Chapter 185: The Classmate Who Chose the Wrong Curiosity
The afternoon in City Garden held that particular Sofia chill, the kind that smelled of damp earth, old stone, and distant traffic. Pale sunlight filtered through the bare branches of the linden trees, painting moving lattices of shadow on the gravel paths. Around the statue of Aleko Konstantinov, pigeons muttered and wheeled, oblivious to the quiet human drama unfolding on a bench nearby.
Nikolai arrived first, his posture an essay in casual vigilance. He’d chosen a jacket that looked thrown on but was actually carefully rumpled, his hands deep in its pockets as he scanned the theatre facade.
“Thought law students only met in libraries or police stations,” he said as Xia and Antoinette approached, attempting a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “The garden’s a nice change. Less… echo.”
Antoinette didn’t return the smile. “Echoes find you anywhere if the noise is loud enough.”
They hadn’t sat down when Nina appeared from the direction of the street. She walked with purpose, a heavy backpack slung over one shoulder, her face a study in controlled neutrality. She acknowledged Xia with a small, polite nod, Antoinette with a slightly tighter one, and Nikolai with a glance that moved past him as if he were a pane of glass.
“You said it was important,” Nina said, her voice flat, directed at Antoinette. She didn’t sit.
“It is,” Antoinette said. “It’s about the shape of things now. After.”
“After the correction,” Nikolai offered, the phrase from Zhito’s vocabulary tasting foreign and clumsy in the open air.
Nina’s gaze finally settled on him. There was no anger in it. Just a profound, weary assessment. “Is that what we’re calling it? A correction?” She let her backpack slide to the ground with a soft thud. “It feels less like a correction and more like a… rebound. The law dropped the ball. Now it’s bouncing. We just don’t know who it’s going to hit.”
Nikolai shifted his weight. He glanced at a group of tourists laughing by the fountain, their joy a dissonant soundtrack. “Look, Sofia’s become a stage for this… this grand debate about justice and loopholes. It’s exhausting. Can’t we just be students anymore? People who didn’t ask for any of this?”
“No,” Nina said simply. The word was final. “We can’t.” She finally sat, perching on the very edge of the bench, putting as much physical distance between herself and Nikolai as the stone would allow. “You can perform normal, Nikolai. You’re good at that. My normal burned down. The performance is over.”
The air between them turned brittle. Xia watched, silent, seeing not just two people but a chasm. On one side, the lived-in devastation. On the other, the terrified tourist, snapping pictures from the safe edge of the crater.
Antoinette, standing before them like an unimpressed prosecutor, decided to stop the photography. Her voice was calm, clear, and carried the weight of a gavel.
“Does Nina know you wrote to her, Nikolai? After the conviction. To Rossitza.”
The words didn’t shatter the quiet so much as they vacuumed it away. The chuckle of the fountain, the distant tram bell, the rustle of leaves—all of it receded, pulled back by the sheer, gravitational force of the question.
Nina didn’t move. She slowly turned her head toward Nikolai. Her expression didn’t crumple into rage; it froze into something more frighteningly precise. A botanist identifying a poisonous plant in a garden she’d trusted.
Nikolai’s face paled. His practiced ease evaporated, leaving behind the raw material of a young man caught. “It was one letter,” he said, the defense weak and immediate. “One. Years ago. I was… I was trying to understand.”
“Understand what?” Nina’s voice was a low wire of sound.
“Her!” Nikolai’s hands came out of his pockets, gesturing vaguely at the city. “She shares a fraction of my blood. A distant, messy fraction. What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Am I supposed to just… pretend she’s a stranger in a news article? I was afraid of what it might say about me, about my family, if I didn’t even try to look.”
“You were curious,” Nina stated. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes! Is curiosity a crime?”
“It’s a luxury,” Nina fired back, her composure cracking to reveal the raw steel beneath. “A luxury that people like me, who live in the wreckage she left, do not get to enjoy. You get to be curious about the anatomy of the explosion. I have to live with the shrapnel permanently in my skin. Every day. Every class. Every time I look at my own future and see the scorch marks.”
Nikolai was silent, his mouth slightly open, breath forming little ghosts in the cold air. He had no retort. He’d prepared for accusations of guilt, of betrayal. He could have defended against those. But this—this accusation of fascination—was a diagnosis he couldn’t refute, because part of him knew it was true. He had been fascinated. He still was. The unsent message on his phone was proof.
“You wanted to know what kind of person could do it,” Nina continued, her eyes holding his, refusing to let him look away. “You wanted to see the monster up close, see if its eyes were really that different from yours. That’s not fear of what it meant about you. That’s thrill. You stood at the edge of my fire and warmed your hands.”
“That’s not fair,” he whispered, but the words had no weight.
“Fair?” A bitter, short sound escaped Nina’s lips. “Don’t talk to me about fair. You have the privilege of distance. You can choose to engage with her as an idea, a phenomenon. A relative. For me, she is not an idea. She is the reason. The reason for the pain, the surgeries, the therapists, the looks of pity, the rage that wakes me up at 3 a.m. You can choose to step closer to it out of intellectual curiosity. I can never step away.”
Xia watched the dynamic solidify, cold and hard as the garden statues. This wasn’t hatred. Hatred was simple, a clean fuel. This was the corrosive residue of unequal damage. Nina’s resentment wasn’t because Nikolai had caused harm, but because he possessed the freedom to treat the source of her harm as a subject of study, a psychological curio. He held the option of detachment, a luxury her trauma had ripped from her forever.
Antoinette saw it too, and recognized the strategic hazard. The garden, the city, TDC itself—they were all arenas. In an arena, a rift like this wasn’t just personal. It was structural weakness. An unlocked door. Resentment this specific, this intimately laced with envy and judgment, could be forged into an alliance of desperate convenience. Or it could be cracked wide open into ruin. More dangerously, it could be spotted by someone else—a Varek, a Rhanian, a Rossitza herself—and weaponized. A trigger waiting for a finger.
Nina stood up, heaving her backpack over her shoulder. The movement was final. She looked at Nikolai not with contempt, but with a devastating clarity.
“Enjoy your curiosity, Nikolai,” she said, her voice drained of all heat. “Write your letters. Ponder what it means. But understand this: when you choose to look at her, you choose to stop seeing me.”
She turned and walked away, her footsteps crisp on the gravel, joining the flow of pedestrians until she was swallowed by the crowd.
Nikolai remained on the bench, staring at the empty space where she had been. His face was a mask of stunned introspection. The performance was over, and the audience of two had seen the raw, unscripted mess behind it.
Antoinette looked at Xia, a silent communication passing between them. The garden felt colder now. The playful pigeons, the golden theatre facade, the winter sun—all of it was just scenery. The real landscape was one of fractures, meticulously mapped, waiting for the right pressure to split things apart for good.
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Doctor’s Garden, Sofia, Bulgaria — near Oborishte Street, Sofia University, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and the central legal district.
Doctor’s Garden, Sofia, Bulgaria — near Oborishte Street, Sofia University, Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and the central legal district.
Two days later, the cold in the Doctor’s Garden felt more intellectual, a dry chill seeping from the stone of nearby university buildings. Antoinette watched Brayko Zaikov approach from the path beside the cathedral, his uniform swapped for civilian clothes that somehow still looked like a costume. He moved with a worn-out energy, his usual buoyant stride replaced by something more careful, as if the gravel might give way.
Vyara Filipova was already there, seated stiffly on a green bench overlooking the dormant flower beds. She’d been staring at the skeletal branches of a magnolia tree, her knuckles white where she gripped the handle of her leather briefcase. She didn’t look at Brayko as he arrived, but her shoulders lifted a fraction, bracing.
“Hey,” Brayko said, the word exhaled like smoke. He stood beside the bench, not sitting, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets.
“Hello, Brayko,” Vyara said, her voice a controlled, professional monotone. She finally glanced up, her gaze flickering past him to where Xia and Antoinette stood observing from a few meters away. “Are we a tribunal or a support group? The locale is ambiguous.”
“We’re the debris field,” Antoinette said, walking over. “Trying to figure out what fell apart first.”
Brayko’s smile was a quick, pained twitch. “I can save you the time on that one.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was thick with unvoiced accusations and a stubborn, defensive regret. Brayko kept glancing at Vyara, waiting for the blow he thought he deserved. Vyara examined the frosted grass, her mouth a tight line, as if confronting his awaited guilt was somehow a more perilous task than assigning it.
Xia settled onto the far end of Vyara’s bench, her presence a quiet counterpoint to the tension. “When you look at the case now,” she began, her voice soft but clear in the still air, “what do you see failed? The evidence itself? The procedure that followed it? Or was it the certainty you built from them?”
Brayko barked a short, humourless laugh. “I failed. I moved too fast. I saw a dangerous person, I saw a clear path to proving it, and I took a shortcut through the rules.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I wanted her contained. I wanted it done. The procedure was just… paperwork in the way.”
“Because the system is too slow!” Vyara snapped, the words sharp as a knife turn. She swiveled to face him, her composed mask cracking with a sudden, fierce heat. “The damage she caused was immediate and real. The legal machinery grinds for months, for years, while the people left behind are supposed to just… live in the crater. You acted because the alternative was watching her laugh from a distance while Nina’s life was still on fire.”
She was defending him. The realization hung in the cold air. Antoinette watched, patterns clicking into place. Vyara wasn’t absolving him out of kindness. She was reinforcing the fortress of their shared conclusion. His procedural misstep was, to her, a justifiable casualty in a righteous war. His mistake had served the verdict she needed, the moral certainty that had been her foundation.
“Don’t,” Brayko said, his voice low, almost pleading. He looked at her with a raw shame that was entirely his own. “Don’t make it noble, Vyara. It was a fuck-up. A dumb, rookie fuck-up that a guy like Zhito Vitanov could spot from a mile away. My hurry is the reason she’s breathing this air right now.” He was protecting her, Antoinette saw. He couldn’t stand the idea of being the singular, flawed cause. If he was to be the crack, then it had to be in service of something she believed in, or the collapse was his alone to bear.
The mention of Zhito’s name changed the chemistry of the space. Both their faces hardened, the subtle dance of guilt and blame eclipsed by a colder, purer unison. Hatred did that. It was a simpler bond.
“He didn’t see justice,” Vyara spat. “He saw a loose thread. He pulled it, and our work unraveled. He didn’t free a person; he extracted a problem he thinks he can now manage.”
“And he’s up in his glass house, calculating the risk,” Brayko added, his jaw tight. “He doesn’t see her. He sees an asset with a volatility rating.”
Xia listened, her eyes moving between them. She saw the components here: Brayko’s impulsive courage, his deep need for redemption. Vyara’s formidable intellect, her conviction that could bend steel. They were loyal, not just to an idea, but to the shattered symmetry of the outcome they’d fought for. They had a shared fire. That was potential. It was also a spectacular danger.
“And Nina Bliznakova?” Antoinette asked, the name a deliberate probe.
The unified front wavered. Brayko’s eyes dropped to his scuffed shoes. Vyara’s gaze drifted back to the magnolia tree, its limbs twisted and waiting for a spring that felt months away. Neither could hold Antoinette’s stare for more than a second.
“What do you want us to say?” Vyara asked, her voice quieter now, strained. “That we’re sorry? We are. Profoundly. That we wish the verdict had held? Of course. But our regret doesn’t rebuild her life. Our shame doesn’t unburn her skin.” She finally looked at Antoinette, a challenge in her glistening eyes. “So what do you do with that? You can’t prosecute a feeling. You can’t lock up guilt.”
“No,” Xia said softly. She understood now. Their conviction was the engine. But it was also the armor plating they’d welded around their own professional and personal failure. In a place like TDC, that could make them relentless, unshakeable partners. Or it could make them blind, driving a team off a cliff because admitting a single navigational error would mean dismantling the very vehicle that kept their self-respect intact.
Brayko shifted his weight, the gravel crunching underfoot. “So what now? We just wait for her to… what? For Zhito to make his move? For her to send another creepy message?”
“Doors open both ways,” Antoinette said, repeating the phrase from Zhito’s quiet confession.
Vyara’s head snapped up, understanding dawning. “He’s not in control. He thought he was buying a key, but he uncaged the locksmith.” A grim, almost feral satisfaction touched her lips. It wasn’t about joy. It was about seeing the arrogant investor realize the market had just crashed.
A wind swept through the garden, rattling the branches and scattering a few last dead leaves. It carried the distant scent of incense from the cathedral, mixed with city exhaust. The meeting was over. Nothing was settled, but everything had been exposed: the fault lines, the alliances, the flammable mixture of their pride and their remorse.
Xia stood. She gave them both a small, acknowledging nod. They had the raw materials for what was coming. They also carried the live grenade of their undiminished certainty, pin already loose, held in place only by the pressure of their mutually assured disappointment.
They walked away separately, Brayko and Vyara heading toward the courthouse, their steps no longer in sync. Xia watched them go. In the arena, fire was a tool. But a shield could become a coffin if you refused to put it down, even when the air inside grew too hot to breathe.
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