The forest thickens around us. Birch and pine crowd the road so tightly that their branches nearly scrape the windows. Every few minutes, a logging track splits off into the trees, marked by nothing more than tire ruts and a rusted chain. This is the kind of place where people disappear. No cameras, witnesses, or cell towers for kilometers. Just frozen ground and silence.
We round a bend, and Boris slows the SUV to a crawl. Up ahead, a narrow track veers off the main road and climbs a shallow rise. He turns onto it without a word, and the vehicle bounces over ruts and frozen mud for another two hundred meters before the trees open into a clearing.
I see it immediately.
A cabin sits at the far edge of the clearing, low and weathered, with a tin roof sagging under the weight of old snow. Two vehicles are parked outside. One is a dark sedan with plates I can’t read from this distance. The other is a beat-up van with its rear doors hanging open.
Boris kills the headlights and eases the SUV behind a stand of birch trees at the clearing’s edge. We’re about a hundred and fifty meters from the cabin, close enough to see movement through the windows.
I count heads. One man stands near the front door, smoking and stamping his feet against the cold. Another is visible through a side window, pacing. A third emerges from the cabin and walks to the van, pulls something from the back, and carries it inside.Through the front window, I can make out a fourth figure seated at a table.
“Four confirmed,” Boris says. “Maybe five. Hard to tell with the layout.”
“That’s more than the two who fled the warehouse with him,” Pyotr points out. “He picked up reinforcements.”
“Probably hired locals. Desperate men with a bag of cash can always find muscle on short notice.”
Pyotr eyes the cabin for a long moment, then pulls his phone from his pocket and dials. “Eduard. We have eyes on the target. Clearing off the main road, approximately six kilometers west of the gas station. Two vehicles, four to five hostiles, one structure. How far out are you?”
I can’t hear Eduard’s response, but Pyotr nods. “Good. Hold your position until Boris signals. Nobody moves until we’re all in place.”
He ends the call and turns to me. His face is calm, but I read the thing underneath it that he won’t say out loud, because saying it would make it too real.
“Stay in the car,” he tells me. “Doors locked. Engine running. If something goes wrong, drive east until you hit the main highway and call Alexei. Don’t stop for anything.”
“I know.”
“I need you to say it back to me.”
“Doors locked. Engine running. East to the highway. Call Alexei. Don’t stop.”
He gathers my face in his hands and presses his forehead against mine, and I memorize the feel of his skin and the rhythm of his breathing. This could be the last time I’m this close to him.
“Come back to me,” I whisper.
“I always do.”
He kisses me once, hard and fast and full of everything neither of us has time to say. Then he pulls back, grabs the duffel from the seat beside him, and climbs out of the SUV.
Boris is already outside, checking his weapon and speaking quietly into his phone. Two more vehicles are idling farther down the logging track. Marat’s men, I assume, positioned there while we flew in. They must have been waiting since before we landed.
I watch Pyotr cross the frozen ground toward Boris with loose shoulders, a steady stride, and every step placed with purpose.
I see his hand drift to his chest for half a second, right over the pocket where he keeps the photo of Kira that she drew for him in crayon. The one with the stick figure holding a gun and the words “MY PIROT” scrawled across the top in purple marker.
He told me once that he carries it on him every day. I asked him why, and he said, “Because it reminds me of what I’m protecting.”
I lock the doors.
Through the windshield, the cabin hunches against the tree line like something waiting to be disturbed. Smoke curls from a crooked chimney pipe. The man by the front door flicks his cigarette into the snow and steps back inside.
Bogdan is in that cabin, fifty meters from the Finnish border, surrounded by hired guns and stolen cash, still running from the life he destroyed. He doesn’t know we’re here. He doesn’t know that nine armed men are fanning through the trees around his hiding spot, or that the woman he spent six years terrorizing is sitting in an SUV at the edge of the clearing, watching it all unfold.
I ran from this man for three years. I packed bags in the middle of the night, fled cities, changed my name, and taught my daughter to answer a name that wasn’t hers. I slept on borrowed couches and held my breath every time a car slowed down outside.
Today, I’m done running.
Boris raises a hand, and Pyotr nods. The men in the trees go still.
