3
Nik
“Well?” my father growls on the other end of the phone. “You ready for a job, or what?”
Fog has rolled in, revealing swathes of blood-red trees as the wind drives it from the lake.
I walk briskly down the path, sweat sticking my shirt to my neck. I woke early, before five. When I saw her sleeping beside me, lips parted and hair mussed, it took everything in me not to lose it.
Say fuck it and leave her there, go back to the city and look my father in the eye and tell him it was over—I wasn’t going to do this to Zane. I couldn’t.
I managed to talk myself out of it, running a few miles in the bracing autumnal cold instead. What good would it do anyway? Best case scenario, my dad would beat hers as punishment and maybe insist we get pregnant immediately.
Worst case, he’d kill her dad—and possibly her too.
“You just sent me out here,” I growl right back at my father, holding the phone to my ear. “I thought the point was to get acquainted with my new wife.”
“Watch your tone.” But he only sounds amused. “You’re already acquainted. You’ve known that little brat since you were still in the fucking womb.”
“You know what I mean.” I stalk through the woods, the wild air rushing, spiked with cold, into my lungs. “What kind of job?” I was shunted into the hitman corner early, when I grew taller and broader than most of my uncles and cousins. My steely disposition only further sold the frigid cruelty so many in the mafia aimed for.
I killed my first man when I was sixteen. Zane didn’t know then—does she now? It was Maya who gripped my hand in her little fist when she found out.
I can’t do this,I remember saying to her, my voice not even fully deepened.I can’t live like this my whole life.
And Maya, capricious, sharp, and impossibly more dangerous than me, had yanked me close.Don’t you ever say that shit again. Not if you want to survive, Nikolai. Not if you want all of us to survive.
How many men have I killed since? How many has Maya? I find myself missing my cousin acutely as I approach the still waters of the lake. She’d know what to make of all this. She’d know how to survive.
“As much as you dislike me right now,” my father says, sobering me. “You have to know I’m not the enemy here.”
“Oh yeah? Who the fuck is?” Usually I bite my tongue a little more, but he and I both know how warranted my anger is.
We used to be close, me and my father. I used to look up to him, and look forward to filling his shoes. But in the years since Mom died, every dreg of humanity in him seems to have dissipated. He’s worse than a villain—he’s nothing. Just a shell of a man, seeking to accumulate as much power and wealth as he can before he’s inevitably executed in his sleep. And I’m his humble, killing servant.
“Lebedev.”
“Yvan…” I stop dead on the path at one of the most infamous Russian names in the United States. “I thought you two already kissed and made up.”
“You know damn well we’ve never rebuilt the bridges that bastard burned.” The other end of the line is quiet a long time. Then, “This isn’t the first time Yvan Lebedev has fucked with this family. It’s going to be his last.”
I continue moving, more slowly now. I can hear the soft tide of the lakeshore, hidden in the mist somewhere at the foot of this overgrown hill. “I though you guys were over that shit in the eighties.”
“His loyalties have always been… mercurial. And anyway, it’s different now.”
“Why?” I’m getting frustrated. Usually my father leaves out the whys of a kill—usually I’m commissioned blankly. Why the hell is he telling me this? “Because he swore loyalty and broke it? Maybe you should have killed him the first time.”
“It’s different,” says my father, a hint of barely-controlled rage in his tone now, “because his betrayal cut deeper this time. He turned your father-in-law to his cause.”
I stop again. Dark water slides over black sand. My shoes sink in, and I step closer, inhaling the ghastly, shadowed cold of this old lake. “I thought her dad didn’t know who he was working for when he betrayed you.”
“Listen to me closely, Nikolai. The girl isn’t some gift—she’s insurance. The more danger her father thinks she’s in, the better. Especially if Lebedev comes sniffing after her.”
I run a hand through my damp curls, my own rage boiling just beneath the surface. I may be angry with Zane—but the last thing in the fucking world I want is her hurt. “Let me get this straight. You want me to purposefully put her in harm’s way so her dad will give you your enemy’s secrets?”
My father chuckles darkly. “And your uncle thinks you’re the stupid one in the family.”
My hands shake. Maya would pin me with a cold stare.Survive.I try for a moment to swallow the word, to quash the impossible loyalty to Zane that’s already growing like a tenacious vine inside of me. But I can’t. Voice steady, I say something I have never said to my father.
