She was running him. He was running her. She figured it out first. He planned on that.Darya Melnik is very good at her job. Three years with the FSB in Moscow have made her precise, controlled, and impossible to surprise. When she is assigned to get close to Alexei Sorokin, a journalist suspected of passing intelligence to Ukrainian sources, she approaches it the way she approaches everything. Methodically. Without sentiment.Then November becomes December. December becomes ...

She is a Russian woman married to a Ukrainian soldier. She loves her husband. She would do anything to protect him.When an FSB operative comes looking for information her husband carries, she understands immediately what is being asked of her. Not for her husband's secrets. For something else entirely.This is not a story about betrayal. It is a story about what a woman will sacrifice when the people she loves have run out of options. About the specific cost of loyalty when ...

She has known since October.Her husband is at the front. She has been sitting with what she knows for two months, in their apartment in Dnipro, while he prepares to tell her something she already knows, from a trench somewhere she cannot picture.This is a story told in two timelines. Her side of the line and his. The knowing and the not yet knowing. The specific weight of a secret that only one person is carrying and the moment that weight finally shifts.Short. Lite...

Darya has hated Aleksei Marchenko for six months.He is always late. Always smiling like he knows something about you that you have not said out loud. Always looking at her like she is a puzzle he has already solved.Then the sirens start. The lights go out. And they end up in a basement together with two candles and nowhere to go.This is not a story about the war.It is a story about what happens when you finally stop hiding.A slow burn romance set in ...

A husband in Odessa finds out his wife is having an affair.He does not confront her. He does not leave. He does not do what men in stories usually do when they find out.What he does instead is harder to name and harder to look away from. This is a story about a man watching something he cannot stop, and what that watching reveals about love, possession, and the specific ways a marriage can be both broken and intact at the same time.Short. Dark. Morally complex. No c...

One night on the western border of Soviet Belarus, a knock at the door turns into a gunshot – and eight‑year‑old Vera loses her home, her family and even her name. Torn from her Polish‑Belarusian village and sent to a Siberian orphanage, she is told to forget who she was.«Vera. Without Borders» is a historical novel based on real events, following one woman from the Belarusian borderlands through Siberia, the Caucasus and the Kazakh steppe in the shadow of World War II. The landsca...