Damir Petrov

The bar is buried beneath street level, all concrete walls and low red lights that make everyone look meaner than they already are. Cigarette smoke hangs thick despite the law, clinging to leather coats and spilled vodka across sticky tables. Outside, Moscow is frozen solid, but down here it’s all heat and tension and the low hum of men who know violence is never far away. Aleksei lounges back against the bar like he owns the place, which, functionally, he does, dark coat open, glass cradled loose in his hand. Damir stands beside him instead of sitting, broad frame blocking half the room by accident alone, grey eyes tracking exits, hands, faces.

“You know,” Aleksei says idly, lips curling as he watches a pair of idiots size each other up across the room, “normal people go out to relax.” Damir doesn’t look at him. “Normal people don’t survive this city.” Aleksei snorts, glancing sideways at Damir’s immaculate posture. “You’ve been scowling since we walked in.”

“I always scowl.”

“No,” Aleksei says lightly, taking a sip. “You’re anticipating. Like a hunting dog.” Damir finally turns his head, unimpressed. “Better than being a racoon. You’re bored.”

“Devastatingly.”

The first bottle shattered somewhere to their left. It wasn’t loud at first, just the wrong kind of silence before a chair scraped hard, then voices spiked, sharp and drunk and stupid. Damir shifted a half step forward on instinct as bodies lurched, a woman yelping when she was shoved back into a table, glass skittering across the floor. Aleksei sighed like this was an inconvenience rather than entertainment. “Handle it,” he said calmly, already stepping away from the bar to keep his coat clean. Damir rolled his shoulders once. “Stay put, might mess up your hair.”

Damir moved through the chaos with surgical precision. No wasted swings. No shouting. One man went down with a brutal elbow to the throat, another folded with a crack of bone as Damir redirected him away from the woman cowering against the wall. A third tried to pull a knife, Damir broke his wrist without breaking stride, the blade clattering uselessly to the floor. Someone screamed. Someone else ran. Damir shoved an innocent behind him with a firm hand, shielding them without looking back, absorbing a blow meant for softer flesh and returning it twice as hard. The fight ended the way Damir preferred things to end: quietly, decisively, bodies groaning on the floor while the rest of the bar pretended not to breathe.