Chapter Text
Aleksander Morozova is a powerful man. Alina Starkov is fully aware of this fact. But even he is not above the perfectly controlled chaos of the Os Alta Underground. At least, that’s what she tells herself, as her train lurches out from the station two storeys underground, burrowing it’s way from the rows of stylish flats and gardens of the inner city and towards the airport, where Mal must be waiting even now, tickets in one hand and a battered duffel in the other. It was a habit they’d formed young, moving from foster home to foster home, living with a packed bag tucked neatly under the bed.
She concentrates on the bag on her lap now, as the train rattles onward, running her fingers in nervous circles over the worn canvas. Inside is her laptop, a toothbrush, two changes of clothes. All the cash she could find in the flat another man had paid for. She’d left the gifts behind. The new shoes, the dresses, the glittering watch worth twice the student debt he’d waved away the day after they met.
He might be powerful, and he might be wealthy beyond imagining, but he’s just a man. Alina reminds herself of this, as the redhead sitting across the aisle stares a little too long, and the almost-familiar woman by the door glances her way, all too casual. Morozova is just a man. He can’t stop trains.
Shadows play on the floor, light appearing and disappearing in patches, as the train weaves it’s way between tunnels and open air. One moment she’s looking out the window over red-roofed houses, the next there is nothing but black. Alina can’t help but hold her breath in the tunnels. There’s something about the dark - the unpredictability of shadows - that is all too familiar.
“Excuse me, are you alright?”
The voice jolts Alina out of her thoughts, and she blames exhaustion for the way she jumps. It’s certainly not paranoia.
The young woman looks apologetic, sending Alina a sympathetic smile from under her oversized floppy sunhat. She must be a tourist, breaking the unspoken rule of the underground: no talking on the train. Alina swallows hard and tries to return the smile, keenly aware that she hasn’t slept since the day before yesterday, the shadows under her eyes almost bruise like.
“Just dozing off. Long day.”
“Oh, sorry.” The tourist doesn’t look like she believes it, her eyes flicking towards Alina’s shaking hands, clutching the bag in her lap just a little too tightly.
Alina pointedly pulls out her headphones, letting her iPod shuffle through songs she barely hears. The tourist gets the hint, turning back to her own phone.
Alina leans back, trying to adopt a casual expression. She stares at the map across the aisle, counting the stops as they fly by. Ten to the airport. Nine. Eight. Seven. Across the aisle the redhead sits perfectly still, staring down at his book. He hasn’t turned a page since she boarded.
They are not watching her, Alina tells herself. She is less than five stops away now, just five brief stops from Mal and freedom. They will fly away, to somewhere safe and warm, where she will forget the man who has offered her the world, and who could easily kill her for throwing it away.
They enter another tunnel, vast and dark. And then, one by one, the other passengers begin to move, to whisper, rising to mutters. That’s when she takes the headphones off, and realizes they’re slowing down.
Across the aisle, the redhead avoids her gaze.
Alina takes a deep breath, pulse pounding in her ears, nails digging into her palms and leaving little pink half circles of worry behind. For a brief moment she wills a maintenance announcement to play, a calm pre-recorded apology for the rare delay. It doesn’t come.
“Does this happen often?” the tourist girl leans over, poking her head into Alina’s space, eyes wide with curiosity. Around them, cell phones are emerging, as other passengers attempt calls.
“I don’t know.” Alina says. Her voice sounds wooden, even to her.
Behind her, a businessman mutters about lack of service. A baby starts crying in another car, the sound filtering in through the cracked windows, thin and frail. Teenagers kneel on seats, trying to peer out into the dark.
Only Alina is still in the growing confusion. She can see them now, clear of her own hopeful delusion. The woman by the door, sending off a text even as the rest of the train is cut off from the network. The redhead across from her, some sort of etheralki no doubt, holding the train in place with a clenched fist.
Morozova would call them bodyguards, security for his most valuable asset. But Alina knows them for what they are now, and the thought sends shivers down her spine.
Mobsters. Thieves. Killers. Morozova’s Grisha.
Mal had shown her the files last night. Names and pictures, news articles and police reports. Crimes that should have been reported. Numbers that didn’t add up. People who should not be dead. People who had gotten in the way.
She tastes blood. She’s bitten through the inside of her lip. Lips that had kissed him, for the first time, only the night before.
She had wanted him. Trusted him. And then she’d seen the blood dripping from his hands, and she’d run from him.
She had been foolish to think he wouldn’t take chase.
The phone in Alina’s hand buzzes the same time the doors slide open with a hiss, letting in cold, forgotten air. The message is a command in four simple words.
This is your stop.
He doesn’t sign. He doesn’t have to. Alina gives the poor tourist girl a soft smile as she stands, slinging her runaway bag over her shoulder. And then, before anyone can stop her, she steps through the train doors and out into the dark.
...
“Hello Alina.” She hears his voice first, as the train whizzes away behind her, swallowed up by the dark. It takes most of the light with it, leaving the two of them wreathed in shadow.
This is how he likes it, surrounded by darkness.
“Sit,” he orders, stepping forward so his outline becomes flesh and bone, much too close.
There are two folding chairs waiting on the abandoned station platform. Alina has only heard of places like this, forgotten or hidden away, but has never seen one. There’s a card table set up between the seats, with a bottle of kvass, two glasses, and a softly glowing tablet, the only visible light source in this gloomy place. It would almost be romantic, all this mystery and attention, had she not seen the blood on this man’s pale hands only the night before.
Alina sits, happy to place something concrete between them, folding herself into the chair even as he leans back and spreads out, at perfect calculated ease.
A flick of her fingers under the table confirms the worst of her fears. They’re too far underground for her to summon sunlight. The soft glow of the tablet wavers at her call, nothing else. The man they call Darkling smirks, and at his command a few dusty lightbulbs flicker to life on the walls, pushing his shadows back. Ivan must be lurking about somewhere, out of sight.
“You betrayed me,” he says, voice soft.
She can see his face clearly now, and Alina’s breath catches in her throat. It’s not fair, that pull he has on her, even now. Electric and calming all at once, like she’s just remembered how to breath. She hates herself for the sudden desire to measure up to his gaze, to prove herself.
To apologize.
She forces her face into a scoff instead, reminding herself that she is in the right this time. “You lied to me.”
“I said I wanted to build a new world with you. That hasn’t changed.”
He’d not mentioned the graves piled up in the foundation. Alina bites her lip. He’s dangerous, she can’t let that voice of his - so reasonable, so reassuring, like steel wrapped in silk - make her forget.
“You left a few details out,” she bites out.
He doesn’t argue. Instead, he taps the tablet in front of him with a fingertip, scrolling over a screen she can’t see.
“Malyen Oretsev,” he reads the name aloud, “caucasian male, 26 years of age, 6.2, approximately 180 pounds, wears bad band shirts, wanted under charges of desertion and abandoning his post only a month ago.” His eyes flick up to meet Alina’s, “child of the foster system, then ward of the state before joining the army. Current residence is 1237 Kermazin, outer Os Alta.” He smiled, almost kind, and entirely patronizing, sliding the tablet across the table to lie face up in front of Alina.
“Some details you failed to mention,” he says. And this time, the words come with a bite.
The screen displays a series of photos, and Alina scrolls through them with a growing sense of dread. A formal shot of Mal facing the camera in his uniform for his military ID. A paparazzi style shot of him moving into the Kermazin flat. Here he was catching the train, buying groceries, standing on the street staring after a car. That was the day he’d first spotted her - their eyes meeting through tinted glass for the first time in five years.
Finally the two of them last night, outside the theatre…
Morozova’s eyes are hard this time, as Alina looked up from the photo of herself wrapped up in another man’s arms.
“What do you want?” she asked, frightened at how small her voice sounded, echoing back at her from the shadows.
A train passes, throwing noise and light their way, catching Alina’s hair in it’s breeze and throwing it over her shoulders. For a brief moment Morozova’s face is lit in a sort of halo, and she sees him smile at the victory, all teeth and glittering eyes.
Then the train is gone, and he’s pouring himself a glass of kvass, surrounded by shadow once again. He takes a sip, stretching out the silence before answering her question.
“I want to tear this world apart, Alina Starkov, and to build a new one in it’s place. Better, stronger, where my people will prosper. And I want you at my side while I do it.” A parody of his promise, once whispered amid candlelight and champagne, now a threat hissed over kvass in the dark.
“I want you.” He says, as simply as he might observe that her dress is blue.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I’m a patient man, Alina,” he smiles at her, almost sad, “I can wait.”
She looks down, and Mal’s face stares up at her, laughing with her. Open and vulnerable. Her words from that first meeting flashing through her mind.
He owns us all.
The man they call The Darkling smiles, as though he knows what she’s thinking.
“All I want right now, is for you to phone your little boyfriend and tell him plans have changed. Tell him to get on a plane and fly far away where I will never have to find him,” he says, voice soft, even as he delivers a threat, “And then I want to put this whole business behind us, and go home.”
Home. The flat he’d bought and paid for, with a Grisha guard standing at the door. A gilded cage.
But Mal - beautiful, innocent Mal whose only crime was being her friend - at least Mal could be free.
Alina takes the slim phone he slides across the table and dials.