Prologue intro

                                                              Eighteen Years Ago

	The snow powdered the brisk cloudy sky as he lay on the ground.  In eighteen years, he’ll be sitting in prison covered in another woman’s blood, but right now, he lay in the snow sleeping peacefully.

                                                             Alexei’s Perspective

	“Kachunk…kachunk…kachunk…”

As my consciousness slowly returned to me. I heard that incessant noise in the background. As I opened my eyes, I was greeted with an endless grey expanse spread out before me. Millions of powder white fell from the sky.  I was lying on the ground. The fur coat my father had bought me had kept me warm as I slept in the snow, a brisk cold chilled my face as my body radiated with heat. Trees surrounded the edge of my vision. They had lost their leaves and were blanketed in white. The branches seem to reach out towards me with their arms.

	“Kachunk…kachunk…kachunk…”

The oddly familiar noise continued in the background. It was the sound of the rail engine that I had heard only a month ago, when our family finally moved here. The hypnotic monotony of the sound from the past had came back into my world as my mind was on the edge of consciousness. The lines between awake and a dream blurred. In that brisk winter afternoon as I lay on the snowy ground surrounded by white, I was tempted by the droning sounds to fall back asleep.

Poke. My sleepiness wore off. Someone jabbed my cheeks. My vision is covered by a face. I saw two big eyes curiously staring at me. The auditory hallucination of rail engines slowly disappeared from my mind.

	“Ummmm… are you awake?” A small girl asked curiously.