In the world of blitz chess, Dmitry Volkov was legend and warning alike — the kind of player others spoke of in half-voices, as if saying too much might summon him to the board. His style was ruthless in its clarity: moves arriving with the velocity of instinct, combinations so quick they left even seasoned grandmasters blinking in disbelief. He rarely spoke during a match, not even to acknowledge victory. His eyes — dark, sharp, and unwavering — had a way of fixing on opponents until they faltered, hands trembling over the clock. Many called him brilliant, a few called him inhuman. To play against him, they said, was like trying to outstare a hawk.
I came to Moscow chasing a rumor — that the anonymous host of a rising podcast called The Inner Game was, in fact, Dmitry Volkov. The voice behind the mic, known only as “Andrey Danilov,” spoke every week to thousands of listeners about resilience, self-control, and the fine art of not cracking under pressure. His tone was calm, almost tender, with a trace of humor — the opposite of Volkov’s icebound reputation at the board. No one knew for sure it was him, but enough clues had surfaced: references to tournaments only Dmitry had played, a passing mention of childhood in Ryazan, even the faint accent that slipped through when the host spoke English. It was the kind of contradiction that intrigued me — the man known for destroying opponents in five-minute games might also be quietly teaching others how to hold themselves together.
He came to meet me at the hotel lobby, a figure who seemed to draw the room’s light into himself. Dmitry Volkov was enormous — easily over two meters — and built like someone who didn’t just sit behind chessboards. His head was shaved close, the planes of his face sharp, intelligent, composed. Black turtleneck, black coat, black gloves. Even his shoes looked precise. When he approached, people stepped aside without quite realizing it.
“Mr. DuPont,” he said, shaking my hand with a grip both formal and testing. “You write for that... culture magazine, yes?” His smile was quick and gone in a heartbeat. Then, with a dry kind of humor: “Why interview a sad, angry man of chess? There are happier games.”
His voice carried that same clean authority I’d heard on the podcast, only colder, like the sound had been cut on a sharper edge. Still, something in his restraint felt less like arrogance and more like self-defense. He spoke curtly, but every word was carefully chosen, never careless, never cruel. And while his tone warned me to keep distance, his eyes — black and vivid, the kind that remember everything — betrayed a steady warmth beneath the steel. It felt as if he was guarding something gentle by pretending it didn’t exist.
“I’d like to see the full picture,” I told him, trying not to sound too earnest. “Not just the sad, angry man.” I gestured toward the hotel café behind me. “May I at least buy you a coffee?”
He tilted his head slightly, that half-smirk flickering back. “I accept. But not that coffee.” He glanced toward the polished glass doors of the lobby restaurant as if they offended him. “Too much perfume, not enough coffee. Come, I’ll show you somewhere better.”
We walked out into the brittle Moscow air — the kind that seems to tighten your skin — and made our way down a side street off Tverskaya, past traffic and bursts of snowmelt. The café he led me to was tucked between a bookstore and an old clock repair shop, its sign painted by hand: Kofe & Dusha — Coffee & Soul. Inside, it smelled of cinnamon, roasted beans, and a hint of vanilla tobacco. Mismatched chairs, jazz playing low, warm lights in hanging glass jars. Everyone seemed to know him. The barista nodded, the owner waved without interrupting a conversation.
He ordered for both of us — “double ristretto for me, flat white for the guest” — then folded himself into a chair that looked too small for him. When he talked, his voice dropped into something looser, the edges smoothing out.
“These men,” he said, stirring sugar though he’d never taste it, “these grandmasters everyone worships — Karelson, Petrov, even the young one, Andrash — they are gods in their own minds. You know what Karelson once did? He resigned not by word, but by pushing the king onto the floor. And everyone applauded his temperament.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Petrov refused to shake my hand after a draw, said I blinked too loud during his endgame. And Andrash —” he sighed, “he sent a lawyer’s letter once over a meme. A meme. These people make the game uglier than it needs to be.”
I watched his expression shift — not bitterness, exactly, but something like tired disbelief. He went on, speaking of years spent among men who mistook cruelty for charisma. “You grow up in that,” he said quietly, “and you start to think the only way to survive is to be colder. I tried. But I’m not as good at it as they are.”
He sipped his coffee, eyes fixed on some middle distance. For the first time, his size seemed less imposing — not a wall, but a shadow cast by too much time in the ringlight of pressure and ego. The warmth I’d sensed earlier flickered again, like heat trapped under ice, waiting for the right crack.
By the time we stepped back into the street, the cold had softened. The snow along the curbs turned to gray slush, and the air had that faint, metallic smell that comes before thaw. Dmitry led me toward a park, saying it helped him “learn his lines.”
“Like an actor?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said. “You don’t just memorize games. You rehearse thought itself. Every move, every mistake. It’s a script of your own mind.”
He walked fast, too fast for the ice-slick paths. I tried to keep pace but slipped once, catching myself awkwardly. Dmitry glanced back, a rare grin flashing across his face. “Careful, DuPont. Moscow ice has no mercy.” He slowed down, and when the next patch looked treacherous, his gloved hand reached for my elbow — matter-of-fact, steady, oddly kind.
The park was half-empty — dog walkers, couples in heavy coats, old men smoking by the benches. Frost still edged the trees. We found a path by the frozen pond, and as he spoke, his tone changed from analytical to almost reflective. He told me about his family — two professors in Saint Petersburg, brilliant but absent, their conversations like equations. “They never fought,” he said. “They just… corrected each other. For years.” His only true ally was his younger sister, Katya. “She was chaos. She’d hide my chess pieces when I was training. She said I looked like a machine when I played.”
He smiled at that, the expression softening him again.
As we walked, he spoke about his first tournament win — a fifteen-year-old kid beating adults who’d underestimated him. “I remember the noise,” he said. “Not applause — keyboards. Everyone writing about the boy who didn’t blink.” Then came the loneliness that followed: long nights before a monitor, thousands of online matches, anonymous victories. “When you win too much, you stop having equals,” he said. “And without equals, you stop having company.”
The light in the park thinned into blue. Dmitry’s voice grew quieter. “If I ever build something of my own,” he said, “it won’t be a school or a studio. Just a small house by the sea. With windows that open to real silence. Not the kind people fill with clocks and phones.”
The thought seemed to comfort him. He stopped, watching the last sun slide across the frozen pond, and for a moment he looked nothing like the man who frightened half the chess world — only someone who’d been playing too long, and wanted, finally, to rest between moves.
We left the park when dusk began to swallow the light. Dmitry said he knew “a place for late lunch,” though the way he said it sounded more like a secret than an invitation. We cut through narrow backstreets until he stopped before a squat brick building with steamed-up windows and a flickering sign that read Domino Café.
Inside, the air smelled of fried onions, cigarettes, and something sweet — maybe baked apples. The tables were uneven, the wallpaper peeling, but there was laughter in the corners, and the sound of dominoes slamming onto wood like miniature thunderclaps. Dmitry waved to the room, and the room waved back. “They don’t know me as Dmitry here,” he said quietly. “I’m Sasha. Just Sasha.”
He moved easily among them — nodding, grinning, tossing short phrases in Russian that made everyone laugh. The transformation startled me. Gone was the glacial grandmaster; in his place stood a tall, joking man who could curse with poetry and slap a friend on the back without hesitation.
At our table, the chef — a round man in an apron that had seen better days — brought out roast beef sandwiches dripping with jus, still steaming, the bread crisp and dark. “For Sasha,” he said proudly, setting down two tumblers of frothy apple cider. The food was astonishing — hot, savory, perfectly seasoned — the kind of meal that doesn’t care about refinement because it’s too honest for it.
Dmitry bit into his sandwich with visible pleasure, a little juice catching at the corner of his mouth. He laughed when someone shouted across the room, responding with a phrase that made three men roar and slap the table. I didn’t understand the words, but the rhythm of them told me it was affectionate.
When an older man with a white beard approached, Dmitry rose at once, serious again, and shook his hand with reverence. “The champion of the world,” he told me, half-smiling. “Dominoes, not chess. A better game. You win here only if people like you.”
I watched him lean close, listening intently as the old man spoke, his huge hands folded, his expression soft. It was the first time that day I saw how easily he could connect — how natural it was for him, once he dropped the armor. Among these players, with their chipped mugs and loud jokes, he wasn’t intimidating or cold. He was simply at home.
As twilight deepened over Moscow, Dmitry led me through quieter streets toward a building that looked far too ordinary to contain anything adventurous. The sign above the door was modest: Urban Quests Co. — an office that promised excitement without ever shouting it. Inside, the space was compact and cluttered with maps, old compasses, and props that suggested mystery and daring. Plastic skeletons leaned against the walls, and half-finished puzzles littered the desks.
His friend emerged from behind a stack of folders, a man of medium height with wiry shoulders and a perpetually tousled mop of brown hair. He wore glasses that kept sliding down his nose, and a faded vest that looked like it had survived a dozen adventures. His handshake was firm, but his smile was wide and unabashed, like someone who genuinely loved chaos, puzzles, and people who dared to enter his world.
Dmitry relaxed almost immediately. The rigid posture of a grandmaster fell away. He walked with a lightness I hadn’t seen all day, joking quietly with the man as they moved toward a table strewn with models of city streets, cryptic notes, and half-built props. He pulled a stack of notebooks toward him and, with a conspiratorial glance at me, revealed that he had authored a series of these mystery quests — highly unusual, layered with twists that no player could predict.
“I like when people think they understand it,” Dmitry said, tapping a page, “then discover they don’t. That moment, that surprise, is everything.” He smiled faintly, the warmth from the café returning, this time framed by the flicker of desk lamps and the cramped, creative chaos of the office. Watching him here, I realized how much of himself he poured into worlds no one could see unless they dared to follow the lines he had drawn. The Volkov I had feared that morning was still there, but in this room he was a storyteller, a guide, someone quietly delighted by minds willing to play along.
I leaned back in my chair, staring at him as he gestured at the notebooks, explaining a particularly fiendish puzzle twist. Every glance, every gesture seemed to hint at another layer of him — the grandmaster, the podcaster, the jokester in the café, the secret author. I realized I was trying to map him, to understand him, but the more I saw, the more impossible it became. Each side revealed a contradiction: precision and playfulness, coldness and warmth, solitude and connection. I wondered, quietly, how many layers this man held, and whether anyone could ever truly reach the center.
By the time night fell, Dmitry led me to his podcast studio, a space that felt intimate and lived-in rather than clinical. The lighting was soft, amber, and the walls lined with books, microphones, and cables coiled in neat, precise loops. He had prepared a small dinner — wedge of creamy cheese, slices of cured meat, and two glasses of deep red wine, each from boutique producers whose labels he explained with pride. The aroma of the food mingled with the warm, faintly musty smell of old paper and electronics.
As we ate, he began pulling out letters, photographs, and little keepsakes from his growing archive of podcast success. Handwritten notes from listeners, screenshots of Skype calls, snapshots of virtual meetups — all addressed to Sasha, the persona no one outside the circle knew to be him. He spoke of these friends with a tenderness I had never expected. His large hands trembled slightly as he traced a message from a young player, reading aloud the words of gratitude. “They only know me this way,” he said, voice soft, “but they trust me. They share their fears, their wins… and I feel responsible for them.”
He smiled more freely than I’d seen all day, leaning back in his chair and letting his massive shoulders relax. He laughed quietly at a memory from a call, mimicked the tone of a shy listener, and for the first time I saw him entirely unguarded. He was no longer the imposing grandmaster from the morning, nor the teasing jokester from the café — he was a man who gave care, fully, to a world only he and his listeners inhabited.
When we left and walked through the darkened Moscow streets back to my hotel, his large frame moving beside me, I felt a quiet awe. The fear and intimidation I had felt that morning had completely melted away. In their place was something infinitely more compelling: warmth, gentleness, and a generosity of spirit that I hadn’t expected from a man so formidable. I realized then that the true game Dmitry played was not only over the chessboard, but in the hearts he quietly touched, and I was utterly captivated.
Back at the hotel, I pulled out my phone and showed Dmitry the screenshots of the article layout — the photos arranged with captions, the excerpts from our interview, the way the text danced around the images of him in Moscow, in the café, in the park. He leaned over, tall and broad, eyes narrowing slightly as he studied the composition.
“Looks… accurate,” he said after a moment, a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You’ve caught the day well.”
I grinned, gesturing toward my room. “Why don’t you come up? You can see the full dummy on the big screen. It’s easier to appreciate the colors and details there.”
He hesitated just a heartbeat, then nodded. “Lead the way, man. Let me see your work.”
We rode the elevator in silence, side by side, the soft hum of the cabin filling the space. When the door opened onto my room, I could feel that same warm, gentle energy he had exuded in the studio, now mingled with curiosity. He followed me over to the laptop, and as I opened the full layout, he leaned in, letting his head tilt ever so slightly, absorbed in the images and text I had arranged. For the first time all day, he didn’t need to speak much — his presence alone, interested and unguarded, made the room feel alive with quiet satisfaction.
“Wow, thank you,” he said. “This IS me.”
***
One breath I was standing behind his chair, next breath the room tilted—Dmitry’s mouth landed on mine without warning, cold at first then blazing. His frame folded around me like a cathedral arch, huge arms careful, almost trembling, as if I might chip like porcelain. I smelled the sharp bite of expensive cigarettes clinging to his collar, the musky cologne that sneezed at my sinuses, and beneath both something raw and grateful that made my knees forget their job. His palms glided down my spine, slow, reverent, each fingertip feeling like a cautious pilgrim, and the contrast—this ruthless board butcher kissing like a shy boy—sent a hot, dizzy wave straight to my toes.
Then his lips left mine and began a slow, deliberate circuit—brow, temple, the corner of my eye where tears sometimes collect—each kiss feather-light, as if he were tasting something he’d only read about. I felt the scratch of his beard shadow, then the soft apology that followed when he gentled the pressure, brushing the sting away with the next kiss. Meanwhile his huge fingers threaded into my hair, cupping the base of my skull like he was cradling something breakable; every tiny circle of his thumbs sent sparks shooting down the back of my neck, over my shoulders, straight to the base of my spine until I shivered against him, helpless, the room melting into warm static behind my eyelids.
The sheer size of him should have felt crushing, yet every touch was asking permission—huge arms trembling like they’ve never held anything fragile. My whole body roared for more; I grabbed fistfuls of his dress shirt, tugging until the buttons strained. He paused, gave me that small, crooked smile, then lifted his hands in quiet surrender—like a chess player toppling his own king. I peeled away his shirt and silk tie, then the white tee beneath, revealing a broad pelt of black hair over hard muscle, large dark nipples, a silky bitch-path of hair arrowing from sternum to waistband. When he reached for my shirt his fingers still shook; we stripped it off together and stepped in, his hairy chest rasping my smooth one, heat sealing skin to skin while his heartbeat hammered against my ribs like a clock counting down to something neither of us could name.
Our belts clink, denim grinds denim, and my hardon tests the pressure downward, expecting some massive Russian monolith—instead it bumps into a modest, half-swollen shaft lying sideways beneath the cotton, warm but not yet fierce. Surprise flickered through me; he felt it, too, his cheeks coloring as he muttered “oh my god, oh my god,” in a soft, almost frightened voice, nothing like the chess hall iceberg voice in his TV interviews. I popped his button, tugged jeans past thick thighs; he mirrored me, fingers clumsy on my zipper, breathing so hard his shoulders quaked. When we stepped free of our clothes he swayed, his big frame suddenly boyish, and I caught his waist to steady the tremor vibrating through him.
I’d heard sculptors call it the Rodin trick—put a merely ample organ on a colossal frame and the eye short-changes itself. Still, when his briefs slid down, the sight stole my breath. There it lay: a straight, pale shaft, maybe six inches, rising only halfway to full mast, the crown peeking neatly from a short cuff of foreskin already retracting with excitement. Against the granite sweep of his thighs the proportions seemed almost delicate, yet every detail sang—velvet skin flushed rose at the tip, a single clear bead trembling in the slit, a subtle upward curve that promised sweet pressure rather than stretch. Beautiful in its modest certainty, his dick seemed a perfectly carved rook standing quiet beside towering kings.
“Let me,” he murmured. Those deep-set black eyes locked on mine—no chill, only vast, tender gravity—and the room tilted. I fell into the pupils, two dark moons pulling every atom soft; my lungs forgot their rhythm, knees liquefied. He drew a sudden, sharp breath, whispered “Mine, mine,” and then his huge hands slipped beneath my thighs, lifting me clean off the floor as if I weighed nothing. The ceiling blurred, but all I could see were those twin voids drawing me in—until pressure bloomed below: the warm, blunt head of his cock found me, pushed, breached, and while I was still drowning in his gaze he entered me, slow but inexorable, gravity reversed inside my body.
I hung suspended, muscles liquid, limbs weightless as smoke—only two bright coordinates remained: the thick, slow burn where he split me open, and the faint tickle of my own cock-head brushing his furry abdomen with every tiny sway. Everywhere else turned to warm static; I ceased to own shoulders, back, even breath—those black pupils bore through me, branding each cell. His voice steadied into a hushed drumbeat: “Mine… mine… listen, you are mine now,” each repetition pulsing through the single point of union, until the words and the pressure merged and I couldn’t tell which was hotter—his shaft inside me or the claim repeating in my skull.
Each stroke felt like the platform beneath me started to spin—carousel lights whirling past—but those two black pupils stayed dead center, rising and falling with the slow pump of his hips, unmoving anchors in a tilting world. I lost track: was he actually twirling us, feet gliding across the rug, or was it my skull doing cartwheels? Every second beat delivered that long, itchy glide—shaft dragging over the sweet spot—then his whole torso swiveled, shoulders carving a quarter-circle, room blurring, ceiling lamps strobing. My breath raced the rotation, frantic puffs timed to the merry-go-round revolutions, until up, down, spin, and thrust collapsed into one dizzy orbit pinned by those unblinking eyes.
The room melted into white sand and salt wind—Dmitry and I sprinted naked along a shoreline that didn’t exist—then snapped back to mattress springs creaking under his weight, chest crushing mine, and I couldn’t tell which was memory, which was now. A distant chord of music swelled, dissolved; my arms floated up on their own, fingers hooking behind his thick neck, feeling the drum of his pulse against my wrists—fast, steady, tethering the hallucination. I was weightless, feather-light, yet every micro-slide of his cock sent hot sparks showering through my sac, each spark climbing my shaft until the head scraped his furry abs. Foreskin peeled back so tight it stung, but the sting felt like applause, like confirmation I was still there, still his, and I rode the burn with a grin swallowed by his next deep kiss.
I tried to glance down—wanting to watch the roll of his shoulders, the flex of my own thighs hooked over his forearms—but the black pupils snagged me like hooks; they didn’t waver, didn’t blink, they simply swallowed focus. Peripheral vision melted: cheekbones, beard-shadow, even the ceiling dissolved into smeared watercolor. When his mouth grazed my throat I felt the warm press, the scrape of stubble, yet those eyes remained stamped on my retina—impossible, disembodied—so the kiss seemed to happen inside the gaze itself, two sensations fused into one continuous drill of attention that refused to let me look anywhere but inward, at him, at the claim repeating behind my eyelids.
The moans cut through the fog first—low, raw, climbing pitch—until the trance loosened its grip and sensation flooded back in a rush. I felt every urgent inch of him driving up, up, while my own cock dragged wet stripes across his fur-covered abs, foreskin slipping with each thrust. Sound widened: ragged breaths, wet kisses, the soft scuff of hair on my inner thighs, even the mattress creaking like a metronome gone wild. Dmitry’s rhythm stumbled, hips losing their hypnotist’s precision, until with a final, grinding lunge we toppled sideways—sweat-sealed, hearts hammering together—and the spell broke into plain, gasping daylight on the crumpled sheet.
“My sweetness, my dear, ah, ah, ah,” he chanted, voice pitched higher, almost woman-soft, each syllable riding the snap of his hips that pounded me deeper into the mattress. I blinked through the tunnel—edges dark, center bright—and his face strobed above me: eyes shut tight, black hair strands falling forward, lips swollen and moving like prayer. The stern hypnotist was gone; in his place there was now a panting lover whispering lullabies between thrusts, tenderness spilling out with every breath, and the sound wrapped around me sweeter than any hymn while his cock kept drumming the rhythm of the words.
Heat flooded back into my sac so fast I barely clocked the warning—just a sudden fat swell of the glans, then two, three blunt nudges right on the sweet spot and I was gone. Orgasm ripped through me like a snapped cable; I bucked beneath him, vision whiting out, cock kicking hard enough to slap his stomach. Spurts sprayed in quick, hot arcs across the dark hair of his belly while he lifted slightly, driving in once more to nail the after-shocks, each tremor of mine answered by a low, satisfied grunt as he keeped me pinned right where the pleasure peaked and breaked.
I waited for the hot flood, but he whispered, “Look at me,” and those twin coals flashed open—black, endless—sucking the world away. Instantly I was weightless again, orgasm still rippling through me yet distant, like surf heard through thick glass. I felt the hard jerks of his cock under my balls, the warm splashes filling me, heard the ragged cries tearing from his throat, but none of it reached center stage; only the gaze existed, drilling, spinning, until my own climax and his dissolve into the dark pupils and the room whirled once more into silent, starry orbit…
***
In the morning sunlight striped the sheet where his big frame should have been—empty, dent in the pillow still warm. I sat up, head spinning with after-images of black pupils, and found the folded piece hotel paper on the nightstand:
“Dear Augie, you were so sweet sleeping. You commanded my heart last night; if I waited until you wake, I wouldn’t have left, and that would have been bad for both of us. I will call you about the signoff on the article, and thank you for letting me love you. I did, honestly. I’ll miss that. Dima.”
The handwriting was small, careful—like the gentle giant was afraid his size might smudge the ink. I pressed the note to my chest, hearing the echo of his hypnotic whisper, and for a moment the room tilted again, but the carousel was slow this time. My world that morning smelled faintly of cedar cologne and the chill carried in from the corridor.
Photos of Dmitry laughing carefree in his modest podcast studio, and the pieces of his interview where he talked so animatedly about grateful listeners broke the ice in many hearts. He still doesn’t have time to expand his podcast, but the money is waiting on his banking account—two sponsors thought the idea was worth financing. At least one million readers read the story on and offline, and there was a TV interview, which he hated but which brought him more publicity.
I know now how he wins his games, too, and don’t you readers? I hope you, too, now can see two large dark eyes staring at you through the page.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
