Zeke joins us in the living room and, mumbling because my mouth is on fire, I run him through everything that’s happenedas quickly as I can. By the time I’m done, he’s shaking his head in amazement.
“What a mess,” he says. “Sage doesn’t deserve this shit. He’s a good kid.”
“He is,” I agree, pressing the frozen peas harder against my throbbing cheek. “Which is why I need to get him out before Aleksei moves him again.”
“And you’ve got, what, forty-eight hours?”
“Less now.”
Zeke scrubs a hand over his face. “So what’s your play? You can’t exactly waltz up to a Bratva safe house and knock politely.”
“I need to do recon tonight. See the building for myself and figure out when and how we’ll have a chance to make our move.” I switch the peas to a fresher spot. “Frank gave us the address, but I don’t trust his intel enough to go in blind.”
Zeke nods once, an unspoken decision made. “I’m coming with you,” he announces.
“Not a chance. This is a solo?—”
“I really fucking wasn’t asking permission.” He crosses his arms. “You’re not doing this alone, Bash. Not after everything.”
He stands and crosses the room to open a drawer beneath the TV console and retrieve a pair of premium binoculars.
Yasmin guffaws as soon as she sees them. It’s the first smile she’s shown since we picked her up from the diner. “Oh, you absolute clown,” she cackles. “Are those yourbirdwatchingbinoculars?”
Zeke immediately clutches the binoculars to his chest defensively. “So a guy likes to admire the beauty of winged nature every once in a blue moon. Sue me.”
“That’s gotta be the least sexy hobby a man can have,” she drawls. “Remind me again what I see in you?”
He winks at her. “My roguish good looks, the heart of a gentleman, and a humongous di?—”
“Alright!” Eliana interrupts with a clap of her hands before Zeke can finish that particular sentence. “Don’t you two idiots have some spying to go do?”
“Yeah,” I sigh as the brief moment of levity ends as quickly as it started. I stand and look at Zeke. “The girls gonna be alright here?”
He reaches over, grabs the baseball bat, and hands it to Yasmin. “Swing for the nuts if anyone tries anything,” he instructs her.
She salutes as she takes it from him. “We’ll be alright. I promise.”
“Take care of my woman, yeah?” I murmur to her.
I guess I didn’t say it quietly enough, though, because Eliana hears. Her face does a strange thing—half of it twists in a scowl, but the other half, if I’m not mistaken, looks almost like it wants to smile.
I’ll take whatever small victories I can get.
With that, Zeke and I go downstairs to my beat-up car. “I’m glad you’re with me, man,” I tell him with a clap of the shoulder. “It means more than I could ever put into words.”
He shrugs me off, but he’s grinning subtly. “That’s what best friends are for, Bastian. We show up for each other—even when you don’t deserve it.”
The Karlov Avenue building squats at the end of the block like a rotting tooth. It’s exactly as Frank described: boarded windows, gang tags crawling up the brick, just a nasty piece of work. Under any other circumstances, it’s the kind of place you’d cross the street to avoid.
Too bad these circumstances require us to head straight for it.
I kill the headlights a half-block down and cut the engine. Zeke passes me the binoculars without a word.
Through the lenses, the building sharpens into focus. I take stock of everything I can see that has relevance to our mission here. It’s three stories of urban decay. The fire escape, rusted to shit, hangs at a precarious angle on the west side. No lights are visible through the gaps in the plywood covering the windows. No movement, either. If there are guards, they’re firmly stationed in place for the time being.
“Anything?” Zeke asks after ten minutes of silence.
“Jack shit.”
