The sun was just comingup, casting warm pink and orange hues over the east side of the sky. The air was acrid with the scent of burnt rubble and smoldering piles of materials.
After our incident in the field, Grisha had immediately called in his cleanup crew. In record time, they had removed all the bodies and vehicles from the grounds. I was told they had also accounted for every single bullet and then disappeared without a trace before the morning light. They had acted with such stealth that the dozens of firemen who were dealing with the fire hadn’t even noticed them coming or going.
Across the driveway, Grisha motioned for me to join him and his two cousins. They all wore the same grim expression.
Grisha looked me dead in the eye. “Thank you for protecting my family.”
This was the moment of recognition I had been trying to engineer for three years. I had worked tirelessly and crossed a multitude of morally gray lines to get here, so why didn’t I feel victorious? Instead, I felt something cold gnawing inside me.
“You know I’d guard your family with my life.”
That part I wasn’t lying about. Tonight, when we had come under attack, the lines between who was good and who was bad had blurred. My soldier training had taken over. When someone tried to kill someone I was assigned to protect, I didn’t think about the morality of eliminating the threat.
I just did it.
When I was a soldier.
When I was a cop.
And now, when I was undercover.
I had eliminated the threat in a brutally effective way, which put me in Grisha’s favor. Now he trusted me more. I had just moved one step closer to legally taking down his entire family, the same family I had protected tonight with violence that resulted in multiple deaths.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
Grisha cleared his throat. “I knew I’d be able to count on you.”
I looked over at the smoking rubble. “What are we going to do about that?”
He spat on the ground. “War has been declared by the Volkov family. We didn’t start this fight, but we will end it.”
It was almostseven before I started walking back toward the house, but I stopped in my tracks when I saw Mila. She was standing off to the side with a small quilt wrapped around her shoulders, looking like a disaster victim motionless in the debris. All around her, men worked. They carried shovels, wrapped up hoses and backed up vehicles. She stood there, completely out of place and unusually still, as she watched the activity around her.
It had been exactly twenty-four hours since we started the skeet shooting competition, and she had slept little and faced an insane amount of stress in that time. It didn’t make sense that she was still outside watching.
I walked up to her, but she didn’t look at me, even when I stopped right beside her.
“You should be sleeping. You’ve had a rough night.” My voice was gruff.
She stared straight ahead. “What was in these buildings that burned down?”
I looked at the wreckage that had once housed more than ninety million rubles’ worth of drugs, guns and black market supplies. “You shouldn’t ask me that.”
She took a deep breath. “I’ve lived here for the past four years, and I’ve never once questioned what was in these buildings. Night and day, trucks would come and go, backing into the buildings and then leaving four hours later. No one ever talked about it.” She looked at me. “And I never asked.”
“That’s for your own protection.”
She looked back at the ruins. “What about the men in the field? I saw three tow trucks go past the driveway, and I saw multiple lights in the field for hours.”
This time I didn’t look at her. “You shouldn’t ask me that either.”
“What happened to violence only as a last resort?”
I hesitated. “It was the last resort. First choice was to get past them. Second choice was to stay on the run and not engage. When they drove our vehicle into the ditch, it was my last resort to keep you and your aunt safe.”
“You shot them all.”
“They are the ones who chose violence, not me.”
