38
Lev
We breach the second floor at 1:38, moving fast through the east stairwell with a Kozlov team I met forty-eight hours ago and who fight like they’ve known me for years, because Boris told them to.
The point man goes first. He clears the landing, turns left, and the flashbang detonates two meters from his face before I’ve finished the turn behind him.
The concussive blast swallows everything. I catch the wall with one hand and keep moving before my ears stop ringing, because stopping is how you die, and Frol’s men pour out of the corridor from both sides before the smoke has cleared.
The ambush is clean. I’ll give him that much.
They split our unit in the first ten seconds, cutting the Kozlov soldiers behind me off from the three of us in front. My radio takes a round in the exchange, shatters against my vest, and goes silent. I don’t stop to assess it. I drop one of Frol’s men comingfrom the left, grab cover behind a doorframe, and register Ruslan to my right.
He’s on his feet.
There’s blood running down his left arm from somewhere above the elbow, soaking through his sleeve, but his right hand is steady and he’s already moved to block the stairwell entrance with his body, holding the position so I can push forward. He catches my eye across the corridor.
“Go,” he says.
I go.
The next twenty minutes run together the way they always do when things go wrong and you stop having the luxury of thinking and start running on training alone. I clear rooms with two Kozlov soldiers whose names I don’t know and who move without hesitation every time I point. Three more of Frol’s men go down on the second floor. Another two on the third. Somewhere below us, I can hear the sounds of Boris’s teams breaching the ground level, which means the building is being closed from the bottom up.
I don’t stop to count the cost of any of it. There’s no time. You move, you clear, you move again, and you don’t look at what you leave behind until it’s over. One of the Kozlov soldiers takes a graze to the shoulder on the third floor landing and doesn’t stop moving. The other one covers him without being asked, no instruction needed, and it keeps both of them alive long enough to reach the interior stairs to the fourth floor.
The landing is narrow, turning back on itself before opening into a short corridor with four doors. I come around the corner and find Frol at the end of it.
He’s alone. He lost his radio somewhere in the chaos, or he chose to ditch it, and he’s standing there with blood on his jacket and the look of a man who knew this was coming and decided to meet it on his feet rather than running.
I tell the two Kozlov soldiers to hold the stairs.
Frol watches me make my way toward him. “You really went through with it.”
“I gave you a choice between your life and his war. You picked wrong.”
“Did I?” He looks at me with a sort of tired clarity, like a man who’s been carrying a position he stopped believing in and is finally setting it down. “You think Dmitri Kozlov is going to let you walk out of this alive? You handed him everything, Lev. He’ll use it, and then he’ll use you, and when you’re done being useful he’ll put you in the ground and tell Polina Kozlov it was her father’s people who did it.”
“You could have left,” I say. “I gave you the chance.”
“So did he.” He tilts his head toward the ceiling, toward the floor above us where our father is behind a locked door. “He gave me the chance to be the one who brought you back. I didn’t take it.”
He moves first. That’s always been Frol’s problem; he thinks aggression is the same thing as advantage. He comes fast and hard, and I let him get close enough to feel certain about it before I redirect his momentum and drive him into the wall. He recovers faster than I expect and catches me across the jaw with an elbow on the way back up. I taste copper and keep moving.
We go at it for longer than it should take, because we grew up learning the same things from the same men and we both knowhow the other one moves. He gets his arm around my throat from behind and wrenches, and I drop my weight and throw him forward over my hip. He hits the railing hard, and I’m on him before he’s finished bouncing, with one forearm across his chest and my weight pinning him against the metal.
We’re both heaving in air and grunting and growling. Like when we were kids grappling, only this time, the stakes are insanely higher.
“It’s over,” I tell him through clenched teeth.
Frol spits blood onto the floor and says, “Traitor.”
“Loyalty to a man who murders women makes you complicit.”
Boris’s men arrive from the stairwell thirty seconds later and take Frol off my hands, beaten but breathing, which is more than he offered Polina. I watch them lead him down the corridor and don’t feel what I expected to feel. There’s nothing satisfying about what just happened between us, and I doubt there ever will be, but I don’t have time to think on it.
I turn for the stairs. My father’s office is on the third floor, east end, behind the only door on this property that locks from the inside. I’ve stood outside it more times than I can count, waiting to be called in, waiting to be assessed and assigned and told what I was worth that week. I know exactly how long it takes to reach it from the landing, because I counted the steps once when I was twelve and never forgot the number.
The corridor is clear when I reach the third floor. Two of Boris’s men are posted at the far end, and one of them nods when he sees me coming. I don’t knock. I test the handle, find it unlocked, and push the door open.
