“Not yet.”
She nods once, a single sharp motion, and then she turns and walks back toward the car with her heels clicking on wet pavement and her ruined dress dragging through puddles.
“Finish it,” Luka says quietly. “Fast. Before she changes her mind.”
I turn back to the sniper and grab his jaw again, forcing eye contact through the blood and rain. “Names. Now. Or I take the rest of them.”
He talks—wire transfers routed through Cyprus, encrypted instructions delivered via dead drop, confirmation codes thatLuka is already cross-referencing on his phone while I crouch in the rain with blood drying on my hands and my wife waiting in a car fifty meters away. By the time we’re done, I have enough to implicate three captains, one Interpol mole, and confirmation that the hit came from exactly where I expected.
“It’s Vadim’s signature,” Luka says finally, looking up from his screen. “The shell company matches three other Pakhan operations. Confirmed.”
My uncle tried to kill me at the Bolshoi in front of hundreds of witnesses, where everyone could see the heir apparent die during Tchaikovsky.
“Safe house on Rublyovskoye,” I tell Luka as I rise to my feet, rain streaming down my face. “Medical treatment, new identity, five thousand euros. Poland by Friday.”
“You’re letting him live.”
“Dead men don’t spread the word that Vadim underpays.”
I’m walking toward the car, leaving Luka to handle it, when the thought hits me so hard I actually stumble on the wet pavement.
If I die, she becomes Yuri’s. If the heir dies before producing an heir, his assets are redistributed according to our laws: his assets, his wife, and his property.
The image comes without warning, and I can’t stop it, can’t block it out, can’t do anything but stand there in the rain while it plays out behind my eyes like a horror movie I’m forced to watch on loop.
I see Yuri’s hands on her skin—taking, hurting, using because he can and because she’s his now and because fighting back gets Mishka killed. I see him bending her over my desk, and his fingers are fisting in that black braid and yanking her head back while she stares at nothing with eyes that have gone completely dead.
I see him breaking her—not because he wants her, not because he finds her beautiful or brilliant or any of the things that make me obsessed, but because he knows I did. I see him using my name while he hurts her, making sure she knows that I failed her, that I’m dead and rotting somewhere while she pays the price for my weakness, that everything I promised about keeping her safe was just another lie from another Volkov man who couldn’t deliver.
I see him turning the light in her eyes into that dead, hollow stare.
The image shatters something in my skull, and I slam my fist into the car door so hard the metal dents inward with a grinding screech. Pain shoots up my arm, but it’s not enough, not nearly enough to drown out the pictures, so I hit it again and again until blood wells fresh across the knuckles I already split open on the sniper’s face.
“Roman.” Luka’s voice comes from behind me. “What—”
“Yuri.” It’s the only thing I can say. “Tonight.”
“You’re covered in blood, and you just got shot at—you walk in there alone, you die.”
“Then I die killing him first.”
“And Anya?”
I stop with my bloody fist still pressed against the dented metal, chest heaving, and I can see her through the tinted window, sitting in the backseat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned away from me, still and quiet in that ruined green dress.
“Blyad.” The curse scrapes out of me, and I hate that Luka is right, hate that I can’t just end this now, hate that strategy has to come before the violent satisfaction of watching Yuri choke on his own blood.
I get in the car, and the door closes behind me. The smell hits immediately—leather seats and expensive cologne andunderneath all of it, the metallic copper stench of blood that’s soaked into my clothes and my skin and my hair, overwhelming in the enclosed warmth of the Audi.
Anya turns to look at me and flinches—just a fraction, just her nostrils flaring and her pupils dilating and her whole body going tense for a split second before she forces herself to relax.
I see it all, the fear and the disgust and the knowing that she’s sitting next to a man who just ripped out someone’s fingernail and enjoyed it. Shame floods through my chest so fast I can barely breathe because I’m bringing the slaughterhouse into her space, sitting beside my wife reeking of another man’s suffering while rain drips from my hair onto the seats.
“Is he dead?” she asks quietly.
“No. Cooperating. Intel on Vadim’s network. Poland by Friday.”
“You pulled out his fingernail. I had to come.”
