Huh.
Of all the women fit to be part of the Bratva it could have been her.
What a crazy fucking bitch.
I chuckled.
My men stared at me.
Radovan and Tau walked toward the vehicle.
We were still coordinating the move to another property when Olya returned, bags in hand, searching for a kitchen that no longer existed.
I’d let her go.
But if our paths ever crossed again, she would meet a very different side of me.
One she would never survive.
Or escape.
Part II
Chapter 50
Iskra
The sun was warm for a change. Summer was coming and it was the perfect time to travel.
The rental car park was quiet at this hour—a handful of vehicles, a bored attendant in a glass booth scrolling his phone, the kind of unremarkable place that existed in every city and remembered no one. I continued to hum the tune that was stuck in my head.
My phone was switched off and tossed out the window several miles back, somewhere between the last Chernograd street sign and the first open road. I rolled my suitcase to the rental car and loaded it into the boot without hurrying. Hurrying attracted attention. Attention was the one thing I couldn’t afford.
Everything was completed online so I had limited time in this car before I had to dump it like his SUV.
I packed the car but kept only one padded envelope on the passenger seat.
The next stop was my brother, Ruslan.
We couldn’t travel together and he knew nothing of my plans. It had to play out this way to protect him. But I could help him get out at a later date when the heat died down. The thought of leaving him behind sat in my chest the way it had since I first mapped this route—a small persistent ache I had learned to breathe around. He was young. He was capable. He had survived theshestyorkaand the contempt of the Brotherhood’s particular brand of education. He would survive a little longer.
I wished I could have seen the Pakhan’s face when he got home.
The destruction was my parting gift in exchange for how he had treated me from the moment we met. Every clause. Every locked door. Every decision made on my behalf while I was unconscious and unable to object. Every woman he paraded through the east corridor with the specific intention of being heard. A fair exchange, I thought. His kitchen for my loss. His east wing for my body. The rubble of his home for the rubble of everything I had arrived with.
I slammed the door shut and settled into the new car. With the mirrors positioned, I tuned the radio before I revved the engine and pulled away from the rental car park.
The road opened ahead of me, straight and indifferent.
I would soon be on a series of trains.
The Trans-Mongolia route before I sorted out my entrance papers to Beijing. The international airport was then my gateway to the world. I would need to purchase multiple flights with his credit cards to throw him off the trail, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Let him find the receipts. Let him follow the wrong thread across three countries while I disappeared in the opposite direction. He had taught me, without meaning to, exactly how a person covered their tracks—I had watched his men operate for months from doorways and staircases, filing everything worth filing.
I hummed along to the radio, driving away from the only world I knew.
Chernograd.
The city that had swallowed me whole and was only now releasing its grip. I had memorised every street of it without meaning to—the compound, the cathedral visible from the balcony on winter mornings, the port district grey and frozen, the university where I had studied and believed, briefly, that knowledge was its own kind of freedom. Chernograd had been a cage with a beautiful skyline.
