Time to play this game.
I throw my hands up, letting the pain I’ve been gritting back overtake me in a tide. Very real tears rise to my eyes and spill down my cheeks.
“Please!” I cry out the window in Russian. “Help me!”
“Don’t move,” barks one of the men. He approaches the truck, rifle still pointed at my face. “Are you armed?”
“I have a gun, in my waistband—”
“Hands up!” he shouts, though I haven’t moved an inch. He jerks the truck door open and grabs me by the arm, dragging me out. “Palms on your head.”
I obey, and the second man stomps over, frisking me roughly with both hands. I inhale sharply as his fingers sink hard into my ribs. He turns me around and shoves me against the truck. Tears freeze on my cheeks, breath hitching as the first guard yanks the glock from my waistband.
“Who are you?” he shouts, and I feel the barrel of his rifle jab me right between the shoulders. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I take a steeling breath, and force every drop of fear in my blood to dissolve. I replace it with resolve, iron: to save my children, to save my life.
“My name,” I say, “is Annika Desyatova.”
Chapter Nineteen
Maxim
All we can do is wait.
I pace the front drive, hands buried in my pockets and head ducked low. Sacha leans against the house, watching his phone screen and giving me updates on Annika’s tracker.
“She’s at the gate,” he says now. “Stopped.”
Stopped.How easilystoppedcould mean dead. Shot, blood pouring into the snow or the black asphalt road.Stoppedcould mean caught, rifle between her shoulders or against the back of her skull.Stoppedcould mean betraying me—turning over my location right now to her father, sending a small army to rain bullets down on this house and kill every man I’ve brought with me into this mess.
I love you.
I run a hand over my face. Did she mean it?Couldshe mean it? Or is Annika Desyatova so buried in lies, she doesn’t know how to surface? How to speak the truth? How to give allegiance and not break it to save her own neck?
I shove a cigarette in my mouth, fumbling with the lighter. Wet, sleety snow is pouring down. I can’t see either end of the highway, can barely make out the drive. The town in the distance is nothing but yellow haze, the illusion of life.
“She’s moving,” Sacha says, fishing a lighter of his coat pocket and clicking it beneath my cigarette. I inhale gratefully, sagging against the wall beside him, smoke pouring from my mouth.
“She’s alive.”
“A good sign,” says Sacha wryly. “Or so we hope.”
I nod. I’ve been cold so long I’ve gone numb, but the nicotine gets my brain moving again, and Annika’s tracker has my pulse quickening. Alive is good. Alive means we still have a chance.
“What do you think will happen,” I ask Sacha, “if we succeed in killing him?”
Sacha says nothing for a long moment. Then: “I think we will have succeeded in doing what he wanted to. We will become the most powerful Bratva gang to ever have existed.”
I look at him sideways, search his familiar face for any trace of doubt or uncertainty. I find none. I turn back to the cold, interminable nothingness before us. He’s right. I know he is. If we kill Viktor Desyatov, we’ll inherit his operation. With his own stores, we can buy his men, or kill them. We could find ourselves sitting on an empire: guns, drugs, cash, men, connections. We could rule Russia.
I’ve never thought about ruling Russia. Suddenly, an image intrudes on my mind: me, ruling Russia—with Annika Desyatova at my side. In a way, her claim would be stronger than mine. Viktor’s men might even listen to her without cash or violence to incentivize them. She is, after all, the only true heir to the Snake.
And if her children aremychildren, what does that make them? Twins, inheritors of two of the biggest organized crime syndicates in the world?
Now that is power.It would be an easy thing, I think, for Annika to turn on me. She could win either way. But knowing now what her father is truly capable of—could she stand by him, just to spite me? Just to get revenge?
Or does she see the future I’m seeing now: the two of us, a family, with our children, changing the way of this world?
