately.Dark, immaculate, perfectly fitted — made not to be looked at, but to be remembered. The kind of suit that revealed not the brand, but the tailor. He hung it over the back of the chair, undid the top button of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves.
A heavy movement flashed at his wrist— Swiss-made, unmistakably deliberate. Not for display.
He sat not in the armchair, but on the carpet, right at the edge of the sofa, as though even here he had more than enough space.
That was how men sat when they had long since stopped needing to prove who was in charge of the room.
You silently placed a glass of whiskey in front of him and remained standing for another moment as he looked up at you.
— You still keep this chair, he said, looking at the dark leather, at the worn corner of the armrest — the same one that had survived too many late-night conversations.
— And you still smoke, you replied. — Some things never change you.
— They do. You just don't always see it at once.
You sat opposite him, tucking one leg beneath yourself.
Your lounge set was soft, black, almost anonymous — the kind of clothing that cost a lot precisely because it knew how to remain quiet instead of shouting about it.On you, it looked almost provocatively simple compared with the way people were used to seeing you in public — sharp silhouettes, familiar coat shoulders, fabrics that held their own shape.
But now, without jewelry and without the mask of evening light, you didn't look smaller.
He was silent for a while, then shifted almost imperceptibly closer, toward the part of the carpet warmed by the floor, where the silence seemed denser.
— Moscow has changed, you said, looking out the window.
Across the glass, the windows of the neighboring building glowed. Down below, a security guard's cigarette flickered, while white headlights crawled along the Garden Ring.
— It used to be more honest. Not better. Not prettier. Just more honest. If someone came with money, you knew it was money. If they came with a threat, you knew it was a threat. Now everyone has learned how to speak properly. Even bastards have learned to wear good shirts.
The corner of Makarov's mouth lifted.
— Then what?You turned toward him.
He nodded slowly, as though acknowledging not an answer, but a diagnosis.
Outside, Moscow breathed evenly and coldly.
The glass facades no longer looked like the future, as they had ten years ago. They had become merely another shell around the old instinct to survive. Somewhere far down the Garden Ring, the lights of cars crawled through the night. Below, the security guards spoke in low voices near the entrance.
And over all of it hung that particular Russian feeling of an ending era — when wealth was still too young to become culture, and too old to remain rebellion.
On the table beside him lay a phone — expensive, thin, anonymous, just like the ones carried by people who had long since stopped believing in miracles and started believing in confidentiality.
Missed messages blinked across the screen. Business contacts. Short sentences without emojis or unnecessary words.
Money. Connections. Obligations. Other people's expectations.
All of it had already learned to speak in the voice of the new century.
But beneath it, you could still hear the old, hoarse bass of the nineties — the same one on which deals, disappearances and reputations had been built.
It was the silence of houses where it was better not to say too much too late, because everything that mattered had already happened.
Makarov ran his fingers over a cigarette without lighting it immediately.
— You've changed, he said at last.
— We've all changed, you replied with a humorless smile.
For a second, something tired flickered in his eyes. Almost human.
Not weakness — merely the brief exhaustion of someone who had spent too long living on the edge of other people's decisions.
Then it disappeared, the way unnecessary movements disappear from people who have long ago learned how to live without them.
You looked at him and thought that he looked exactly like the kind of man whose name, one day, would be spoken on the news as though it already belonged to someone else.
Right now he was here: jacketless, shirt unbuttoned, cigarette between his fingers, elbow resting against his knee — his eyes holding neither a request nor a promise.
Only the habit of being beside you as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
You stayed that way for a long time: him on the carpet, cigarette between his fingers, shirt undone by a single button; you in the armchair, barefoot, carrying the weight of your own world on your shoulders and the calm of someone who had seen too much to be frightened by theatrical darkness.
There had long been no youthful spark between you.
Only a connection that had existed for so long it could no longer be called a romance, a transaction, or a habit.
Something closer to an old loyalty between two people who had learned what danger looked like far too early — and no longer needed beautiful words in order to recognize it.
Because here, he never had to explain himself.You reached for his hair, almost absentmindedly, as though touching something you had known for years.
He closed his eyes for a second.
From the rare opportunity to allow himself to become a little quieter.
Outside, the city dragged its lights across the glass, as though checking its own reflection.And yet the room held something beyond the past.
That same distinctly Russian uncertainty hanging over the country after the 2000s like snow above asphalt: not quite a fall, but no longer a rise; not yet an ending, but no longer a beginning.
Neither of you knew what would happen next to Moscow, to this new, polished, expensive Russia where old names were changing their formats, while old sins were merely changing their packaging.
Neither of you knew what price would be paid to keep it all standing.
Or whether it would stand at all.Makarov opened his eyes and looked up at you.
— Seven years, you whispered, your hand still in his hair.
But you knew he had heard you.
And then you added, looking toward the dark window where only you, him, and Moscow were reflected — Moscow that did not yet know that the things it considered eternal would, seven winters from now, be remembered as someone else's luxury, someone else's blood, and someone else's name.
