Chapter 1: The Serpent’s Inspection
The air at the checkpoint tasted of diesel, damp earth, and a sharper, coppery hint of fear. Vanja held it in her lungs, still and cold, as the Serbian police officer—a boy really, with acne on his chin and a grip too tight on his rifle—stared at her Swiss passport like it was a puzzle written in alien script.
Behind him, the barriers of sandbags and razor wire cut a jagged line across the road. Podujevo, 1997. The words were a drumbeat in her skull, a reality she still couldn’t touch without feeling the world tilt. One moment she’d been in her Basel apartment, the scent of fresh coffee and printed newspapers, the next… this. The grey sludge of late winter, the uniform gloom, the watchful, hostile eyes.
“Basel,” the young officer said, struggling with the pronunciation. He looked up at her, his gaze skittering from her face down her body, taking in the anachronistic quality of her jeans and jacket, the confidence of her posture that felt like a brittle shell. “Why are you here?”
“I am a journalist,” Vanja said, keeping her voice low, melodic, effortlessly switching to the Belgrade-accented Serbian that felt like a childhood ghost on her tongue. “I am here to see. To write.”
He blinked, disarmed by the familiar language from a foreign document. He was out of his depth. He turned and called out, “Captain!”
He emerged from a low concrete bunker beside the road, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves. Captain Marko Stojanovic was a different creature entirely. Tall, his shoulders filling his dark police coat, he moved with a predator’s economical grace. His hair was shorn close to the skull, his face all hard planes and a clean, brutal symmetry. Handsome, in the way a honed blade is handsome. His blue eyes scanned the scene, dismissed the young officer, and settled on her.
They didn’t roam her body. They dissected it, then pinned her in place. He took the passport without a word.
The silence stretched, broken only by the distant cry of a crow. His gloved fingers, thick and strong, slowly turned the pages. The burgundy cover, the gold Swiss cross. He stopped at her photo. Looked up. Looked down. The cold in his eyes was absolute.
“Vanja Vranic,” he said. His voice was a low baritone, weathered by cigarettes and command. “Place of birth. Belgrade.”
“Yes.”
“Swiss citizen.” A statement, dripping with implication.
“Yes.”
He snapped the passport closed but didn’t hand it back. He took a step closer. Vanja forced herself not to retreat. She could smell him now—stale tobacco, wool, and beneath it, the clean, cold scent of gun oil.
“A Serbian woman. With a Swiss passport. In Podujevo.” He let each phrase hang. “A journalist. Here to write.” He smiled. It didn’t touch his eyes. “What will you write, Miss Vranic? Fairy tales? Or are you here to collect other stories? Stories for other audiences?”
The threat was woven into the question, silken and sharp. She knew the stories. The fate of Serbs who were deemed too sympathetic, too curious, too connected to the Albanians. They were traitors. And traitors were dealt with. Disgrace, imprisonment, or a quiet disappearance into the gulag of rumour.
She met his gaze, letting a flicker of defiance—the only weapon she had—show in her golden-green eyes. “I write the truth as I see it, Captain. I’m yet to meet an Albanian, honestly, so I’m not sure what you are accusing me of.”
For a fraction of a second, his cold composure cracked. His eyebrows, pale and faint, lifted almost imperceptibly. A woman, speaking back. Not pleading, not flirting, not cowering. Correcting him. The young officer holding her car’s door open stiffened, his knuckles whitening on the metal.
Stojanovic’s smile vanished. The air grew tighter. “You are clever. You speak our language very well. Too well, perhaps. You have the look of someone… adaptable.” His gaze swept over her features, the sharp cheekbones, the full mouth, the heritage that was purposefully vague. “That is a dangerous quality to have here.”
“I am only here to observe,” she repeated, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“Observation is a form of participation,” he said softly. He leaned in, closer than was necessary. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the pale stubble on his jaw. “This is not Basel. There is no neutrality here. You are on one side, or you are in the way. Your passport,” he tapped it against his palm, “puts you in the way. It makes me wonder who you really observe for.”
He was building a box around her, with logic and suspicion as the walls. She had to shift the ground. “My family is in Belgrade, Captain. My loyalty is not in question. Unless asking questions itself is now a crime?”
It was a risk. A direct challenge. His eyes narrowed, and for a terrifying moment, she thought he would order her dragged from the car. Instead, he let out a short, humourless breath that fogged in the cold air.
“Your family is in Belgrade. Good. You will remember them. It will help you make… prudent choices.” He finally extended the passport. She reached for it, but he didn’t let go immediately. His gloved fingers brushed against hers, a cold, deliberate contact. “You will report to the police station in the town center tomorrow. At ten. To register your presence. And to discuss the parameters of your… observation.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a leash.
“Of course,” she said, retrieving the document.
He stepped back, gave her car—a nondescript, dusty local sedan she’d acquired with difficulty—a final dismissive glance. “Proceed.”
The young officer hastily waved her through. As she drove past the razor wire, the pressure in her chest didn’t ease. In the rearview mirror, she saw Captain Stojanovic still standing in the road, watching her car shrink into the distance, a fixed and dark point in the gloom.
She let out a shaking breath, her hands clammy on the wheel. The confrontation had been worse, more intimate, than she’d imagined. He wasn’t just suspicious; he was intelligent. He saw the contradictions she embodied. And he was interested.
Podujevo unfolded before her—a landscape of low, weary buildings, pockmarked walls, and streets where people moved quickly, heads down. The tension was a live wire humming just beneath the surface of everything. She had a name, a lead on a potential source, an Albanian teacher who might speak to her. But now, that mission was shadowed.
She had attracted the attention of the serpent. And he would be waiting for her tomorrow. The question wasn’t just what she would write anymore. It was whether her words, her very identity, would become evidence against her in a place where the law was whatever men like Marko Stojanovic decided it was.
She needed to find her contact. Tonight. Before her movements were officially documented, before the leash tightened. Before the captain decided that a woman who talked back and looked like she could belong anywhere was too dangerous to simply watch.
The grey streets of Podujevo blurred past her windows, a monochrome film reel of hardship. She drove aimlessly for a few blocks, her nerves too frayed to go directly to her intended contact. She needed a base, a moment to think. And she had one, though the idea of using it filled her with a complicated dread.
Her grandmother’s key was cold and heavy in her jacket pocket. She’d kept it for reasons she never fully understood—sentiment, a stubborn tether to a past that wasn’t quite hers. Now, it was a lifeline.
The building was exactly as described, a looming grey concrete block from the 1960s, but its size and solidity spoke of a different era’s ambition. It stood in the very center, a fading monument to a time when quality was a point of pride. The stairwell smelled of boiled cabbage and disinfectant. Her footsteps echoed on the marble steps, a lonely sound.
The key turned with a satisfying, heavy clunk. The door swung inward on silent hinges.
The air inside was still, cold, and smelled faintly of dust and old wool. Vanja stepped into the salonac, the large formal living room, and froze. Time had stopped here. A massive, ornate Persian rug covered the parquet floor. A ceiling fixture of polished brass and cut glass, unlit for decades, gathered shadows. Velvet drapes, their colour a deep burgundy now faded at the folds, were drawn against the world. The furniture was heavy, dark wood, upholstered in damask—a sofa, armchairs, a huge sideboard displaying crystal decanters and a porcelain dinner service. It was luxurious, utterly preserved, and profoundly sad. This was the one thing they’d kept, the anchor to a home left behind. It felt less like an apartment and more like a museum dedicated to a ghost.
She moved through the four bedrooms, each with made-up beds under dust sheets, a surreal sight. This was hers. A secret pocket of Switzerland in the heart of Kosovo. The dissonance was staggering.
But survival came first. She was hungry, and the cupboards were bare. She needed local currency, and she knew where it would be. Her grandmother, a woman of fierce practicality and sentiment in equal measure, had shown her the safe once, whispering the combination with a wink. “In case you ever get into trouble, dušo.”
The safe was hidden behind a large, grim landscape painting in the main bedroom. Vanja lifted the painting away from the wall, her muscles straining. There was the small, steel door. Her hands were cold. She spun the dial. 19… 11… 68. Her mother’s birthday.
It opened with a soft sigh. Inside, neat stacks of Yugoslav dinars, now obsolete, and beside them, bricks of later Serbian dinars, wrapped in paper bands. There was gold, too. A few small bars and some jewellery. A fortune, frozen in time. She took a modest pile of the newest-looking notes, closed the safe, and restored the painting. The weight of the money in her pocket felt strange. Blood money? Inheritance money? Emergency funds. She’d settle on that.
The open market was a bombardment of sound and smell after the tomb-like silence of the apartment. Woodsmoke, roasting peppers, animal dung, and unwashed bodies. Stalls offered meagre produce: wrinkled apples, onions, loaves of heavy bread. Eyes followed her—a tall, strangely-dressed woman moving with an alien confidence. She bought bread, cheese, apples, a bottle of rakija, and a few tins of stew, communicating in terse, polite Serbian. The vendors were wary, but the money was good. No one smiled.
Back in the apartment, she locked the world out. She ate bread and cheese at the immense dining table, feeling like a child playing dress-up in a dead queen’s court. The grandeur mocked the reality outside. And it raised a pressing, dangerous question.
She knew her grandmother’s brother, Mitar Pendic, was here. Alive. Well-connected, living in a villa with his family. A Serbian patriarch in a mixed town. He was a potential ally, a source of protection, or a colossal risk. Reaching out to family was natural. But here, now, nothing was natural. Would he see her as a beloved niece, or as a complication? A Swiss journalist poking holes in a fragile, violent reality? Would he feel obligated to report her presence to the very authorities Captain Stojanovic embodied?
Stojanovic. The memory of his gloved fingers brushing hers was a cold brand. He would be waiting tomorrow. He would have questions she couldn’t answer. Having a powerful uncle might be a shield. Or it might paint a target on her back, connecting her to local Serbian networks, making her look even more like a spy.
She poured two fingers of the found rakija into one of the crystal glasses. The liquid was fire going down. The luxurious room swallowed the sound of her breathing.
She was sitting on a fortune, in a fortress, with family a phone call away. And she had never felt more exposed. The decision hummed in the silent, opulent air. Call Uncle Mitar, and step firmly into one camp? Or remain the rootless observer, a ghost in her grandmother’s museum, waiting for the serpent’s next move?
She swirled the amber liquid, watching it catch the fading light from a crack in the drapes. The apartment held its breath with her.
The apartment held its breath with her.
The silence was a physical thing, thick and velvety with dust. It was broken by the growl of her own stomach. The adrenaline from the checkpoint had burned through everything. She needed to move, to act, to reclaim some agency. Food first. Then a decision.
The open market at the edge of the town center was a study in subdued survival. Woodsmoke and the sour tang of fermenting cabbage hung in the damp air. Voices were low, transactions quick. Eyes, dulled by hardship, tracked her with passive curiosity. She moved through the stalls, a ghost in modern jeans. She pointed at potatoes, at a wiry bunch of carrots, at a paper-wrapped block of white cheese. She used simple Serbian, keeping her tone polite, neutral, unthreatening. She paid with the dinars from the safe, their crispness feeling obscene next to the worn leather of the vendor’s change purse.
“You are not from here,” the old woman selling the cheese stated, not looking up as she made change.
“No,” Vanja agreed softly.
The woman’s eyes, milky with cataracts, flicked up to hers for a second. “Be careful what you buy. And who you buy it from.” She pressed the cheese into Vanja’s hands, her grip surprisingly strong. “The wrong bread can make you sick.”
The message was clear. This wasn’t about food. It was about allegiance. Vanja simply nodded, a tight coil of anxiety winding in her chest. She retreated, her grocery bag a modest shield.
Back in the grand, silent salonac, the groceries looked pitiful on the ornate kitchen counter. The decision couldn’t wait. She had to know what kind of ground she was standing on. Family. It was the only card she had that wasn’t Swiss.
She found the heavy black rotary phone on a small table in the hallway. It felt like a relic. She half-expected it to be dead. The dial made a satisfying, heavy click-whirr with each number. She dialed the number her mother had repeated to her a lifetime ago, a string of digits that felt like a secret code.
It rang. Once. Twice.
A male voice answered, sharp and guarded. “Da?”
“Mitar Pendic?” she asked, her voice suddenly small in the huge, quiet apartment.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Vanja. Vanja Vranic. I am… I am Dana’s husband's family. From Basel.”
A long silence crackled down the line. She could hear faint sounds of a television, a child’s distant laugh.
“Dana’s you say, you have the same name as her daugther?” The voice changed, the guard dropping into sheer astonishment. “Little Vanja? My god. Is everything okay? Is Dana—?”
“Everyone is fine uncle,” she said, the familial title feeling strange and comforting on her tongue, its how you called both real uncles and family friends. “I’m… I’m in Podujevo. For work. I have the key. To Slava’s apartment.”
Another pause, shorter this time, filled with rapid reassessment. “You are staying there? Alone?” His tone wasn’t disapproving. It was concerned, protective. “That old place… it is full of ghosts, child.”
“It’s quiet,” she said, which wasn’t an answer. She took a breath. “I just wanted to let you know I was here. That I had arrived safely.” She consciously decided to stop there, to not mention the checkpoint, the captain, the journalism. The future or who she really is. Not yet.
“Well.” She heard him settle, the creak of a chair. “Any friend of my niece is my friend. And family is family. You are not alone here. You understand? If you need anything. Anything at all. You come to the villa. You call. Day or night.”
The simple, unquestioning kindness of it was a seismic shock. After the captain’s glacial suspicion, after the market vendor’s veiled warning, this open-armed offer was a blow to a dam she didn’t know she was holding shut. A hot pressure built behind her eyes, swift and overwhelming.
“Thank you,” she managed, the words thick. “That means… thank you, Uncle Mitar.”
“Be smart, Vanja,” he said, his voice dropping slightly, the paternal warning returning. “The streets have eyes. But you have family. Remember that.”
She hung up gently, the click echoing in the hall. She stood there, her forehead leaning against the cool, floral-patterned wallpaper. Then the tears came. Silent, heaving sobs that had nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with the sheer, destabilizing relief of not being entirely adrift. She cried for the strangeness, for the fear at the checkpoint, for the weight of the dusty luxury around her, for the simple sound of a kind voice in this charged and dangerous place. She let it out, all of it, until her ribs ached and her breath hitched.
When it was over, she felt hollowed out and cleaner. Sharper.
She had an appointment. She had to get ready.
A long, hot shower in the surprisingly functional pink-tiled bathroom washed the last of the tears away. She studied herself in the steamy mirror. The woman who looked back was familiar, yet different. The beautiful face, high cheekbones, the intelligent, guarded eyes. She needed to project capability, not threat. Neutrality, not curiosity. Respect, not fear.
She chose her armor carefully from the limited, anachronistic selection in her suitcase: black trousers, clean lines, a simple dove-grey wool sweater, expensive but understated. She brushed her long, dark-blonde hair until it fell in a severe, sleek wave. Minimal makeup. She looked professional. She looked European, like a model from Paris or Milano. Model with huge tits that is. She looked like someone who belonged to a world of order and press passes, not a world of sandbags and serpentine police captains.
It would have to do.
She checked her watch. 9:45. The police station was a fifteen-minute walk. She wanted to be exactly on time. Early suggested eagerness or anxiety. Late was defiance.
She took one last look around the museum-like apartment, at the crystal decanters catching the weak morning light. It was a beautiful cage. She locked the door behind her, the key heavy in her pocket.
The walk was a lesson in tension. The air was colder now, biting. She passed other pedestrians, who kept their gazes fixed ahead. A police patrol car, muddy and dented, idled at a corner, two officers smoking inside, watching the street. She felt their eyes on her like a physical touch but did not turn her head. Her heart was a steady, purposeful drumbeat in her chest.
The police station was a two-storey concrete building that had probably been yellow once. Now it was the colour of grime and neglect. The Serbian flag hung limp and wet above the door. She pushed it open.
The interior was overheated, smelling of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, and cheap coffee. A uniformed officer behind a high desk looked up from a newspaper, his expression bored until he saw her. It sharpened into recognition of the unfamiliar.
“I am here to see Captain Stojanovic,” she said, her voice clear and steady in the stagnant air. “He is expecting me.”
The officer’s eyes lingered for a moment too long. Then he nodded, picking up a phone. As he muttered into the receiver, Vanja stood perfectly still, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, every sense alert to the hum of the building, the footsteps upstairs, the low murmur of voices from behind closed doors.
She was here. The interview was about to begin. The only sound now was the oppressive buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead and the distant, methodical click of a typewriter from a room down the hall.