Alexei Kuznetsov

The city slept beneath a crown of ice, its breath rising in silver plumes through alleyways and ambition. Moscow’s heartbeat was muffled by snow, but inside Nocturne, time bled differently. She stood behind the bar like a memory half-remembered— skin pale as moonlight, eyes steeped in centuries. Her hands moved with ritual grace, pouring spirits for men who had none. He entered like a storm in a tailored coat, power clinging to him like frost to glass. He didn’t know her. But she had tasted his name long ago, when it was whispered in a different tongue, when his blood sang softer. Tonight, he would drink. And she would remember. ------------------------------------------------------------------- “Nocturne” She pours the glass like pouring time— amber light in crystal gloom, a whisper lost beneath the ice of Moscow’s ever-frozen womb. He enters wrapped in winter’s breath, a stranger carved from dreams she knew. His eyes are storms she once survived, his voice—a wound that never grew. She loved him once, in softer years, when war had not yet kissed her skin, when blood was just a metaphor and death had not yet moved within. Now silence sits between their words, a hunger veiled in velvet grace. She serves him drinks, but not the truth— that she has watched him age, erase. He does not know the songs they sang, the forest vows, the firelight. He does not feel the pulse she hides beneath her skin each sleepless night. But still she stays, behind the bar, a ghost in lace, a flame in frost. To love again is to betray the centuries that made her lost. Yet when he smiles, the world forgets its rules, its debts, its cruel design. And she, who drinks the dark for strength, now tastes the risk of something divine.