She was the first thing he wanted. He could not save her. Brighton Beach, summer 2007. Viktor Lebedev is nineteen. Not yet the pakhan his father will make him. Not yet the silver-fox alpha you will meet in *Lebedev's Bride*. Just a boy with his father's hands and his mother's grief, walking past Petrova's bakery one Thursday afternoon and stopping when he sees her. Katya Morozova is nineteen. Daughter of a card-game operator. Lives in three rooms with her mother's photographs on every wall — the ghost of a woman cancer took when Katya was ten. She has never been touched. She has never been protected. The bratva watch her father. The bratva watch her. Everyone knows. Nobody says anything. That is how Brighton Beach works. He sits down across from her without asking. She does not flinch.
