All By Design: A Nikolai Lantsov Series

Chapter One: sharp enough to kill a man

this chapter's song: vigilante shit 

This is going to end badly. Of course it will. How could it go any other way?

Looking back, you probably should have seen the signs as they flashed before you. People were worried. Your reputation was splintering with every passing second. You used to be good. No one sees it now. No one had for a while. It makes perfect sense that they would try to do something to stop your image from fracturing any further. You just didn't think they'd resort to something like this.

Besides, it wasn't as if you were totally out of control. The world loves to watch its stars burn to ash and dust, to gawk and point as you lose the last of your principles and let it all go in one last hurrah. You weren't quite so close to your own dying days to to think you were anything but untouchable, but you weren't blind either. Everyone has their end date. Yours was coming up.

It wasn't like you were going to die. You didn't think you were there yet. No one thinks they are until it happens, but still. The only wars you had were internal. You don't make mistakes when it comes to business, you keep your books clean. You play by the rules, and they hate you anyway.

That's alright, though. A bit of good-natured sniping never hurt a soul. You'll sell your songs by the dozens, and a thousand people will read into every word in the hopes of grasping your true meaning. Maybe they'll find it, maybe it never existed at all. Regardless, you'll stay up there on that stage until it burns you out, and then at last you will be able to rest.

Until then, you stay with it. The game of the famous is a tempting one, you have never been able to keep away for long. You make yourself a promise that you'll stay out of the melee, maybe treat your wounds for a month or two, but soon enough you're creeping back towards the clubs and the nights out and all is lost once more. You've got people you know who are out every night, certainly more than you. They'll write your name in scarlet letters until you join them once more.

That's how you can excuse this to yourself. Blame it on others, never on yourself. In truth, maybe you were falling off the deep end. The journalists were certainly scrambling to chase down every sordid truth about your life, and you gave them enough to fill a thousand books and news broadcasts. It all came to a head with a meeting in your label's office. PR wants to talk, the email said. Say no more. You know what this means.

Or, you thought you knew what it would be. A slap on the wrist means the same thing as a warning shot in the dark, you'll ignore both until they're aiming for the whites of your eyes. There will always be people gunning for you. Saints know the amount of times they've tried to stage your death only for you to come out smiling. Not even Kaz Brekker, that godforsaken up-and-comer from the Barrel's scraping skies and burning bridges, could devise a plan to drag you down forever.

That's how you stay alive in the business, you know. You choose your enemies better than you choose your friend, and throughout all of it you develop a skin thick enough to carry you through every rumor, every lie. That's why you didn't stress that PR meeting all that much. They'd tell the same story about starting to get worried, and then they'd cut you loose for another month or two. It had happened before. You were sure that it would happen again.

Instead, you walked blindly into their game plan. You're not sure how long they'd been thinking about this, but it must have been long enough to get all their pieces in order. You were locked in checkmate before you even opened your mouth, you just didn't know it yet.

They did, though, and that was enough. Your lead PR specialist is a terror of a woman named Zoya Nazyalensky. She's well known in the industry for taking the most hopeless of cases and turning out martyrs and heroes by the dozens. Even if they don't last all that long, you'll be damned if you haven't heard of her clients by the time she's done with them. Zoya is ruthless and utterly without sentiment, but sometimes that's what you need. You know a few others who were made anew by her. One was a young woman who'd left a previous agency in Keramzin, but her stories come later. Yours is now.