And whatever my father assumes about her, he’s never watched her hands shake while she talks about her family and then hold steady enough to butterfly-strip a wound closed.
He doesn’t know her. I do.
The pieces are falling together in a pattern I don’t want to see but can’t look away from. My family’s rage at the Bratva. The guns. The violence. The way my father talked about them like they were a problem he was planning to solve permanently.
There’s only one reason a family operates like that.
We’re mafia. Something rival, something just as deep in the blood and the dark.
And I came here. To her stretch of coast, her beach, her house. I came here for a reason, and the nausea twisting through me says I already know I won’t like what it is.
I force myself up. My legs feel borrowed, unreliable.
Through the kitchen window I can hear Nikolai’s voice, muffled but sharp, and Natalia’s silence beneath it. Every instinct screams at me to go inside, to put myself between her and that dead-eyed fuck. To plant myself in that kitchen and let him see exactly who’s been sleeping down the hall from his sister.
But I can’t. She told me to hide, and if I show my face now, I blow everything.
So I walk. Fast and unsteady, sand giving way under my feet as I cut down the beach toward town. Not Ronnie’s. I can’t sit across from someone and make small talk when my father’s voice is still rattling around my skull like a stray bullet.
There’s a bar a few doors down. Faded surf stickers peeling off the door, a chalkboard sign advertising half-price margaritas that nobody’s updated since Labor Day.
Good enough.
Inside, the place is nearly empty, which tracks. November on the Outer Banks doesn’t exactly scream happy hour. There’s a guy at the far end of the bar who looks like he came in last Tuesday and forgot to leave. Behind me, near the pool table, four guys who look like they spend more time in this bar than their own kitchens. Locals. Thick-armed, red-faced, with the permanentsquint of men who’ve been drinking since the fish stopped biting.
I order a pale ale with Natalia’s cash and wrap my hands around the frosted glass. The cold feels good. Grounding. My hands are still tingling from how hard I gripped the sand, and my head is a mess of my father’s voice sayingenemyand Natalia’s voice sayingmy family runs the Russian mafia in Vegasand all the space between those two facts where the truth of who I am is hiding.
“The fuck are you looking at?”
One of the pool table guys. I didn’t realize I’d been staring in their direction, but evidently my face was doing something unfriendly while I did it, because the biggest of them has his cue propped against his shoulder like a weapon, already squaring up.
I turn back to my beer. “Nothing.”
A snort behind me. Low murmuring. Then something small and hard bounces off the back of my neck.
A peanut shell.
Don’t. Not here.
I take a slow sip. The beer tastes like nothing. Another shell hits my shoulder, and one of them laughs, loud and deliberate, the kind of sound designed to make sure I know it’s at my expense.
My grip tightens on the glass. I breathe through my nose. I think about Natalia. About how I’m a stranger in a small town staying in her house, and any mess I make lands at her door.
I finish the beer, set it down, nod to the bartender. He nods back. At least some people still have basic fucking manners.
Outside, the salt air hits me and I walk around to the back of the bar, where a warped wooden railing overlooks the dunes. The ocean beyond is gray and restless, whitecaps chopping at the surface. I lean on the railing and close my eyes. I just need ten minutes. Ten minutes of waves and wind and no one’s voice in my head telling me who to hate.
The back door bangs open behind me.
I’m already turning when the first punch catches me in the kidney. The pain is sharp and deep, folding me sideways. I go to one knee, the sand-dusted concrete biting through my pants.
The big one from the pool table has a buddy with him, the shorter one in a red Carhartt, and two more hanging back by the door with their arms crossed like bouncers at the world’s shittiest nightclub.
Red Carhartt comes next, swinging wide and sloppy. My body moves before my brain gives permission. I duck under his arm and drive my fist into the soft spot below his ribs. He folds with a wet grunt, hitting the concrete on both knees.
The big one resets, bouncing on his toes like he’s seen too many bar fights on TV. He leads with his right. I slap it aside with my forearm, step inside his reach, and hook him hard in the floating rib. Something cracks under my knuckles. He staggers, and I hit him again. Same spot. Targeted. Efficient.
My breathing is steady. My body knows this. Knows the angles, the timing, the way to read a telegraph in someone’s shoulder before the punch even starts. This isn’t scrappy instinct. This istraining. Thousands of hours of it, coded into my muscles like a second language.
