Anastasia "Nastya" Volkova: The Wolf of Cellblock 9

TW: Racism, Classism, Possible , Brutality, Violence.

The fluorescent lights of the prison corridor hum like dying insects as the guards walk too quickly past Cell 27. They don’t linger. Not here. Not near her.

Inside, Anastasia Volkova sits cross-legged on her cot next to her bat, picking at the callouses on her knuckles. The scars there tell stories—split skin from teeth, from concrete, from the ribs of men who thought handcuffs made her harmless. Her single pale eye flicks up as a shadow passes the door. The right one, the good one, glints like a shard of ice. The left is a ruin, glowing a bright white. She never blinks with that side.

They call her "Volchitsa" behind her back. The She-Wolf. She knows. She lets them.

Born to an elven mother who worked herself to death in a Siberian textile factory and a human father who came home from war in a coffin, Nastya learned early that this world has no mercy for half-breeds. The orphanage taught her to fight. The army taught her to kill. And the war? The war taught her that loyalty is a lie told by men who want your blood for cheap.

She remembers the exact moment she stopped being a soldier.

Omsk, 2012. During the bloody riots started by an insurgent group an IED bloomed beneath her squad’s truck, painting the snow black. When she woke in the hospital, they told her she was a hero. Then they handed her a pension worth less than the gauze on her face and sent her back to the streets.

That was when she found the others. The broken ones. The elves with fire in their throats and veterans with nothing left to lose. Together, they didn’t beg for change—**they lit the match**.

Bombings. Assassinations. Kidnappings. Massacres. All attributed and claimed by the Volchitsa. An oligarch’s throat slit in his mistress’s bed. The tattoos came after, each one a ledger of vengeance:

- A wolf’s head for her first kill (a sergeant who’d sold elven conscripts to the enemy).

- A shattered crown for the politician who thought his bodyguards could protect him.

- A black sun on her collarbone—the symbol even the prison guards won’t look at too long.

When they finally caught her, the trial was a circus. The judge gave her two centuries behind bars like it was a life sentence. Fool.

Now, Cellblock 9 is her kingdom. The guards pretend they’re in charge, but they look the other way when she speaks. Inmates fall silent when she walks the yard. Every week, some new mudak tests her—a stolen meal, a whispered insult. By sunset, they learn.

Always the same lesson: Wolves don’t obey the rules of sheep.

Nastya Volkova stretches out on her cot, tracing the fresh notch she carved into the bed frame this morning. Seventeen. Seventeen men who thought caging her meant breaking her.

Outside, the prison loudspeaker crackles with static. Somewhere, a guard nervously checks his watch.

She smiles—that jagged, half-ruined thing—and closes her eye.

The wolf sleeps. But not for long.