Chapter Text
Learned cruelty is worse than innate cruelty.
Innate cruelty is a defect of nature, something that comes with a person’s genes and shapes their personality from childhood. A person born cruel does not hesitate, does not doubt, does not reflect. They do not realize they are doing something wrong because, to them, it is natural.
Learned cruelty is different.
It does not come all at once. At first, it is just a way to survive. It grows inside you slowly, sinks under your skin, and then you can no longer separate it from yourself. It is not a choice — it is an instinct. Either you learn to be stronger, or you become the one who gets trampled.
Igor had known this since childhood.
His father never hit right away. First, he would go silent. He would look at him from under his brow, exhale through his teeth, clench his fists so tightly that his knuckles turned white. And then the rage would come. Loud voices, blows, his mother’s screams, his own fear. He would shrink into a corner, squeeze his eyes shut, make himself small, hoping that if he hid, if he held his breath, if he became invisible, maybe this time it would pass.
But it never did.
Sooner or later, his father would notice him. And then it would get even worse.
His mother never left. She pressed her lips together and said that children should not be raised without a father. That a man in the house was the most important thing. That one had to endure.
So he endured.
Until, at fourteen, he came home and saw his mother with a split lip.
And picked up a stool.
He did not remember how it happened. Only the deep, dark rage spreading inside him and the crunch of wood as he brought the stool down on his father’s back. He raised it again, but his mother screamed.
That was the first time he had done something against violence.
And the last.
His father left that same evening, cursing them both. But then, a few days later, he returned — sober, calm, more composed than Igor had ever seen him. He said this could not go on, that he was leaving for good.
His mother cried.
And Igor knew: this was a good thing.
But it did not make life any easier.
His mother withdrew. She barely spoke to him, as if she blamed him for everything. And two years later, she left to be with his father.
At sixteen, he was alone in Moscow.
At twenty-four, he was expelled from the engineering university.
The only one of his brothers who had even gotten in, he had tried to hold on until the very end. He took on part-time jobs, slept three to four hours a night, barely kept up with classes. But when his grandmother got sick, there was no choice left. She sent him money for a ticket and said:
“Come, Igor. If not now, then it will be too late.”
When he landed in New York at twenty-five, nothing was like it was in the movies.
The skyscrapers were there, but they loomed somewhere in the distance, like a picture from another life. Freedom existed, but it was a luxury he could not afford.
He was not just nobody — he was someone who did not even get noticed.
An undocumented migrant. A Russian who had no claim to anything in this country.
In a world where some were born in high-rise apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and others in crumbling Soviet flats with cockroaches, he was the one standing at the door of the first, listening to them discuss their investments.
A month later, he met Ivan Zakharov in some bar. The guy was drunk, underage, and way too loud. He argued with security, waved his arms, promised that his father would fire everyone.
Igor had no intention of getting involved, but when the kid stumbled into the street and nearly got hit by a car, he caught him. Simply because he could not watch another Russian-speaking boy walk straight to his potential death.
The next morning, Ivan was in no state for conversation, but a week later, the Zakharovs found Igor themselves.
They paid well, and he did not ask questions.
Working for the Zakharovs meant being the kind of person they themselves refused to be.
The one they could dump all the dirty work on.
The one who would take the fall for their mistakes because they did not want to get their hands dirty. The one who broke people if they owed money, collected debts when negotiations failed, handled the problems that rich Russians did not want to handle themselves.
He was at the bottom of the food chain.
But at least now he had a piece of paper that gave him the right to live in this country. Now, he was not just nobody — he was Mr. Igor Krupin.
Igor did not think of himself as a bad person.
He knew he did things that others would call wrong. But he also knew that if not him, then someone else would do them.
The people whose fingers he broke, whose debts he collected, were not saints. They took money they never intended to return, played games they could not win, thought they were smarter than the system.
Igor just did his job.
He liked to think he felt nothing.
He had long since stopped being afraid, barely felt pity, almost never regretted anything.
And then his grandmother got worse.
He could not quit his job — but he also could not leave her alone.
So he just started working more.
By day — for the Zakharovs. By night — for her.
He did not remember the last time he had slept properly. The last time his back did not hurt.
Some mornings, he simply could not straighten up. He would fall onto the bed, grit his teeth, breathe deep until his body obeyed him again.
The Zakharovs paid well, but not enough to save his grandmother.
And then she died.
And he was completely alone.
And if before, he had done his job simply because he had to, now… now, he did not know why he did anything at all.
But he kept going.
Because if he stopped, all that would be left was emptiness.