My head is pounding. One of those brute guards struck me so hard with the stock of his AK, I fully blacked out. The pain at the base of my skull is dense and cotton-thick, making it hard to concentrate. Opening my eyes introduces a new kind of discomfort: the stabbing agony of bright light.
There’s a figure seated in front of me, hazy and silhouetted by what I’m a little concerned might be a concussion. Both of us are bound to chairs in a large, cold, empty room.
“What is this going to accomplish? Hm? Now we’re both screwed, and who the hell is gonna care if we die?”
Maya.
I blink hard, finally grounded though my stomach is wheeling with nausea. Maya is paler than usual—blood loss, no doubt—her hair lank with sweat, her clothing caked with dried blood. Beneath her torn t-shirt, her abdomen is bound with fresh bandages.
“Star treatment,” I croak, and she barks out a laugh. “What the fuck is going on?”
She shakes her head, grinning like a maniac despite what is most likely impending doom for the both of us. “Daddy Lebedev wasn’t happy I turned my coat. And apparently your selfless and somewhat melodramatic act of martyrdom didn’t impress him much either. What was your thought process?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. It felt so clear on the drive over. If I turned myself in, Nik’s father couldn’t use me against him. And I suppose I thought my death, or whatever punishment Lebedev thought to dole out, would earn my father or Maya’s freedom. I guess I overestimated him—and perhaps my own worth. Although there’s still plenty of time to torture and kill me. I try not to think about it too much. “I thought if Lebedev killed me, he’d have his revenge on my dad.”
Maya shakes her head, but her eyes glitter. She’s impressed, I realize. Through the haze of pain and distant fear, this warms me. “God. You’re the same as you were. I should have reached out to you sooner, you know? We could have fucked all of these guys in their asses and taken over ages ago.”
A laugh, a little hysterical, bubbles up out of me. “If only, right? Shit. I’m sorry I disappeared on you guys. You deserved better.”
“Oh, no, don’t even start.” Maya shakes her head again. “Don’t get all sappy and sentimental on me now.”
“Come on. Why not?”
“’Cause that means we are really not getting out of this.”
Her words cast an inexorable and sudden graveness over us both. I look down at my knees. The room is cold and damp, the walls and floor constructed of cracked cement. There are no windows, and no furniture to indicate what the room is for. A drain in the floor sets alarm bells off in my head, and I try, with some difficulty, not to think about what it might be used for.
“I’m surprised, honestly,” Maya says after a moment. Her voice is uncharacteristically soft. “That you trusted me.”
“Why? Because I caught you speaking Russian on the phone?”
She grins. “Five years is a long time.”
“No. It’s not. Not for us.” And I mean it. I hold her eyes, taking some measure of comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. That if we die here, we die together. “We’ll always pick up where we left off.”
“Damn. NowI’mgetting sentimental.” She looks around the room, taking it in. “Shitty place to die.”
“Cold too.”
“Yeah. What the fuck happened to good old Russian hospitality?”
I bite my lip, caught by an unexpected riptide of grief. “I would have liked to see my dad one more time.”
“Weirdly, me too.” Maya shakes her head. “Despite all the shit they’ve done, it’s hard to let them go altogether, you know? I’ve been fantasizing about it for a long time now. Ever since I started this undercover infiltration bullshit. Because Lebedev felt different. Shitty, you know. But bad in different ways. And more human, maybe. I started imagining cutting them out—all of our dads. Maybe kicking them out of the city, or even the country. Stripping them of their wealth, their names, their power. And after what they did to your dad, and you and Nik… it made it all feel righteous, you know? Like this was the cause I’d go out for.”
I smile sadly. She still talks like she did as a kid—like a born but grounded visionary.
“But I could never quite picture killing them. My dad. Yours. Nik’s. Sometimes I’d try to, and all I could see was the three of them at the lake, fishing and sharing their beers with us. Those are the men who really raised us, you know? Not the cold-blooded killers who use us as pawns in their stupid blood-feud games now.”
Tears well in my eyes. I try to picture my dad at the lake, but all I can manage is him on his knees across from me at Anton and Artur’s HQ, a Glock against his temple. He was a broken man then, not one I recognized. I remember the way his lip trembled as he looked at me, all of the hope burned out of him like a line of gunpowder.
Like he was already resigned to death, and the bullet was only a formality.
“I admire you,” I tell Maya. “For believing you could do it.”
“Me? No. No way.Us.” She pins me with a hard stare. “I never thought for a second I could do it without you and Nik.”
“Well, I hate to disappoint you. But even if we did cripple the syndicate and land you in power, Nik and I… we wouldn’t stay, May.”
