PETROV

The portrait

Twenty-seven; he looks older in the eyes and younger in the face. Blond hair, almost white; gray eyes, dirty ice. Tattoos climbing his arms and showing at his neck: Cyrillic letters, a cupola, something that could be a date or a sentence. He's been using dead men's names for so long that sometimes he has to make an effort to remember which one is his.

The soul

This man was manufactured. They found him at fourteen and built him from the inside, piece by piece; killing he learned later. Those Russian winters — a room with no heat, a knife assembled and taken apart in the dark until he could do it in his sleep — programmed him not to shake, and he hasn't shaken since, not even when he should have. He lives with toska, that bottomless Russian melancholy, and with an old voice that doesn't shout: it reasons. He is someone else's property, and he knows it. The only war he ever chose was against the needle and its whole chemical family, and that one, the one he won, is the most honest he's ever fought.

The appeal

Danger with beauty. A predator of spare movements and ice-colored eyes who hides, underneath, a capacity for tenderness more frightening than his aim. Desirable the way things that could kill you are. And when, against all his training, he lets himself be touched, he gives up control with a surrender no owner ever taught him and none of them managed to buy.

Light and shadow