That leaves Eduard, Boris, and me standing in ankle-deep snow, four hundred meters from the end of everything, while Daria waits in the car.
Boris checks the magazine on his rifle, racks the charging handle, and looks at my arm. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Functioning.”
He grunts. “I can take the breach. One door, one hostile. I’ve cleared tighter rooms with worse odds.”
“No.”
“Pyotr—”
“I said no.” Whatever he sees in my eyes shuts the argument down before it starts. “He dies looking at me.”
Boris holds my stare for three long seconds before dipping his chin once. “Then we’re on your six. You go through that door, we’re right behind you.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He claps me on my good shoulder and moves toward the tree line with Eduard to radio the team and confirm positions.
I stand alone in the clearing for a moment. The snow is falling harder now, with fat flakes drifting through the birch canopy and settling on my shoulders and the barrel of my pistol.
Six weeks ago, Dmitri handed me a file with Daria’s name on it and told me to find out if she was a threat. I read it on the train to St. Petersburg and expected to find a liability. What I found instead was a woman who’d survived things that would have broken most people, and a five-year-old girl who stole my heart.
They changed everything. And the man in that lodge is the reason they almost didn’t survive long enough to change anything.
Lana comes to mind. The eight-year-old girl in Syria who died because I was thirty seconds late pulling her from the rubble. That failure has lived inside me for eleven years. It hollowed me out and filled the space with discipline and silence and the conviction that I would never be too late again.
Footsteps approach behind me. I turn, expecting Boris, but it’s Daria. She’s standing at the edge of the tree line in her coat and boots, with her arms wrapped around herself, and her face pale against the dark collar. The car door must have opened while Boris was on comms.
“You should stay in the vehicle,” I tell her.
“I know.” She closes the distance between us in five quick strides and grabs my good arm with both hands. Her fingers dig into the fabric of my jacket hard enough that I feel each one through the lining.
“Daria—”
“I love you.”
The three words land beneath my ribs, in a place I didn’t know still had feeling. Simple and enormous and said without a single tremor, which is how I know she means them. Daria’s voice only shakes when she’s afraid. Right now, she isn’t shaking.
Snow collects in her hair and along the ridge of her shoulders. Her eyes are locked on mine, and she doesn’t blink or qualify or backtrack.
I’ve spent years holding up walls, keeping every woman at arm’s length because closeness meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant someone else could end up like Lana. A decade of telling myself that the safest version of me was the one who didn’t feel anything beyond duty.
And here she is, standing in the snow outside the hunting lodge where I’m going to kill her ex-husband, telling me she loves me.
“I love you, too,” I confess. “Should have said it weeks ago.”
“You said it every other way. The way you put yourself between him and us. All those nights you stayed awake so we could sleep.”
I holster the Makarov, cup her face with my good hand, and kiss her. The weight of eleven years doesn’t vanish. It won’t, and I know that. But for the first time, it doesn’t feel like something I’m carrying alone. She clutches my jacket and pulls me closer, and I let the words finally settle into the space between us. In this moment, there is nothing else. No lodge. No snow. No four hundred meters of birch trees between this moment and what comes next.
Walking away isn’t an option. It hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t want it to be.
She kisses me back with her hands fisted in my jacket and her body melting against mine. When we pull apart, she rests her forehead against my chin, and I feel her breath come in uneven bursts against my throat.
“Come back to me,” she whispers.
“I told you before. Always do.”
