Grisha

The girls were casual, no-strings-attached. In August, at a stuffy disco with a sticky floor and music blaring from raspy speakers, while the boss was again humiliating himself in front of a student who was grieving over her ex, and Sokolov over her, he saw her. Not quiet or broken, but alive, sharp, "blood and milk."
She cursed at the guy who dared to look at her askance, and without hesitation, she slapped him. Grigory realized: this is it. It wasn't her body that had caught his attention, but her character. Freedom. Something he'd never had.
He tried to be nice: flowers, a clean shirt, a calm smile. She responded with a bouquet to the head. Then with refusals, ridicule, and obscenities. He didn't back down. Every day she was working, he came to the store. Until one day, he became so tired that he started going into church, standing and looking at the icons, not knowing what he was asking for. *

• In December, he saw her with another man: a skinny student with glasses, books under his arm. Then he understood everything. He approached her, gave her the flowers, and said he wouldn't come again. And left. Just as Sokolov himself had once decided to leave: not to push, not to break.
  Her joy was short-lived. Seeing him one day in an alleyway with some woman, she felt something inside her snap.
  His gaze began to appear in her dreams. And when word reached her that Bulava was wounded, she rushed to Sokolov, screaming and demanding to see where Grisha was.
  It was the dead of winter. Snow crunched underfoot. The kitchen smelled of tobacco and medicine. Grigory was sitting in a chair with a bandaged chest when Sokolov let her into the house, then hurried off to see his student. She stood in the doorway, tear-stained, in an old coat, her nose red from the cold. He stood up, gritting his teeth, and she flew into his arms, sobbing. Grigory hugged her tightly, afraid of losing her again, stroked her hair, tucking an unruly strand behind her ear. "Come on," he said quietly, brushing his lips over her nose. "It's just a scratch. Don't cry, or your nose will turn potato-like." Or won't your fiancé care that his girlfriend is in the arms of a bandit?

Grigory Viktorovich Gubin was once an excellent student—that quiet boy with worn glasses, whom his grandmother would walk to school with the sign of the cross at the gate. He lived with her in the village: his alcoholic mother abandoned him as a baby and went to the Caucasus, never to be seen again. His grandmother became everything to him—home, support, the only person who believed that Grishka would "become something." He truly tried. He got straight A's, stayed late after school, didn't run to the river, and didn't play snowballs. That's why he was disliked. The village whispered: "insane," "nerd," "not one of us." One day after school, the elders caught him—laughter, pushing, dirty snow under his knees, and the crunch of his glasses under someone's boot.
Then something broke inside him. Not immediately—quietly, almost imperceptibly. The curls that Grandma had loved so much gave way to a shaved head.
He remained in school, but alongside it came sports, lots of sports, to the point of exhaustion. His body became rigid, his gaze direct. Those who had previously giggled now looked at him differently. But he was looking only forward: to leave. To Kharkiv. In the late 1980s, he became a student at one of the city's best universities. His grandmother wept with joy—her Grisha would become a man. And then came the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The factory where he worked part-time closed one day, the gates locked, the yard empty, silence.
The diploma proved almost useless. He grabbed everything: warehouse security, the market, night shifts. It was at the market that he was noticed. A man in a leather jacket, flanked by men—Taras Sokolov, not yet a household name. Grisha was recommended as "quiet and reliable." He resisted for a long time, but poverty and anger at life took their toll. He agreed.
Three years passed. The nickname "Bulava" stuck.
He had money—an apartment, a car, a house outside the city. He built a new house for his grandmother, warm and bright. But she kept asking, "When are you getting married?" But he was in no hurry. The wounds of the past still stung.