“It’ll keep you alive. That’s what matters.”
“I need to be there when it ends. Not to fight or get in the way. I need to watch it happen, because if I hear about it secondhand from a phone call, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if it was real.”
Every tactical instinct I own tells me to refuse. To plant her on the couch, station a guard at the front door, and head north without looking back. Dmitri told me to keep her here. Boris would say the same thing. Any rational person would.
But Daria isn’t asking to be protected. She’s asking to be present for the end of the thing that has been tearing her apart for six years, and telling her no feels like one more man making decisions about her life without her consent.
I stare at her for a long time. She doesn’t blink or fidget or add another word to the argument because she knows the case is already made.
I hold her stare for one more second, then bend down, grab her bag, and swing it over my shoulder next to mine.
“Boris is going to lose his mind,” I mutter as I brush past her into the hall.
“Boris lost his mind when you let me ride along the first time,” she calls after me. “He survived then. He’ll survive now.”
From the kitchen, Boris’ voice carries down the corridor. “I can hear both of you. And no, I won’t survive. For the record, this is a terrible idea, and I want that documented somewhere.”
“Noted,” I reply without slowing down.
“Noted and ignored,” Daria adds.
Boris snorts. “We leave in forty-five minutes.”
I set the bags by the front door and turn back to Daria. She’s standing in the hallway with her hands at her sides, and for half a second, every version of her I’ve known overlaps. First, the woman who flinched when I raised my voice during our first week together. Then, the one who sat in an armored car and dialed her abuser’s number with steady hands. And finally, the woman who screamed every word she’d swallowed for six years into a phone and then hurled it across the kitchen.
“Forty-five minutes,” I tell her. “Make your calls. Talk to Kira. Tell her you love her.”
Something fractures behind her eyes, but she nods once and reaches for her phone.
I watch her dial, then pull the bedroom door shut to give her privacy.
From the kitchen, Boris is rattling off rendezvous coordinates to Eduard, and Tony’s tracking feed is pulsing on the laptop screen. Bogdan Lebedev is running north at eighty-seven kilometers an hour, and we are forty-five minutes behind him.
That gap is going to close.
34
Daria
The helicopter lands in a frozen field outside Vyborg, where a black SUV is waiting with the engine running.
We’ve been in the air for just more than an hour.
Boris sat up front with the pilot, barking coordinates into his phone while Pyotr and I shared the back bench in silence.
I spent most of the flight staring at the landscape below, watching the city thin into suburbs and the suburbs dissolve into forest.
Somewhere down there, Bogdan is driving in the same direction we’re flying, except he’s on a highway doing seventy, and we’re cutting the distance at ten times his speed.
As soon as the skids touch the ground, Boris is out and jogging toward the SUV. Pyotr takes my hand as I climb down, and the cold hits me like a wall. It’s a different kind of cold out here. Denser. Wetter. The kind that crawls through every seam and settles into bone.
“Eduard and Marat?” Pyotr asks Boris as we reach the vehicle.
“Already in position ten kilometers north. They’ll shadow Bogdan from behind once we set up ahead of him.” Boris opens the rear door and waves me in. “Tony’s last ping puts him twenty minutes south of Vyborg. He stopped for gas, which bought us time.”
“How much time?”
“Enough.” Boris drops into the driver’s seat and adjusts the mirror. “We get to the intercept point first. That’s what matters.”
