“ARGH!”
Taekjoo gasped as his eyes snapped open. He stared at the now-familiar ceiling. His skin prickled, every hair on end. His hands fumbled across the bed, searching for something to ground him. He found the rough hospital sheets under his fingers. He was still in the hospital bed. He turned and saw the windows shut tight.
Was it a dream? Taekjoo lay there, running his hands over himself. Aside from some soreness, there was no pain. His throat felt neither strangled nor sore.
He wiped the sweat from his face and let out a long sigh. Of all dreams, why that nightmare?
It was a while before he finally sat up. Sweat dripped from his face. All that gasping had left his throat dry. His mood plummeted. His head felt heavy. He needed a shower.
He was just about to get out of bed when he stopped. The blanket was tented in the middle. It can’t be. He pulled the blanket away. Just as he feared, there was a big bulge in his crotch.
Damn it. Goddammit.
He jumped out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. He turned the shower on full blast, not caring if his clothes got drenched. He let the cold water calm his aroused body.
I’ve gone insane. I must be. How could I possibly get hard from a nightmare like that? This wasn’t the first time. If it had been, he could’ve dismissed it as some strange trauma reaction. But it kept happening. Repeatedly. He had no explanation.
He banged his head against the wall, loathing himself. He became convinced that the drug Zhenya had injected wasn’t just a tranquilizer. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be getting these uncontrollable erections.
Zhenya’s face appeared in his mind before he could stop it. His expression and cold laugh in the dreams felt like they had just happened. Taekjoo clenched his fists, flushed from the icy water.
Maybe Salman was right. Maybe he was lucky just to be alive. Taekjoo knew he couldn’t beat Zhenya. He was no match for Zhenya’s physical strength, even without his money and power. Knowing that didn’t make Taekjoo feel any better. At this rate, the rage would kill him.
Even in his furious, impulsive state, Taekjoo knew a frontal assault was impossible. He was badly injured. Barging into Zhenya’s office and throwing a punch was out of the question. He had to keep a cool head and not let his emotions cloud his thinking. Haste would only lead to failure.
He racked his brain for another way to strike back. He needed a plan to beat someone with that kind of strength and cunning.
After thinking for a while, Taekjoo suddenly went blank. A strange sense of déjà vu surfaced, pulling up something from his past.
‘...he’s powerful, and nothing can kill him.’
He remembered hearing this recently. Who had said that?
‘In every Russian folk tale, there is one figure who always appears. It’s Koschey the Immortal.’
Zhenya. It was Zhenya who told him that story. Now that he remembered who said it, the whole situation came back. Taekjoo’s face flushed at the vivid memory.
He shook his head, forcing himself back on track. He carefully replayed Zhenya’s words in his head.
‘Of course, even Koschey has his Achilles heel, and only he knows what it is.’
What else did he say?
‘Every story ends with Koschey being slain by the hero because he falls for a beautiful woman and foolishly reveals his own weakness.’
Zhenya had said that too.
‘You’re no beauty, however I look at you, but I’ll let you in on the secret and tell you the weakness of Koschey the Immortal.’
The weakness of the Immortal.
Taekjoo dug deeper into his memories, recalling the moment the story came up. Before the Koschey part, Zhenya had mentioned Grand Duchess Anastasia of Imperial Russia. Right before that, he’d admitted that the development of Anastasia, the weapon, was a failure. Anastasia—supposedly something that never existed. Anna Anderson, the impostor duchess. Koschey’s fatal weakness. Three seemingly unrelated stories, yet Taekjoo started to see a connection.
When Project Anastasia failed, everyone involved was executed—except the Bogdanovs. Why? What spared them? Did Anastasia, the unprecedented weapon of mass destruction, truly disappear without a trace? Or did it still exist somewhere, in some form, just like the Bogdanovs had survived?
‘Anastasia? Why would you ask me for Anastasia?’
When asked, Boris from Sonchev had seemed clueless. But he had glanced at Zhenya with a knowing grin. Their eyes met, and something passed between them. What was it? What had Taekjoo missed? A thought was forming, not yet clear.
He turned off the shower, silencing the water. Past memories surged to fill the quiet.
Psikh Bogdanov. They see him as nothing more than an arm.
There’s a reason he’s called a living weapon, a nuke.
A weapon.
A nuke.
A man who was a nuke himself.
Taekjoo’s thoughts jumped from one clue to another. His eyes narrowed. Realization cut through him. Why hadn’t he seen it?
It had been right there, hiding in plain sight. Sometimes what’s most obvious is hardest to spot. Maybe that old saying would prove true again. As the conclusion crystallized, he dashed out of the bathroom.
✦ ✦ ✦
Taekjoo stood in a library in Irkutsk, ignoring the sharp stares he got for wearing a hospital gown. He didn’t care. He’d worried that an old library might have limited resources, but it was surprisingly well-equipped.
He went online. The connection was slow, though, so he had to be patient. He managed to load a satellite image on the sluggish search engine. He entered an address—the Bogdanov mansion in Moscow.
Soon, an aerial photo of the mansion and its surroundings appeared. He zoomed in. The image wasn’t perfectly clear, but he could make out the main hall, the outer garden, the central garden, and the gates. He mumbled as he stared at the screen.
“A castle no one lives in, a tree as old as Koschey, a treasure chest in the south, and smaller chests inside...”
His eyes widened. His heart raced. He could be wrong. He might be connecting dots that didn’t even exist. Maybe it was just a nasty coincidence. He had to be sure, more thorough.
He left the computer and went to the shelves. He passed through several sections before stopping at architecture. He pulled out every book on house design, focusing on foundations, and flipped through the indexes. He filtered through them and looked for the ones that mentioned the Bogdanov mansion.
He was down to six books. He opened each one. He was lucky. The books had detailed information about the mansion—its photos, architectural style, the architect, and materials used.
The mansion looked different in every photo. Some were taken during lush summers, others in bare winters. Some reference shots showed it lit up at night.
“...!”
Taekjoo studied the pictures repeatedly until he froze. At first, he thought it might just be a misreading, but no—it was unmistakable. Regardless of the season or time of day, one room in the mansion was always lit. Its curtains were always open.
I found it. Koschey’s heart.