Two more follow in quick succession. Rifle rounds from Boris.
Then, a short pause, followed by a burst that I can’t separate into individual shots because there are too many echoing off the stone foundation and bouncing through the trees.
Five rounds. Six. I lose count at seven.
Something punches through the west window from inside, making me gasp. A bullet. It whizzes across the clearing and hits the SUV’s hood with a metallic shriek that sends me diving sideways across the center console with a scream. Half a breath later, a second round blows through the windshield six inches above the passenger headrest. Glass sprays across the dashboard and the front seats, and I feel a piece slice across the back of my left hand as I throw it over my face.
I’m on the floorboard between the seats with my knees jammed against the gearshift and my cheek pressed against the rubber mat. My ears are ringing. Blood is running down my fingers from the glass cut, warm and fast, dripping onto the mat in a pattern I can’t stop staring at.
A third shot cracks from inside the lodge, followed by a fourth. Then nothing.
The silence is worse than the gunfire.
I count to ten. Nothing. Twenty. Still nothing. My breathing is so loud inside the cab that I can’t hear anything beyond my pulse, so I force myself to hold my breath. With my lungs burning and ribs locked, I press one palm against the seat cushion and push myself just high enough to peer through what’s left of the windshield.
Cold pours through the hole in the glass. A shard is embedded in the headrest where my head was three seconds before the roundcame through. The edges are frosted with condensation, and a hairline crack spiders outward from the point of impact.
If I hadn’t dove when the first bullet hit the hood, that shard would be in the back of my head.
Still, I’m not scared yet. Fear is somewhere behind me, waiting for the adrenaline to burn off so it can land. Right now, every nerve in my body is pointed at one thing: the lodge door.
It is open, with smoke curling from the frame where the wood splintered. Nothing moves inside, and no shadows pass the windows.
A shape appears in the doorway.
Boris. His rifle is down with the barrel pointed at the ground as he steps onto the threshold and turns to say something over his shoulder. A second figure emerges behind him.
Eduard, wearing a dusty vest with his weapon holstered. He’s holding his radio to his ear and speaking into it, but I can’t make out the words from this distance.
Where is Pyotr?
My chest contracts so hard that I nearly choke. I scramble upright in the driver’s seat, glass biting into my palms, and watch the doorway for a third figure. Boris remains on the threshold. Eduard has moved to the side of the building. Neither is rushing, which should tell me something, but the only thing my brain can process right now is that two men went in with Pyotr and two men came out without him.
Boris turns and speaks into the doorway again. Eduard puts a hand on his radio, nods at whatever he hears, and looks toward the SUV. Toward me.
Why is he looking at me?
People look at the widow. That’s the thought that detonates in my head. They look at the person who needs to be told. At the woman in the car, because someone has to walk over there and say the words, and nobody wants to be the one who does it.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”
I’m reaching for the door handle when a third shape fills the doorframe.
Pyotr.
He steps out of the lodge and into the snow, and I see the blood. It’s on his hands, his forearms, and the front of his jacket, soaked into the fabric from collar to waist. His face has a smear of it across one cheekbone. The Makarov hangs at his side in his right hand, still smoking from the barrel.
He’s upright and walking, and it takes a moment to realize the blood covering him isn’t his.
He stops three paces from the door and tilts his face toward the sky. His chest rises once, deep and slow, and then his chin drops, and he looks at the SUV. At me.
I don’t remember opening the car door or crossing the clearing. One second, I’m sitting behind a shattered windshield with glass in my hair and blood on my knuckles, and the next, I’m running through ankle-deep snow toward the lodge with my lungs screaming and my legs barely holding beneath me. The snow grabs at my boots. A stumble near the tree line nearly drops me, but I catch a birch trunk and keep going.
Boris steps aside as I barrel past him. Eduard says something I don’t catch. The only thing I see is Pyotr, standing in the snowwith Bogdan’s blood on his clothes and his gray eyes locked on mine.
I reach him, and my legs give out as I drop to the snow at his feet.
Pyotr crouches in front of me. His right hand grazes the side of my face, and I feel the tackiness of drying blood against my cheek. He holds me, with his palm against my skin, and waits.
