Chapter 5: First Contact
The file on Ru Yong-Jin was thinner than Zykin expected. He’d read it twice already in his study, the sharp smell of ink and old paper failing to mask the deeper scent of disappointment. Not in the quality of the work—Anton’s men were thorough—but in the mundane facts of a life not yet lived for long in his city. A one-year lease on a small apartment in a bland, post-Soviet block. Employment records from the garage, ‘Arshin Motors.’ A list of groceries purchased, heavy on instant noodles and kimchi. No known associations, no vices, no lovers. A ghost who smiled too much.
The photo clipped to the front was the problem. It was grainy, taken from across the street with a long lens. Yong-Jin was leaning against a battered Lada, head thrown back in laughter, a smudge of grease on his cheek. He looked alive. Vibrant. Untouchable. It made the clinical text beneath it seem like a lie.
Zykin slid the file into his desk drawer and stood. He couldn’t sit any longer. The memory of the dream, of the crushing heat and the yielding body, was a phantom limb. He needed to see the reality. To calibrate the fantasy against the man.
The Mercedes glided to a stop half a block down from Arshin Motors, tucked behind a delivery van. The auto shop was a low-slung concrete bunker stained with decades of grime and exhaust. One of the large rolling doors was open, spilling a rectangle of sickly fluorescent light onto the cracked asphalt. The rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk of an impact wrench echoed into the street.
And there he was.
Yong-Jin was bent over the engine bay of a silver Volkswagen, his back to the street. He wore dark blue coveralls, unzipped to the waist, revealing a plain grey t-shirt beneath. The fabric clung to the damp sweat on his spine. As Zykin watched, Yong-Jin straightened up, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a new dark streak above his eyebrow. He said something over his shoulder, his voice lost in the garage’s echo.
A larger man in similar coveralls—Oleg, according to the file, the shop foreman—ambled over, holding two chipped mugs. He handed one to Yong-Jin.
“Thanks,” Yong-Jin said, his accented Russian clear even from the distance. He took a sip and grimaced.
Oleg chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. “Still not used to proper tea?”
“This is not tea. This is tar,” Yong-Jin said, but he was smiling. “In Seoul, we have barley tea. Cold. Sweet. It does not taste like… engine oil.”
“This is Russian tea. Builds character.” Oleg clapped him on the shoulder, a gesture that made Zykin’s jaw tighten. “Besides, you need something strong. That Golf’s timing belt is fucked. Again. You’re too gentle with it.”
“I am precise,” Yong-Jin corrected, his nose wrinkling. “You are like a bear with a wrench.”
“And cars fear the bear!” Oleg laughed again, draining his mug. “You finish the belt. I go smoke.”
As Oleg wandered toward the open door, lighting a cigarette, Yong-Jin turned back to the car. He set his mug on the fender and leaned into the engine, his entire focus narrowing to the mechanical puzzle before him. His small, competent hands moved with a quick, certain grace, selecting tools from the cart beside him without looking. The muscles in his forearms corded with the effort of loosening a stubborn bolt.
Zykin’s fingers, resting on the steering wheel, curled into his palms. He could imagine the warmth of that skin under his own hands, the texture of grease and soap. He could picture wrapping his fingers around one of those wrists, feeling the delicate bones, seeing the contrast of his own pale, scarred skin against Yong-Jin’s. The image was so vivid his breath hitched.
This was different from the dream. This was sharper. More maddening. Here was the real man, in his element, utterly unaware of the monstrous want he’d spawned half a city away. The ordinary beauty of it—the concentration on his face, the shift of his shoulders as he worked—was a new kind of torture.
Oleg finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into the gutter. He called something into the garage, and Yong-Jin responded, his voice bright and threaded with a laugh. He said something else, and Oleg barked out a loud, genuine guffaw.
“You’re fucking crazy, Jin,” Oleg said, shaking his head as he walked back inside. “But okay, tomorrow. My wife’s pelmeni against your… what was it?”
“Kimchi-jjigae,” Yong-Jin called back, still half-buried in the engine. “You will lose.”
“We’ll see, little man.”
The casual intimacy of it was a physical blow. The shared tea. The nickname. The planned meal. A jealousy, cold and irrational, flooded Zykin’s veins. This man, this Oleg, got to spend his days in that greasy light, hearing that laugh, earning that smile. He got to clap that shoulder. He got to make plans.
Zykin’s vision tunneled. The sounds of the street faded. There was only the figure in the garage, now humming something under his breath as he worked, a faint, unfamiliar tune. Yong-Jin pulled a rag from his pocket and began to clean his hands, still humming, wiping each finger with a careful attention that felt obscenely intimate.
He turned, leaning his hips against the car’s frame, surveying his work with a satisfied nod. The fluorescent light caught the line of his throat, the dip of his collarbone above the t-shirt. He raised the rag to wipe the sweat from his neck, exposing a strip of flat stomach.
In the Mercedes, Zykin was perfectly still. A predator downwind. Every instinct screamed to get out, to cross the asphalt, to shatter that peaceful concentration and make those dark, phonex-shaped eyes widen with a different kind of awareness. To see the smile vanish, replaced by the dawning knowledge of who was watching, and what he wanted.
But he didn’t move. He let the moment stretch, a wire pulled taut.
Yong-Jin finished wiping his neck, tossed the rag onto the tool cart, and bent to gather some dropped tools. As he straightened, his gaze swept idly over the street. It passed over the delivery van, over the parked cars, and drifted across the windshield of the black Mercedes.
He paused. For a fraction of a second, his eyes seemed to catch the tinted glass. A faint, puzzled line appeared between his brows.
He couldn’t see in. Zykin knew that. The glass was a one-way mirror, a vault. But Yong-Jin stared, his head tilted slightly, as if sensing a pressure change in the air.
Zykin held his breath. He felt a strange, violent hope that Yong-Jin could see him. That he would recognize the shape of his obsession even through the darkness.
Then Oleg yelled from inside the shop, breaking the spell. Yong-Jin blinked, shook his head with a small, self-deprecating smile, and turned back to the garage, the moment of odd awareness forgotten.
The tension snapped, leaving a vacuum.
Zykin exhaled slowly, the air leaving his lungs in a controlled stream. The smile was back on Yong-Jin’s face as he said something to Oleg, the easy camaraderie returned. The world had righted itself, oblivious.
He watched Yong-Jin zip up his coveralls, his movements efficient and final. The shift was ending.
It was time.
Zykin reached for his phone, his movements deliberate. He didn’t dial. He simply pressed a single speed-dial button and lifted the phone to his ear, his eyes never leaving the man in the garage.
Anton answered on the first ring. “Yes, boss?”
“The car,” Zykin said, his voice low and utterly calm. “The white Lada he’s working on. I want it to break down. Tomorrow. On his way home. Somewhere quiet.”
There was the briefest pause, a beat of understanding. “Understood. A clean failure. Nothing traceable.”
“And Anton,” Zykin added, watching as Yong-Jin shrugged out of his coveralls, revealing the simple t-shirt and jeans beneath. “I will be the one who stops to help.”
He ended the call and dropped the phone onto the passenger seat. Inside the garage, Yong-Jin slung a worn backpack over his shoulder and waved goodbye to Oleg, heading for the bus stop at the corner.
Zykin waited until Yong-Jin was seated on the bench, bathed in the orange glow of a streetlight, before he started the Mercedes’s engine. The soft purr was swallowed by the city’s noise.
Tomorrow, then. The distance between them would close from half a block to the space inside a car. The fantasy would meet the road. And the hunt would move from watching to the touch of metal, the smell of gasoline, and the first, real words spoken between them.
He pulled away from the curb, his gaze lingering on the receding figure until it was swallowed by the night.