“No. I don’t know.” I take a deep drag. I’ve been debating whether or not to tell them the truth—that Annika’s children,ourchildren, are in the hands of Viktor Desyatov. No one would challenge me if I told them this. No one but Sacha. Still, I haven’t been able to speak the words. What if sheislying? What if I’m the fool who ends up dead at the end of this for trusting her? “Sacha.”
He looks at me sideways, smoke flooding from his nostrils, spiraling up into the dark. “Brother.”
“You were right about us. I’d met her before.” The end of my cigarette glows, a red star in the night. “Three years ago, in Moscow. We slept together.”
Sacha straightens, but says nothing.
“I didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know me either. Why would she? I was no one, then, really. Just another street kid in the Bratva waiting to get killed. When we tracked her to Seattle, I still didn’t know. Then I saw her, and…”
“Mm,” grunts Sacha, tossing the butt of his cigarette into the snow and crushing it under his heel. “I see.”
It’s a cooler reaction than I expected. I hand him another cigarette, but he waves it away. “Her children,” I say, before I tell myself to.
His eyes shoot to mine, narrowed to slits. “Maxim,” he warns.
“I trust her.”
“Then you are a fool.”
I grip his arm. “We cannot live like the Bratvathat has come before us. Like Viktor Desyatov. We can’t live with guns under our pillows and no true allegiances. We can’t live distrustingeveryone.”
Sacha stands, jerking his arm away from me. “We must. This is what it means to live as we do—”
“Alexei trusted no one,” I bark, standing and going toe to toe with my oldest friend. “He ended up with a bullet in his back just the same.”
Sacha searches my eyes: for what? Betrayal? Anger? Grief? Vulnerability?
I let him see it all.
“We have to be different, Sacha. If we aren’t, if we can’t trust each other, we’ll be crushed under the heel of those more ruthless than us. We will be erased by Viktor Desyatov and all of the old Bratva bosses like him. Is that what you want?”
Something falters in his expression. “No,” he says softly.
“I know you don’t trust her. Fuck—I don’t either. But I need to. I have to. She’s…” I swallow the anger and fear and frustration that rises in me. My voice emerges broken. “She’s the mother of my children, Sacha.”
He takes a step back, boots crunching into the snow. A thousand emotions cross his face.
“I’m not asking you to trust her,” I say. “I’m asking you to trust me.”
He looks off into the dark, the endless waves of snow. After what seems like an eternity, he says, “She wants to go in. Doesn’t she?”
I don’t see any point in lying. I’ll have to tell them all soon enough. “Yes.”
“She wants to be your spy.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have to point out how very easily she could turn on us.”
“No.”
Sacha runs a hand over his face, then shoves his hand out. I give him the cigarette he’d declined, and he lights it in the dark. “Fuck,” he mutters ineloquently. “Our fucking lives are in the hands of that little bitch.”
I smile fondly. I wouldn’t expect anything less. “Yes.”
He heaves a sigh, smoke pouring from his nostrils. “She better be a fantastic fucking lay.”
* * *
