A fixer is a term used often in criminal elements to describe a person that makes arrangements for people. Per the name, they’re usually there to assist in fixing a problem. Livia Avencii is a recipient of such an entity in the criminal world, being the daughter of a prominent Italian mobster. Her childhood was brutal and disgusting, as her father went through great lengths to make sure she was prepared to take over the drug empire he had built overseas, but honestly she was stretched so thin mentally that she had none of it. She took a bag of money (a pittance in comparison to the empire) and the absolute basics and ran. This was perhaps in the early 2000’s, surveillance could be intense in some parts of the world but given that she never had photographs of her taken, her face was not out in the world and would raise no flags. This was an advantage when she ran.

Livia was a woman of mixed heritage, born and raised in Italy but traveled fairly often, learning a multitude of relevant languages to the criminal underworld including English. She had an accent but after a year in the United States, and a concentrated effort on her part she lost some of it but it still stuck around in times of frustration or high emotion, which she suppressed. She had tanned skin thanks to her mother’s side, incredibly long brown hair that she used to keep in a ponytail but after her escape she kept it down to obscure her face. She had piercing, sharp brown eyes. A clean face overall, but had a foreboding stoic expression that put her expression in somewhat permanent neutrality. She had been through a lot and it showed.

The fixer she hired had multiple stops for her to get through, including a several hour wait in a smaller town in the middle of America. She was certainly not short on wealth and if she spent carefully, it would carry her far. It was enough to spend casually, and at one point she spent some time in a bar to watch the local news. It was one of the first times she got a read on the country’s culture. Oddly the television spent a lot of time talking about the world, which she assumed America to be more self centered, perhaps it was just the specific channel. It spoke of a major earthquake and hurricane, but it eventually veered back into the events of 9/11, still fresh in America’s mind and putting a lot of military pressure on the middle east. At that point some mohawk’d, bearded punk sauntered into the bar with a couple of his mates and demanded the television to be turned off. The bartender complied without protest, perhaps he just wasn’t interested in the channel either.

“I was watching that,” Livia said in her usual monotonous manner.

“Well I guess yer not are ya, cunt?”

She gave a nod in acquiescence. She then took her bottle of local bear and smashed it against head, flinging him off the bar and onto the floor. Enough force that the bottle itself shattered and exploded. The punk bled a bit but the damage was superfluous, easily fixed by a bandage or a stitch.

Naturally his mates took offense to this, looking at her with fury in their eyes. She kept the shattered bottle in hand, and stated flatly:

“Whatever you are thinking, be sure to rethink it.”

They stare matched hers, unblinking. Perhaps they recognized that the woman was not to be trifled with, and they took their friend’s arms to drag him out of the bar.

“Would you turn that back on, please?”

Wide-eyed in amazement, the bartender complied again. He still had to mention, “Normally I’d remove everyone involved in a fight…”

She interrupted, “No. I won’t be here long enough for it to matter.”

The bartender gave a shrug with a ‘fair enough’ facial expression.

True to her word, she was only there for a couple of hours before going back to the airport, her layaway was up.

The fixer had aimed to get her to a village in Norway, not far from some steppes to a mountain range. The mountain would give her cover, and the couple of towns nearby would give some relative anonymity. A lot of people fleeing a life of crime tend to choose some islands, straight down to Mexico or even Sweden. However Livia always liked the cold, the snow. Alaska was even up for an option but she wanted to be a bit more deceptive. Norway is technically closer to Italy but knowing her father, she surmises that he may think she decided to bunker down in America. Otherwise, it would be quieter. She specifically wanted to live a meager life of chopping wood and hunting wolves.

She was led to a shack, off the path. Down the hills there was a decently sized town, with a population of about ninety-thousand. Close enough to a major city for imports but still mostly sustaining themselves. Up the mountain paths was an isolationist village, which she was warned against bothering. They were described as wearing animal furs, had their own farms, and lived completely off the grid. There was electricity up there, as during the night she noticed plenty of lights and even heard the faint sound of music coming down the mountain. Likely using their own generators.

Her shack was small, a single room. It was a tiny longhouse, a privacy curtain for a shower. It too was similarly off the grid, only having lanterns and oils to keep warm. There was a bed, stove, a single table that could only fit two visitors and herself comfortably. Some shelving and storage units but not much, most of the storage was a small shed on the back of the house, pushed against it. Ultimately the whole thing took very little space at all, which she adored. It’s essentially exactly what she wished for.

Outside was a scattered forest, plenty of skinny pine trees with some spread to see a decent distance, with some of it too thick to do so. She took the time to set up basic traps for both wolves and people, as she had the advantage of having private property. They weren’t always harmful or lethal traps, but more of an early warning system. A crack here, a trip there. One of the many survival tactics her father taught her, from taking a ship and tossing her onto a small island to survive for a week. She almost didn’t make it.

Her USD did not do her very well but the fixer was well paid enough to assist her in some conversions. She planned on setting some roots down but she still kept several bundles of foreign currency in case of emergency. Ultimately she had a sizable portion of it converted to Norwegian Krones. It got her pretty far, at the time the Krone was worth .15ths of a dollar. Not a bad conversion for her purposes. On occasion she would travel down to the town to make some basic purchases. Other than the necessities she also purchased a decent hunting rifle, nothing military and no suppressor. She was far enough away from anything to the point where her potshots at wolves were never heard, nobody came looking for the source.

English was fairly prominent in Norway, being their second language. She would still go on to learn some relevant phrases but it seemed like she didn’t need to, and mostly asked to pass the time.

She was vaguely acquainted with the hunters up the mountain. They were cordial enough, being introduced to the fact that it’s technically their land but a bit too far below them (topographically speaking) to deal with so the shack was abandoned and maintained by outsiders. They asked for no tax, just that she respects the land. She does fine enough, and actually opened a line of trade between but is always stopped at their defensive gate up the path when she had pelts to sell.

While they did employ furs in their usual wardrobe, she found it odd that some were rather scant in their clothing. More than she’d expect for the cold, anyway. All the hunters she met always wore full pants and shoes to deal with the snow, but above the belt was always more random. The men sometimes didn’t have shirts, a portion of their chest showed with some wolf pelt covering their shoulders. A hunter, whom she finally wrangled the name Astrid from, wore a type of split-leather where her sides and midsection showed, but wore pelts and a hood as everyone else did. The one time she bothered to engage in conversation, Livia asked about it.

“I did not want to be impolite, but why do some of you… not cover everything?”

“It breathes. We’re very active,” Astrid said.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Oh. Makes sense,” Livia said truthfully. She knew full well after some hours spent chopping wood, sometimes she’d remove her overcoat because the heat became too much to bear.

“I also didn’t want to be impolite, but where’s that accent from?” Astrid asked, in her own fairly thick Norwegian accent.

“Ah. I am from Italy. I tried to lose it but I guess I won’t for some time.”

Astrid would nod once, satisfied with the answer but left to return to her group after lingering at Livia’s shack for a minute too long.

Livia barely got a good look at her. She had a strong, matronly jaw with thin lips. Damn near as white as the snow below them, but not truly. Livia was used to the occasional double-takes to her own person, as the country was very heavily Caucasian. Over time, people barely paid her a mind.

Livia spent roughly six months doing all of these things before anything of note happened.

It was an early morning like any other. Livia built up a routine but she lived by her whims, lonely in the cold wilderness. Some days she would cut wood, sometimes she’d hunt, sometimes she kept a journal, and sometimes she would just relax and listen to the pine leaves rub against each other in the wind. She was cooking some noodles on the stovetop when she heard one of her early warnings trigger. One would think it was just a hunter come to visit, but it was in the opposite direction. Her vicious ‘training’ gave her a degree of paranoia so her first action was to grab her rifle and pocket some ammunition, and essentially geared herself up as quickly as she could, even choosing her white jacket to camouflage with the snow.

She exited her shack but kept to her own perimeter. She had crafted herself a bit of a makeshift fence, which she used for basic cover and some stability for her rifle as she peered between the trees, the best her vision would allow.

She caught a glimpse of something. Tall, furred, and very white. She almost missed it, as it also blended with the snow stuck to the pine. She elected to step a few trees closer, constantly using them for cover. It was rarely for her to leave the comfort of her shack, she never needed to. Event hunting was easy, as packs of wolves sometimes wandered in her tiny zone.

After some basic tracking, she learned that this beast was not subtle, nor particularly quiet. A guttural, inconsistent growl could be heard as some lumbering beast sauntered around the woods, with barely a proper goal in mind. When she got a good look at its backside, she was very confused.

It was like a wolf, but stood tall. It was a pale white in its fur, and massive in scope. Incredibly broad shoulders, long legs with powerful thighs and calves. It was like nothing she had ever seen. Notably, it was scratching at trees and twitching erratically. She didn’t get a good look at its front yet but she saw it twitch its snout into the nearest tree, biting into the bark and drooling all over it. Mad, this thing was.

After a few seconds, the idea of a ‘werewolf’ came to mind. From all the movies and television shows she used to watch, it had the same stature. Surely not, however, because werewolves were not real.

It seemed to be all but confirmed when it turned around. Livia duck lower, sinking into the snow slightly, letting her white hood cover most of her features. She didn’t have a particularly keen eyesight, but had no need for glasses either. The beast was something to the effect of sixty feet away from her, and indeed it was highly werewolf-like. Long, bloody snout, perhaps from a recent meal. The red was punctuated deeply from all the white fur, it was partially dried and reached down to its chest area. It even looked like the beast had breasts, but all possible extremities were covered by fur. Still, it was not a titillating picture, the beast continued to drool, twitch, and even howled. Not a howl like she’s heard on television, this one was sickly and low. It drooled on itself, the salvia revitalizing some of the dried blood which made it drip down its cleavage even further.

The scope of its height could not be understated in her mind. It was a massive beast, comparable to a bear. It certainly dwarfed her, so she elected to slide down the small snow mound obscuring her and snuck back to her shack. It was successful, as she didn’t seem to have caught its attention until more of her warning traps began to trip, accompanied by the annoyed howl of the creature with violent slashing against the trees nearby. Livia ran into her shack and covered most of the windows, peeking out a slight one-inch slit and noticed one of the trees began to fall. It was approaching.

After being annoyed at getting a stick in its ankle, it lumbered over towards her shack. She put out all possible lights she could, and watched the beast just wander and observe the perimeter of the shack. Not entirely unlike a bear in a camper’s gathering. Livia’s heart was pounding at this point, adrenaline coursing through her to the point where everything almost seemed to slow down, much to her annoyance because she’d rather this problem go away as soon as possible.

She tracked the beast through the windows, having left a slight inch in all the flaps so she could watch it wander. Unfortunately the light peering in, without any internal lights did not give her the best periphery and she bumped into her bed, wood screeching against wood.

The beast charged the shack like it was an enemy all by itself, tearing through one of the windows as if there wasn’t a structure there at all. An entire hole now in her shack, she ran out the door to get a better vantage point to open fire. And fire she did, opening a volley of three bullets before noticing that she did nothing to deter it. To wit, the bullets had connected and entered the creature, as it bled slightly (again, she could only tell because the bright white fur accentuated any damage it took). She opted for a reload as the howling, mad wolf began to close the distance.

She got one more shot off and with the range closing, managed to get a shot right in one of its eyes, which surprisingly gave it pause. It howled in pain, their large claws trying to dig at the eye cavity to try and retrieve the intruder but it quickly gave up to locate the source of the shot which was, of course, the reloading Livia not terribly far away. It was incredibly fast, the size of the beast allowed it to close the distance in only a couple of seconds, where its massive maw clamped onto Livia’s left shoulder. The force of the charge pushed her onto the back as their maw chewed down.

There was so much pain and fear, that it reminded her of a memory. Her father once staged an assault one night as she slept. One of his underlings was tasked with emulating a sexual assault (though not going that far or he would likely have been killed). It was a test of her reflexes and combat prowess at the time, even when she was very young. It absolutely terrified her as she was being held down, but got a lucky knee to the man’s groin, took his knife, and shoved it into his ear. At the time she assumed it was a rival cartel infiltrating the compound to make her father hurt so she went lethal. Discovering that it was just one of her father’s thugs nearly made her vomit, yet he was absolutely so proud of her. She hated that.

Livia was nearly in a similar position here, and she had a combat knife. A couple of them, really. However this monster-wolf’s attack was erratic, behaving almost like a bear protecting its den. As it chewed through her arm, it at times lifted her up to smash her against a tree. It left her alone for just a second as it had another one of its odd seizures, which allowed her to begin crawling away, bleeding all over the snow. She went towards her shack but the pause in combat did not last long as it leaped over and bit at the same wound yet again, nearly tearing her arm off.

She was able to turn around only for it to bite yet again, this time her arm properly being torn right off, sliding down a couple feet away from the melee. She wanted to throw up, her mouth tasted of iron but her mind was just flooded with thoughts of survival even though part of her knew she would not. The creature crawled on top of her ready to nip at the next part of its meal but with her remaining arm she got her knife to stab at it. Their hide was incredibly tough, it was like trying to cut through steel. She didn’t waste too much time on its hide though and due to their proximity, she elected to begin stabbing at the eye she shot through.

The plan worked, she stabbed and stabbed and the beast was too preoccupied with its own pain to respond properly. The eye cavity was eventually carved out enough to fit the entire blade in. Blood spewed all over Livia, getting into her mouth and the nub of her lost arm, and absolutely drenching her white jacket. Eventually she was able to palm strike the hilt of the knife with all the strength she had left and she was surprised that it began to… stop. There was a groaning, a sad mewling as perhaps the knife finally reached its brain and pierced it. It was hard to tell if it was an instant kill or not, or if the beast’s muscle memory just allowed it to stand there for a second before flopping lifelessly on top of Livia. It was so god damn heavy, she couldn’t move now. Tried as she might, she had no strength left and it got very hard to breathe, and was met with an oncoming burning sensation that permeated her veins.

This was of course, not the end of her story.