He started talking to himself. He cried at night. He stopped eating.
He turned into a shadow of a man, jumpy and hollow-eyed. One day he tried to open his veins with a sharpened spoon. Sever stopped him.
“I told you, neighbor. Death has to be earned,” he said, taking the spoon away. “And you haven’t paid your debt yet.”
He wouldn’t let him die. Because his revenge still wasn’t finished. He didn’t just want to break him.
He wanted to remake him. To force real remorse out of him.
And that, according to the legend, was the hardest part of the plan. Two more years passed. Dmitry Baskakov, once City Wolf, no longer existed.
In his place there was a creature in the cell who referred to himself only as Neighbor. He had lost track of time. He had nearly forgotten how to speak. He moved on command and lived in a permanent fog of fear and Mike Krug songs.
Sasha Sever had gotten what he wanted. He had erased his enemy’s identity. But that was only phase one.
One day Sever changed the routine. He stopped singing. Stopped telling stories.
He just sat in silence. For a whole week he didn’t say a word, only watched Neighbor with those cold eyes. That silence was worse than the songs, worse than the nighttime talks.
Neighbor, used to constant pressure, started to come apart under the quiet. He didn’t know what was coming next. He waited for some new turn of the screw.
On the seventh day he couldn’t take it anymore. “Alexander,” he finally whispered, speaking to Sever after a long silence. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”
Sever slowly looked up. “What’s left to say, Neighbor? I’ve told you everything.
Now it’s your turn.” “My turn?” the man asked.
“Tell me,” Sever said quietly. “Not how you killed him. I know that.
Tell me what you thought. What you felt. That night. And after. Tell me the truth.”
And that began a new circle of hell.
A forced confession. Every day Sever made Neighbor remember and talk. He became a merciless amateur shrink, opening infected wounds in the man’s soul with a crowbar instead of a scalpel.
At first Neighbor lied. Dodged. Blamed Moose. Blamed circumstance.
But Sever caught every false note. “No,” he’d say, shaking his head. “That’s not it.
You’re lying. To me and to yourself. Start over.” He made him retell that night dozens, then hundreds of times.
Demanding every detail. What did he think when he saw fear in Krug’s wife’s eyes? What did he feel when he heard the mother-in-law scream?
What went through his mind when they ran, leaving a dying man behind? It was worse than physical pain. Neighbor screamed, cried, shook, lost control.
But Sever never let up. “Again. Louder. Make me believe you.”
Bit by bit, he stripped away every layer of cynicism, cruelty, and self-justification. He forced the man to look straight into his own conscience. And what Neighbor saw there was ugly.
Not a wolf. Not a tough guy. Just a small, frightened, worthless thug who had destroyed a family for money, swagger, and nothing at all. The turning point came after months of this.
One night Neighbor woke up screaming. He’d had a dream. He was back in Krug’s house.
But this time he wasn’t seeing it through his own eyes. He was seeing it through Mike’s. He felt the pain. The panic.
The love for his family he had tried to protect. He sat up on the bunk, drenched in sweat. And he cried.
But these weren’t tears of fear or self-pity. They were tears of remorse. Real, deep, overwhelming remorse.
“I get it,” he whispered, looking at Sever, who as always was awake and watching. “I get it now.
God, what did I do?”
