Outrunning Blood

Valentin’s POV

(Summer 2021)

By the time I turned twenty-three, I already understood the truth of what I was born into. Sokolov Industries was a name wrapped in legitimacy, praised in magazines, and paraded across investment reports. But beneath the layers of corporate polish, it was a front. The hotels, the breweries, the shipping lines, the defense contracts; they were all veins that fed into so