Daria Nikolaevna

Part 2 Chapter 5 I struggled to concentrate in all my lectures the next morning. Something had shifted inside me. Fear was in the background all the time, but I had woken to Luba’s soft golden eyes. And since then I had not been able to shift them. Weirdly I ran into her boyfriend, Piotr, who was studying in a different department, coming down the corridor. As he walked past, I did not know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of him fucking her up the arse. I caught myself with this new language in my brain, but then my heart went wild as I remembered Luba’s tears when Ludmilla had checked whether she had broken up with him. Did she love him? Was that jealousy? ...

VOLUME 1: TOMSK Chapter 1 It was so cold after the heat of the class. The cold that freezes your breath, stifles your nostrils and turns the world black and white. The sort of cold you never wait around in for long, unless instructed to. I had been told to wait. “The corner of Nikitina and Kyevskaya after your lecture,” the note said. I was not just cold but scared, standing there in the November dark, not knowing what to expect, but knowing enough that I could not ignore the instruction. I could feel all the suppleness in my body drain away as the ice worked its way under my coat and into my boots, just as a black Volga pulled up belching smoke and steam, its tyre chains grinding on the ice covered road, breaking the cocoon of silent struggle that real cold creates one. ...