Chapter 9: o
The dream was always the same.
Not images at first, but sounds. The wet, rhythmic chop of an axe into frozen earth. A child’s voice, singing a nursery rhyme in Albanian, the tune warping into a scream. Then the smell—cordite, wet wool, and beneath it, coppery and sweet, the unmistakable iron-tang of blood saturating soil.
Vanja jerked awake, a silent gasp trapped in her throat. The Podujevo apartment was freezing, her breath pluming in the dark. She fumbled for the chain of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Harsh light bleached the room: the wobbly table, the stack of her notebooks, the mattress on the floor where the ghosts of two different men seemed to linger in the folds of the blanket.
Prekaz. The name was a stone in her gut. She knew the date. March 5th, 1998. The Jashari family compound. A hammer blow that would shatter the last pretense of peace. She was living on borrowed time, in a borrowed body, dreaming of a massacre that hadn’t happened yet. The historian’s curse was knowing the earthquake was coming and feeling the tremors in your sleep.
She swung her legs out, the linoleum ice against her bare feet. Dawn was a thin gray line at the window. The courtyard below was silent. No generators, no laughter. Just a waiting quiet.
Movement was the only antidote to the static dread. She cleared a space in the center of the room, pushing the table against the wall. She began slowly, deliberately, falling into the muscle-memory of her Krav Maga drills. It wasn’t elegant. It was functional. Brutal.
Stance. Breathe. She shifted her weight, hands coming up. A jab-cross combination snapped into the cold air. The force traveled from her hip, through her core, out her fist. Pivot. Elbow strike. She imagined a torso, a throat. Marko’s smug face. A Serbian policeman’s visor. Bahri’s friend, Arben, clapping him on the shoulder.
Block. Grab. Knee to groin. Her body was a machine of efficient violence. She was sweating now, the long, thick dark-blonde hair sticking to her neck. Her breath came in controlled bursts. Each movement was a word in a language of survival. This body, with its huge tits and ass, its tiny waist and long legs—it was a lure, a liability. But here, in the dim light, it was also a weapon. She could feel the power in her thighs as she launched a front kick, the strength in her shoulders as she practiced a choke release.
For twenty minutes, there was only this: the burn of muscle, the pattern of attack and defense. No past. No future. Just a present tense of strain and sweat.
When she finished, trembling with exhaustion, the room felt different. Smaller. More real. She peeled off her damp clothes and washed at the sink, the water so cold it made her teeth ache. She studied her reflection in the small, spotted mirror. Golden-green eyes, sharp cheekbones flushed from exertion. The face of Vanja Vranic, a woman out of time. A woman who had been fucked senseless by a Serbian policeman in a sterile apartment and then, days later, taken with equal desperation by an Albanian militant in a safehouse that smelled of war. The contradictions were written on her skin, in the faint bruise on her hip she couldn’t remember getting.
The days bled into one another, a monochrome stretch of suspended animation. She read—dusty, academically-pedantic histories of the Balkans from the town’s anemic library. She wrote in her notebooks, not journalism, but a frantic, coded chronicle of her own. Observations. Names. The license plate of a police van that lingered too long in her neighborhood. The growing number of young Albanian men who were no longer seen at the café. The way the Serbian grandmother downstairs now hurried inside when Vanja passed, avoiding her eyes.
She was a ghost in two worlds. To the Albanians, she was Marko’s Serb, a thing of suspicion. To the Serbs, she was the Swiss journalist, useful but odd, a little too comfortable in the other half of town. Her loneliness was a tangible thing, a third occupant in the apartment. It had the taste of cheap instant coffee and the sound of the wind whistling through the ill-fitted window frame.
One afternoon, she tried to write a real article. A neutral piece on the economic anxieties in the region. The words were dead on the page. Lifeless. A lie by omission. She saw Bahri’s face, the fear in his eyes before he hardened it into ideology. “When you see them on the news… you will remember I am a man.” She slammed the notebook shut.
She slammed the notebook shut.
The silence that followed was worse than the failed writing. It was a vacuum, filling quickly with the ticking of the wall clock and the relentless, phantom countdown in her head. March 5th. A week passed. Then another. Marko was away, reportedly on a prolonged “action” near Gnjilane. His absence was a reprieve that felt like a different kind of sentence. She was free from his groping demands, from the perfumed soap in his apartment, but she was walled in by her own irrelevance. Time was bleeding out, and she was no closer to Drenica, no closer to the man whose family’s fate was a screaming siren in her historical memory.
Her routine became a prison of her own making: the brutal morning drills, the silent reading, the aimless walks through Podujevo’s tense streets where every glance felt like an indictment. She was a ghost, a theory waiting for a catalyst.
The catalyst came on a Thursday afternoon, as she was returning from the market with a thin plastic bag holding a loaf of bread and a single onion. An old man was walking ahead of her, his steps slow and shuffling, a traditional white plis hat sitting proudly on his head. He stumbled on a crack in the pavement, his body tilting sideways with the slow, graceful inevitability of a falling tree.
Vanja was beside him in an instant, her bag dropping, her hands catching him under his arm before he could hit the ground. He was light, like a bundle of dry sticks. “Ju mirë?” she asked, her Albanian automatic.
He righted himself, patting her hand, his palm like paper. His eyes, milky with cataracts, found hers. “Falemnderit, vajzë,” he thanked her, his smile revealing a few lone teeth. “Këmba ime… pak e dobët.” My leg is a little weak.
“Let me help you home,” she insisted. He tried to wave her off, but she was already gripping his elbow firmly, retrieving her bag. He directed her slowly, and they walked two quiet blocks until they reached an older, two-story house with a wide, overgrown garden. It had a fading grandeur, the woodwork intricate under layers of peeling paint. Inside, it smelled of woodsmoke and dried herbs.
They spoke in Albanian. His name was Bashkim, he said. He lived with his sister, who was at the clinic. He offered her coffee, but she declined, seeing his exhaustion. Before leaving, she took a scrap of paper from her notebook and wrote down the number for the phone in her apartment, which rarely ever rang.
“In case you need anything,” she said, pressing it into his hand. “For shopping. Or if you fall again.”
He smiled that gap-toothed smile and nodded, tucking the paper into his waistcoat pocket. “You are a kind girl. God bless you.”
Two days later, his great-nephew arrived from Germany for the summer. Bekim Jashari was nineteen, with a curious openness that hadn’t yet been hardened by the soil of Kosovo. He sat with Bashkim, drinking the thick, sweet coffee, listening to the old man’s meandering stories. “A beautiful girl helped me,” Bashkim said, his voice warm with the memory. “A Serbian girl, but she spoke our language like a bird. She gave me her number.” He produced the wrinkled scrap like a treasure.
Bekim, impressed and bored, tucked it into his own wallet. When he returned to the compound in Prekaz a few days later, he mentioned the story to his uncles, Adem and Hamez, more as an anecdote about their great-uncle’s charm than anything else. He showed them the number.
Bahri Nika was there, leaning against the doorway of the farmhouse, listening to the logistical reports. His blood turned to ice water, then to fire, when he saw the digits on the paper. He knew that handwriting. He knew the Podujevo exchange prefix. He had traced the lines of those numbers with his fingertip on a dusty table.
Adem Jashari, a man whose presence was a physical force, took the paper. His eyes, dark and relentless as a river stone, moved from the number to Bahri’s face. He saw the recognition there, the violent flicker of something personal. Adem didn’t smile. He held the paper out toward Bahri.
“It is time for you to bring her here,” Adem said, his voice a low rumble. “Bring her to Drenica.”
Vanja woke to knocking. It was 5 AM, a brutal, insistent pounding that shattered the last fragments of a dream about axes. Her heart launched into her throat. Marko. It had to be Marko, back early, demanding entry, demanding her.
She pulled on a robe, her hands shaking, and went to the door. “Po?” she called, her voice rough with sleep.
“Vanja. It’s me.”
That voice. Not Marko’s smug baritone, but a lower, rougheɾ timbre that went straight through her core. She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Bahri Nika stood in the dim hallway, shadows hollowing his cheeks. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was dressed in simple, dark work clothes, but the intensity in his eyes was a uniform of its own.
“Come,” he said. No greeting. “Adem Jashari wants to meet you.”
She stared at him. The air left her lungs. This was it. The catalyst. Delivered by the last person she expected, the one person who made the mission feel like a betrayal of something else entirely. She simply nodded.
Ten minutes later, she was in a battered, dark blue Zastava sedan, not the personal car he’d driven in Pristina. This was a utility vehicle, anonymous. The engine coughed to life, and he pulled away from the curb, the car swallowed by the pre-dawn gloom. Podujevo fell away behind them. They drove in silence for twenty minutes, the roads empty, the world still holding its breath.
“Are you well?” he asked finally, the words sounding strange, formal.
She didn’t respond. She watched the skeletal trees blur past, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“Vanja,” he tried again, his voice softer, strained. “Please. Talk to me.”
“Why?” The word cracked out of her, sharp as a gunshot. “You don’t really want to talk. You are just following orders.”
“That’s not true.”
She didn’t know she was going to cry until the first hot tear slipped down her cheek. She turned her face fully to the window, but her breath hitched. She heard him suck in a sharp breath.
“Fuck,” he swore in Albanian. “Mos qaj. Don’t cry.”
“You just fucked me and left me,” she said, the obscenity crude and satisfying in the tight space of the car. “After feeding me some bullshit about freedom and belonging. You left me in that room. You walked out.”
“You left,” he said simply, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “You walked out of the alley. You walked out of the garage. You went back to him.”
She laughed then, a bitter, choked sound. “As if I had a choice! But it does not matter. What matters is that I talk to Adem and tell him what I know.”
He nodded then, a sharp, resigned dip of his chin. He glanced at her, this impossible woman, this wild forest spirit he had fallen in love with, sitting so still and not fearing what was to come. Her profile was etched against the lightening sky, defiant and utterly vulnerable. The need to touch her was a physical ache, a madness overriding every protocol, every danger.
Without a word, he wrenched the steering wheel. The car lurched off the main road onto a rough forestry track, bouncing violently through potholes until it was shrouded in a thicket of young pines. He killed the engine. The sudden silence was absolute.
He turned to her, his chest heaving. “I have not slept,” he said, the words raw. “I see you. In that room. Under me. I smell you on my skin when the rain comes.”
“Bahri—”
He was on her, his mouth crushing hers, swallowing any protest. It was not a kiss of tenderness but of consumptive hunger. His hands fumbled with the belt of her robe, then shoved at her nightshirt. He pushed the fabric up, his rough palms scraping over her ribs, closing over the full, soft weight of her breast. He squeezed, hard, and she cried out into his mouth.
“You are in my blood,” he growled against her lips, his other hand pushing between her thighs, shoving her cotton underwear aside. His fingers were calloused and demanding, sliding through her wetness. “You are a sickness. I cannot do my work. I cannot think.”
“Then don’t think,” she gasped, arching into his touch, her own hands clawing at his belt. She got it open, shoved his trousers and underwear down just enough. He was already hard, thick and hot in her hand. She guided him to her, positioning him at her entrance.
He didn’t wait. He drove into her with a single, deep, punishing thrust that filled her completely, that knocked a sobbing gasp from her throat. The car seat was cramped, the gearshift digging into her hip. He braced one arm on the headrest behind her, the other gripping her thigh, hauling it up over his hip to sink deeper.
“This is what you do,” he grunted, pistoning into her, each stroke a furious claim. The car rocked on its springs. “You split me in two. You make me weak.”
She met his violence with her own, her nails digging into the hard muscle of his back, her hips rising to meet every slam. “I’m not… yours… to weaken,” she choked out, the pleasure coiling tight and brutal despite her words.
“You are,” he insisted, his rhythm faltering, his control shredding. He was close. “Here. Now. In this car, you are mine. Say it.”
He fucked her harder, faster, the obscene, wet sounds of their joining filling the air. The pressure broke. Her orgasm tore through her, a silent, seizing wave that clenched around him like a vise. With a shattered groan, he followed, pumping his release deep inside her, his body shuddering violently against hers.
He collapsed forward, his forehead against her shoulder, his breath scorching her neck. They stayed like that, tangled, sweating, the smell of sex and pine needles dense around them. Slowly, reality seeped back in: the cold, the cramped seat, the mission.
He pulled out of her gently, the separation feeling more profound than any words. He righted his clothes, his movements stiff. She pulled her nightshirt down, the fabric damp and clinging.
He started the car, reversed back onto the road, and drove. Neither spoke. The sky was light now, a pale winter blue. The landscape grew hillier, more forested. They were entering Drenica.
After an hour, he turned onto a narrower dirt track that wound up a wooded slope. He stopped at a gate where two young men with Kalashnikovs stood watch. They recognized Bahri, nodded at Vanja with curious, appraising stares, and waved them through.
The compound came into view. It was not a fortress, but a cluster of farmhouses and outbuildings, sturdy and plain. Smoke rose from chimneys. A few men moved between the buildings with purposeful calm. It looked peaceful.
Vanja’s blood ran cold. She knew every building, every tree from the grainy photographs that would circle the globe in a few months’ time. This was the place from her dreams. The axe. The singing. The blood.
Bahri parked and turned to her. The vulnerability from the car was gone, sealed away behind the militant’s mask. But his eyes held hers for a beat too long.
“Ready?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, smoothing her hair, her robe. She was a mess, smelling of sex and sweat, arriving in her nightclothes to meet a legend. It felt perversely right.
“Yes,” she said, and opened the car door.
The cold Drenica air, sharp with woodsmoke and wet earth, hit her like a slap. It cleansed nothing. It only made the scent of their coupling, rising from her skin and clothes, feel more obscene. She stepped out, the gravel crunching under her slippers, and pulled the robe tighter. It was a futile gesture. She was profoundly exposed.
Bahri came around the car, his face a closed door. He gestured with his chin toward the main house. “This way.”
She followed, her eyes drinking in the details her history books had only hinted at: the well-maintained stone fence, the stacked firewood, the sturdy two-story house with its distinctive wooden balcony. Life here. Normal, precious life. Her stomach turned.
She entered the yard.
A few hens scattered. A teenage boy was chopping wood near a shed, his rhythmic axe blows echoing the sounds from her dreams. He paused, watching her. Near the house, a group of men stood in a loose circle, their conversation halting as they noticed her. Adem and Hamez Jashari were easy to identify—Adem with his broad shoulders and unwavering gaze, Hamez sharper, more intense. Their father, Shaban, stood with a quiet, weathered dignity beside a woman who could only be their mother, her hands tucked into the apron around her waist. Three other young men flanked them, their postures alert but not hostile.
Bahri led her to them. His hand, for a fleeting second, brushed the small of her back. It wasn’t possessive. It felt like an apology, or a push into the unknown.
“Mirë se vini,” said Shaban in Albanian, his voice steady, his eyes kind but deeply assessing.
She answered back in perfect Albanian, meeting his gaze. “Falemnderit për ftesën.” Thank you for having me.
A subtle ripple went through the group. Her accent, her fluency, was not what they had expected from a Serbian woman , someone Marko Stojanovic is paying special attention to.
Adem stepped forward. He was taller up close, his presence a physical pressure. “You are risking a lot by coming here,” he said, his voice a low rumble that carried no threat, only grave fact.
She nodded, her throat tight. The words she had carried from another time felt like stones in her mouth. “I know. I have something to tell you.”
A long, silent moment stretched. Adem’s dark eyes searched her face, looking for the trap, the deceit. He saw the exhaustion, the fear, and something else—a dreadful certainty that had nothing to do with spycraft.
“Come in,” he said finally. He turned toward the house.
Bahri came with her, he was behind her. His proximity was a live wire at her back, a reminder of the animal heat they had just shared in the cold car. She could feel the ghost of him between her legs with every step up the stone path.
They entered the house. The warmth was immediate, carrying the rich smells of simmering beans, baked bread, and tobacco. The main room was simple, clean, dominated by a large wood stove. Family photographs in ornate frames sat on a sideboard. It was a home.
Adem led them to a door off the main room. He opened it.
They entered the oda, the guest room. It was a space apart, a sanctum. Thick wool rugs covered the floor, and cushions were arranged along the walls. A low wooden table sat in the center. The air here was still, sacred, used for councils and important strangers.
There, in that charged quiet, Vanja stood before the men who would soon become martyrs. Shaban and his wife remained by the door. Adem and Hamez sat on cushions, gesturing for her to do the same. Bahri lowered himself beside her, not touching, but his shoulder was a solid line of heat next to hers. The three other young men remained standing near the walls.
“Speak,” Adem said. No coffee had been offered. This was not a social call.
Vanja took a breath that shook her entire frame. She looked at Shaban, at the mother, then at Adem. The words came out flat, stripped of any drama, which made them sound all the more true.
“The Serbian Interior Ministry, the MUP, has a plan. It’s called ‘Operation Shpejtim’. They mean to make an example of Prekaz. Of this house.” She swallowed. “They will come in force. Not just police. Special anti-terrorist units. They will surround the compound and give an ultimatum for you to surrender. They will not negotiate.”
Hamez leaned forward, his eyes blazing. “We have heard rumors. Why should we believe you? You come from him.”
“I come from the future,” she said, the absurd, perfect truth of it hanging in the air. She pushed on before they could dismiss it as madness. “I saw a map on their desk, Adem. A tactical map. This house was circled in red. The date was written beside it. March”
A deadly silence engulfed the oda. The only sound was the crackle of the fire in the next room.
“What year?” Bahri asked, his voice hollow beside her.
“1998.”
“That’s six months from now,” Hamez breathed.
“They are waiting for spring,” Vanja said. “For the ground to thaw. For the roads to be clear for their armor.” She looked at Adem, who had not moved a muscle. “They believe a decisive strike here will decapitate the UÇK in Drenica before it can fully organize. They believe it will terrify everyone into submission.”
Adem’s gaze was fixed on a point on the rug. “How do they plan to attack?”
“They will blockade all roads in at dawn. They will use loudspeakers. They will say anyone who surrenders will be treated fairly. They will give you one hour.” Her voice broke. She forced the next words out. “Then they will use heavy machine guns mounted on armored vehicles. They will fire RPGs into the upper floors. They will not stop until there is no return fire. They have orders to leave no one alive inside the perimeter. To make a lesson.”
Shaban’s wife made a small, choked sound in the doorway.
“You are certain of this.” It wasn’t a question from Adem. It was a demand for finality.
“I have seen the photographs,” Vanja whispered, the images from her own time flooding her: the shattered walls, the blackened windows. “After. I know the names of the dead. All of them. Adem, Hamez, Shaban…” She looked at their mother. “Your daughter-in-law. Your grandson. Your granddaughter. Fifty-eight people. Most of them from this family.”
The room seemed to tilt. The mother turned and walked silently back into the main house. Shaban’s face had turned to ancient, grief-stricken stone.
“Why?” Hamez demanded, surging to his feet. “Why tell us this? What game is Stojanovic playing?”
“This is not his game!” Vanja’s control snapped, her voice rising. “I haven't seen him in weeks. He is away. I am telling you because you cannot be here on March fifth. You have to be gone. The movement needs you alive. Your family needs you alive.”
“To run?” Adem said, finally looking at her. His eyes were bottomless pools of defiance. “To abandon our home?”
“To survive!” she pleaded. “To fight another day from somewhere they cannot predict. If you are here, you die. It is not a battle. It is a pre-planned slaughter. Your martyrdom feeds their story. Your survival wounds them.”
The ideological chasm yawned wide in the room. Bahri was staring at the floor, his fists clenched on his knees. He understood both sides—the unthinkable shame of retreat, the brutal logic of her warning.
Adem stood, his height seeming to fill the small room. He looked at his brother, at his father, then at the young men against the wall. He finally settled his gaze on Vanja.
“You have given us a thing of great weight,” he said, his voice impossibly calm. “It must be considered. You will stay here tonight. You cannot go back now. It is not safe.”
Vanja nodded, exhaustion crashing over her. The deed was done. The timeline was infected with her knowledge.
“Bahri,” Adem said. “Show her to the upstairs room. The small one.”
Bahri stood, a soldier receiving an order. He gestured for Vanja to follow him. As they left the oda, she heard Hamez’s voice, low and fierce: “It could be a trick, Adem. To make us run, to make us look like cowards before our people…”
The wooden stairs creaked underfoot. The upstairs hallway was dark, paneled in old wood. Bahri opened a door to a sparse, clean room with a narrow bed and a washstand. A single window looked out over the yard.
He closed the door behind them and for a moment they were alone again in the silence. The gravity of what she had just done pressed down on them.
“Did you mean it?” he asked, not looking at her. “The photographs. You saw them.”
“Yes.”
He turned then, his face a mask of anguish. He crossed the small space in one stride. His hands came up, cradling her face, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. “What are you?” he whispered, his breath warm on her lips.
Instead of answering, she kissed him. It was soft, a slow burn that contrasted violently with their frenzied coupling in the car. This kiss was a question, a shared breath in the face of the abyss. He responded in kind, his lips moving over hers with a desperate tenderness.
His hands slid from her face, down her neck, to the knot of her robe. He untied it slowly, letting the fabric fall open. Her nightshirt was still rucked up from earlier, stained and damp. He pulled it over her head, letting it drop to the floor. She stood naked before him in the cool room, her skin pebbling in the air.
He didn’t speak. He just looked, his eyes traveling over her body—the full breasts, the curve of her waist, the swell of her hips—as if memorizing a landscape that was about to be shelled. Then he sank to his knees before her.
He gripped her ass, his fingers digging into the flesh, and pulled her hips toward his face. He buried his mouth between her legs, his tongue finding her core with an unerring, hungry precision. He licked her slowly, thoroughly, tasting himself and her together. She braced her hands on his shoulders, a moan stifled behind her clenched teeth.
“Quiet,” he murmured against her, his breath hot. “The whole house will hear.”
He devoured her then, his tongue circling her clit with a relentless, focused pressure. He slid two fingers inside her, crooking them, finding a spot that made her knees buckle. He held her up, his strong arms locked around her thighs, his mouth working her with a furious intimacy. The pleasure was a rising tide, sharp and sweet, amplified by the danger, by the whispered arguments still drifting up from below.
She came silently, her body seizing, her inner muscles fluttering around his fingers. He drank her in, his own groans muffled against her skin until her tremors subsided.
He stood, his own need evident in the hard line of his trousers. He unfastened them, freeing his cock, which was thick and already glistening at the tip. He turned her around, bending her gently over the narrow bed. He pushed her legs apart with his knee.
From behind, he entered her in one smooth, deep push. She was still swollen, sensitive from her climax, and the fullness was overwhelming. He wrapped one arm around her waist, pulling her back against him, the other hand covering her mouth to stifle her cry.
He fucked her like that, with a slow, deep, grinding rhythm that felt less like taking and more like merging. Each stroke was profound, reaching a place inside her that the frantic fucking in the car had not touched. His lips were at her ear.
“You have put this inside me,” he whispered in Albanian, his voice ragged. “This knowing. It is a poison. I will never be free of it. I will never be free of you.”
He picked up his pace, his hips snapping faster, his grip on her mouth tightening. The bedframe began a soft, rhythmic knock against the wall. The sound was terrifyingly loud in the quiet house. He didn’t stop.
“They are listening,” he breathed, a dark thrill in his voice. “Let them hear. Let them know you are not his. You are here. With me.”
The thought, the sheer taboo of it, sent a final, violent shockwave of pleasure through her. She came again, a pulsing, internal convulsion that milked his cock. With a guttural choke, he followed, spilling into her, his body shuddering as he pressed his forehead between her shoulder blades.
They stayed locked together, breathing hard, until he softened and slipped out of her. He righted his clothes with swift, efficient motions. He handed her the nightshirt from the floor without meeting her eyes.
“Sleep,” he said, his voice once again that of the soldier. “I will be outside the door.”
He left, closing the door softly behind him. Vanja heard the faint creak as he sat on the wooden floor of the hallway, keeping watch. She pulled the nightshirt on and crawled under the heavy wool blanket on the bed. She could still taste him on her lips. She could still feel the imprint of his body on hers.
Downstairs, the murmur of voices continued, urgent and low. The axe had stopped falling in the yard. The compound was holding its breath, waiting for Adem’s decision. Lying in the dark, Vanja wondered if she had changed anything at all, or if she had simply made herself a witness, and a participant, in a history that was determined to bleed.