He dropped to his knees before Sever. “Kill me, Alexander,” he sobbed.
“Please. I can’t live with this. Just kill me.”
Sever studied him for a long moment. There was no sympathy in his face. No satisfaction either. Just a cold reading of the facts.
The experiment was over. The patient had been cured. “I told you, Neighbor,” he said quietly.
“Death is a reward. And you still haven’t earned it. Your punishment is just starting.
Now you live with it. Every day. Until the end.”
From that day on, the torment changed. Sever stopped talking to him much at all. He simply existed nearby, a living reminder of the man’s guilt. And Neighbor changed.
He became almost saintly in that hell. He prayed all day. He carved a crooked little icon from wood and prayed in front of it.
He asked forgiveness. Not from God. Not from Sever.
From the man he had killed. He found his punishment not in the outside world, but inside himself.
And that punishment was for life. No parole. No appeal. Sasha Sever had taken revenge.
He hadn’t just destroyed the man who killed his friend. He had forced him to be born again. Born into permanent moral pain.
And in the legend, that was the most terrible and most complete revenge the underworld could imagine. Sasha Sever believed his revenge was finished. The shooters were punished, the man who gave the order was supposedly suffering in a private hell of remorse—but the criminal world, like politics, doesn’t like loose ends.
And one small detail, one thread from the past, kept bothering him. Protection. That same protection inside the local organized-crime unit that had let Wolf’s crew operate so freely in town.
Sever wasn’t the kind of man, at least in stories, who left business unfinished. He understood that the street thugs had only been tools. The man who put those tools in their hands and pointed them at the target was just as guilty—maybe more so.
And that man was still free. From his cell in Black Eagle, Sever tugged again on the strands of his web. Archimedes and his people got a new assignment.
Find the cop who had been backing Wolf. That was harder than finding gangsters. Law enforcement is a closed world, and it knows how to keep its dirty secrets.
But there are always leaks. Always people willing to talk for money or out of old grudges. The search took almost a year.
Archimedes’ people collected rumors, compared notes, bribed, threatened. Eventually they found a trail. It led to the top of the city’s organized-crime unit.
To Colonel Igor Anikeev. A man with a spotless public reputation, medals, commendations. A hero in the war on crime—and, according to the legend, one of its conductors.
The story says Anikeev had long used his office to control several gangs, including Wolf’s. He used them to squeeze out rivals, seize businesses, and handle dirty work. In return, he gave them protection.
But why would he want Krug dead? The singer wasn’t a businessman or a gangster. And here the legend adds another twist.
Supposedly Krug, who knew many underworld figures including Sever, had recently started building his own fund. Not a mob fund—his own. Money meant to help prisoners’ families and support young working-class talent.
And that fund was becoming a real force, outside the control of both gangsters and crooked cops. Anikeev smelled money and wanted control of it. Through Wolf, he offered Krug protection.
Krug, true to the story, turned him down flat. In plain language. And that signed his death warrant.
Anikeev decided not just to punish him, but to do it in a way that would send a message—using reckless young thugs, then passing it off as a home invasion.
When that information reached Sasha Sever in a coded note, he sat still for a long time. The picture had come together. And it was ugly in the most ordinary way.
His friend hadn’t been killed over honor or revenge. He’d been killed over greed. Plain, dirty greed. And not by a gangster.
By a man in uniform who was supposed to protect him. Compared with that, what he’d done to Wolf felt almost small. The anger that rose in him now was something else entirely. Reaching a serving police colonel from a prison cell should have been impossible.
But in legends like this, nothing is impossible for a man like Sasha Sever. He started a new game, more complicated and more dangerous than the first. The board was the whole country.
The pieces were crime bosses, crooked officials, journalists for hire, and former colleagues of Anikeev. The first move was dirt. Archimedes’ people started digging into Anikeev.
Every old sin. Every case he’d buried. Every business he’d squeezed. All of it went into a thick file. The second move was a media leak.
Through a well-known journalist in the capital—one who specialized in crime reporting and owed favors to the underworld—information started trickling into the press. First hints, then more direct claims. That Krug’s murder wasn’t as simple as it looked.
That powerful men in uniform had stood behind Wolf’s crew. Anikeev got nervous. He could feel the ground shifting.
He made mistakes. Tried to pressure the reporter. Tried threats. But the man had protection of his own. Then Sever made the third and decisive move.
He used his connections in the highest criminal circles in the capital. He sent the file on Anikeev to a very influential figure in government who had his own score to settle with Interior Ministry leadership. And then, the legend says, the machinery of state justice began to move…
