I look at the madness in his eyes, and the truth hits me like a bullet to the chest.
It’s not a warm feeling. It’s not butterflies. It’s a terrifying, hollow thud in the center of my chest that feels exactly like a death sentence.
I’m in love with him.
I am in love with the monster.
ROMAN — Zamoskvorechye Alley, 23:18
Ihave the sniper pinned against the brick wall of the alley with my left forearm crushing his windpipe while my right fist pistons into his face. When his cheekbone gives way under my knuckles with a wet crunch that feels like punching through a bag of wet gravel, I don’t stop.
I haul him back up by his tactical vest and hit him again because I’m not done, not even close to done, not when every time I blink I see that violin exploding three inches from my skull while Anya was coming on my fingers.
Rain is pouring down on us now, icy and relentless, washing the blood from his ruined face onto my white shirt and turning the expensive cotton into a translucent red-stained second skin that clings to my chest with every heaving breath.
I can smell blood and the particular stench of a man who’s pissed himself in terror, and none of it makes me want to stop.
I hit him again, and something in his orbital socket collapses with a sound I feel all the way up my arm. The sick thing, the thing that proves I’m exactly what my father was, is that I’m hard—from this, from the power of deciding whether he keeps breathing or stops, from the way his body jerks with every impact and the sounds he makes that aren’t quite human anymore.
“Boss!” Luka’s hands clamp onto my biceps from behind, fingers digging in, and he yanks me backward so hard his boot splashes through a puddle as he wedges his body between me and the ruin of the man against the wall. “Roman Viktorovich, khvatit! He’s drowning in his own blood—you want answers, or you want a corpse?”
My chest is heaving so hard my ribs ache, and my vision has tunneled down to nothing but the sniper’s destroyed face. My hands are still curled into fists at my sides with the leather of my gloves creaking from how tight I’m clenching. I want to shove past Luka and keep going, want to hit him until there’s nothing left to hit, until my knuckles are ground down to bone, until the image of that bullet shattering wood inches from my wife’s face stops playing on loop behind my eyes.
“Roman.” Luka’s voice cuts through the roar of blood in my ears, sharp and commanding in a way he rarely uses with me. “Look at me. Focus. Intel first, then you can kill him.”
The words filter through slowly, finding purchase in the part of my brain that still functions on strategy instead of pure animal rage.
I force my hands to unclench, force my breathing to slow, force myself to take a step back and assess the scene like the Bratva heir I’m supposed to be instead of the feral thing I actually am.
The sniper is slumped against the brick with his head lolling to one side and blood streaming from his nose and mouth, and the orbital socket I caved in somewhere around the fifth hit. The rain is washing pink rivers down the brick and into the gutter, swirling toward drainage grates cut into Soviet concrete while I crouch down in front of him with my soles pressing into wet asphalt.
I grab his jaw, bone fragments shifting under the pressure because I broke it earlier and didn’t even notice, and I force eye contact through all the blood and swelling. “Who hired you?”
He spits in my face—warm and thick, sliding down my cheek and dripping onto my already-ruined shirt—and something in my brain clicks. I reach for the pliers in my inner jacket pocket, the same kleshchi that Anya watched me use on Petrov.
The sniper sees the metal gleaming in the streetlight and starts babbling immediately, his words tumbling over each other in his desperation. “Wait, I’ll talk, please, I’ll tell you everything, radi Boga—”
“Too late.”
I grab his left hand and pin it against the brick wall, spreading his fingers wide against the rough surface. I position the pliers around his thumbnail while Luka says something about Anya being in the car fifty meters away, about her hearing if I do this.
“Good,” I say, and I pull.
The nail comes free with a wet, tearing sound, and the scream that rips out of the sniper echoes off the brick walls and bounces between buildings, raw and animal and satisfying in a way I don’t examine too closely. I’m already reaching for the next finger when Luka grabs my wrist.
“She’s coming. She heard the scream. She’s getting out of the car.”
I hear the footsteps before I see her—heels on wet pavement, getting closer with every click. I don’t move because some sick part of me wants her to see, wants her to know exactly what she chose when she chose me.
And then she’s there, standing at the mouth of the alley in that emerald silk gown that cost more than most people make in a month, her hair falling out of its arrangement and plastering to her face in the rain, her bare arms covered in goosebumps from the cold. She looks like something from a fever dream—all that green silk against the grey brick and dirty concrete, all that beauty standing ten feet from a man with a missing fingernail and a face like raw meat.
Her eyes move slowly across the scene, tracking from the sniper slumped against the wall with blood streaming down his chin, to Luka standing off to the side with his hand still wrapped around my wrist, to the pliers in my grip with metal gleaming wet in the streetlight, to the fingernail floating in the puddle at my knees, and finally to my face.
“Is he the one who shot at us?” she asks, and her voice is steady in a way that makes something in my chest crack open.
“Yes.”
“Did you get what you needed?”
