Waiting is a job. I taste copper and sweat. My lip is raw—must’ve banged into my teeth somehow. Adrenaline keeps the worst of it at bay, but my head is ringing too. Hardly my first concussion. It won’t be my last.
I’m going to get this piece of shit.
The forest moves around us—leaf, twig, wind. The engine gives up its heat. I smell burned earth and our own coolant. Someone built this trap for me. They know the weight of my car and where I am likely to put it. Sap smells sharp where a branch snapped.
“Hear anything?” I whisper.
“Leaves,” Fyodor murmurs. “My heart.”
Marcus is quiet for a count of ten. “Motorcycle,” he says finally. “Coming in.”
I hear it too, the thin snarl, then the cut to silence. A man could park on the shoulder, kill the light, and approach through the ditch. He would want to look into the cabin. He would want to see that he took me down.
If he’s a hitter, he needs to prove the kill. If he’s not, this is personal and he’ll wanna know he got me. Either way, he’s coming to me.
His last mistake.
I tilt my head so my line of sight covers the broken rectangle above us—the blown window that looks like a skylight. The tree line is a dark page. The stars are a handful of salt. Time stretches thin enough to see through.
A footstep in leaves. Fabric whispers against bark. A twig snaps underfoot. Whoever it is, he learned to move quiet but didn’t practice much in the woods. A city boy.
A head rises in the window.
For a fraction, the face is only a shape with my gun aimed at it. He leans down to look closer, and the light catches his face. The years fall away and a day in a hospital returns. Tiny fingers, a mouth that searched my knuckle like it could drink from it. That memory is as fast and useless as a flashbulb. I let it go.
Vitaly.
He looks older and younger at once—cheeks a little hollow, eyes too bright, not enough sleep, not enough peace, too much cocaine. He holds his pistol proud and high, the way he held his first knife at twelve when he wanted me to see it. He thinks this will make him a man. He thinks this will make me small. He learned from me how to move. He refused to learn when to stop.
He scans our faces. He doesn’t see mine until the angle shifts and the stars do their bad trick of lighting what should stay dark. I feel the hesitation rise in me because I am not a monster. He’s my son.
His muzzle dips. He chooses a target. Me, of course. It has always been me.
I shoot first.
Thunder in the cabin. The tempered glass above me shatters and showers us. Vitaly whips sideways. My round takes bark from a tree trunk where his head was a breath ago. He’s quick. He always was quick. He rolls out of sight the way a boy drops from a wall when his father opens the back door.
A shot answers, wild and high. Another hits the undercarriage with a dumb clang. Then nothing. The woods breathe like they’re relieved to be left alone again.
No one in the trees moves to flank. No second engine starts. I count to three, to five, to fifteen, the old script of staying alive. The motorcycle coughs awake, closer than I like, then climbs the road in a rising whine and disappears.
“Coast is clear,” I say.
Marcus lets out a long breath and then laughs once, sharp and tired. “I hate that phrase. Every time we say it, I don’t believe it.”
“Believe the silence,” I tell him.
Fyodor opens his eyes. He looks at the broken window and then at me. “You hesitated.” It isn’t a rebuke.
“I did. Then he raised his gun.”
“You shot first.”
“I’m his father. Not his shield.” I set the safety with my thumb and keep the pistol low. My hands are steady again. “If I had been slower, you wouldn’t be asking me questions.”
He nods once. It’s the nod he used to give me when I was sixteen and lying about something small—approval for the honesty, warning for the lie in the first place. He listens to the road the way I do. It stays empty. The trees go on being trees instead of places for my son to hide.
“Think he’ll climb a tree to get a better shot?”
