Deeper and deeper we go. It seems impossible that the compound stretches so far beneath the frozen earth. There must be generators funneling heat down here, because the conditions are livable—but barely. It’s so cold my teeth are chattering by the time my father finally steps off the elevator.
“What is this place?” I ask, unable to smother my morbid curiosity. I follow him down the endless cement hallway, flanked by five armed guards and Mirka, the blonde woman, who my father introduced as hisbusiness partner.I wonder if she’s the one responsible for getting my father in thebusinessof selling human beings. “What was it before?”
“An ammunition factory, during the Cold War,” my father says. “Defunct. It was then used as a factory to produce and ship large engines and generators. It was abandoned in the late 2000s. I purchased it then and began using it as an outpost. From here we ship most products to either Scandinavia or China.” He gives me a small, knife-sharp smile. “Depending on the product, that is.”
The way he says it makes my skin crawl. I understand the implication instantly. He’s talking about people—and apparently, my father isn’t new to the human trafficking trade. It seems he’s been at it awhile, years even. How has he kept it hidden from the rest of the Bratva, from the public? More importantly—why? Does he think the other cells would disapprove?
Or, worse, want to get in on the action and threaten my father’s monopoly?
Both options make me want to wrestle one of the guards’ guns away and open fire on every horrible person present. But I know that’s not an option. Not if I want to get out of here alive, much less save my mother and my children.
“It took us a long time to find you,” my father admits as he walks. Doors have begun appearing in the bare cement walls. They’re reinforced steel, with tiny, crisscrossed plexiglass windows. My heart is in my throat, my stomach twisting, because I know:there are people in there.“You did well. No medical records. No travel records. Might I ask—why Seattle?”
“The rain and the fish markets,” I say, only half-paying attention. I keep expecting to meet a pair of eyes through the glass of any one of the numerous doors. “How did you find me, in the end?”
“We followed your boyfriend.”
I jolt, looking to him sharply. “Maxim is not my boyfriend. And if you followed him, you could have stopped him taking me. But you didn’t.” The realization dawns on me then, and I can’t believe how stupid I am not to have made the connection before. “You wanted them to capture me—so you could capture my children.”
My father raises one massive shoulder in a shrug. “Yes. But also for the inside knowledge. You were a spy and you didn’t even know it. You have always been so good under cover.”
I bristle, fighting to make sure it doesn’t show. “Anything could have happened to me.”
“Maxim Volkov is a pussy. And besides, he’s in love with you. I knew he’d put you up in his little Rose Palace outside the city; give his princess everything she wanted.”
“Fuck you,” I growl, unable to swallow the words.
My father only laughs. “Come, Annika. You have made me proud, infiltrating his pathetic little gang.”
“I thought he was just a cockroach.”
“He is. But cockroaches can become such a nuisance, multiplying as they do.” He pins me with dark eyes. “I’m surprised you kept them. The children.”
Karine, I think, suddenly, desperately. I’ve done all I can not to imagine them.Manya.My twin girls, with blue-ice eyes and black curls. Precocious, ferocious, dangerous little things: a pair of knives. Born wild and clawing, just like their mother. Only two years old, and already they narrow their eyes in suspicion and have cold laughs.
My fists clench. I order myself not to think of them. Not to remember giving birth, an old-fashioned midwife and her aide crouched beside the bed in the little Seattle house. Smell of blood and viscera, the pure vivid danger of it all, the snap of two cords. Karine was first, but only by two minutes. She came out screaming, hands in fists. And Manya, a quiet child with pliant open hands: the pair of them two sides of one coin, two sharpened ends of the same dagger, curled in my arms.
Mine.
I remember thinking: how did my father turn me into a soldier? A servant? A spy?
I remember promising:I will never do the same.
“Did you love him?” My father’s voice sobers me, yanks me up from the fast-rising sea of desperation, and love, and missing them. “Why else keep the children?”
“I didn’t love him. I didn’t know him.” Cynical as I was at the time, I did sense that I could love Maxim. His tenderness, his understanding, his carefully-veiled power…everything about him felt meant for me, like he made up for my shortcomings, and I made up for his. But I didn’t want to be possessed, then. I didn’t even know who I was. So—why, when I found out that I was pregnant, did I keep them? “Do you remember when Mother took me away from you, the first time?”
My father’s face closes. He’s stopped walking. We’ve reached a low-ceilinged subterranean chamber, where a dozen hallways shoot off into the darkness. We are surrounded by guards: a jostle of fatigues and theclumpof steel-toed boots; the constant, subtle, metallic shift of five AKs against five chests.
“Yes,” my father says. “She took you to Paris.”
“I was eight. Did you remember that?”
My father says nothing. Despite the cold, I’m not shivering. Despite the pain in my ribs and my face, the filth—blood, dirty snow residue—coating my skin, I’m not abashed. I look the Snake in the eye.
“That was after. The first man.” I remember the mission with granular clarity. I pretended to be lost in the streets of Moscow one December morning. The man—a target I still don’t know the name or position of—followed me as I sobbed and and ran into a labyrinth of alleys. At the end of one, I put a silenced pistol against his ribs and fired twice:pop pop!“She didn’t even know I could shoot a gun.”
“Your mother was weak. She was always weak. But you…” My father’s eyes glitter. He reaches for me, touches his fingertips to my cheek. “You were different. You were always destined for so much more, Annika. You were born for this world. Born to succeed. To rule when I am gone. Your mother poisoned you against me, but in the end, you will return to the viper’s nest, because that is where you born, and it is all you have ever known.”
