There’s a little sniffle on the other end. “When are you coming back?”
“Just hold on a little longer, okay?” I plead, leaning forward to brace my hand on my knee. “I’ll be there to get you soon.”
“Okay,” he mumbles.
There is a pause on the line long enough that the room grows loud around me. When Mikhail’s voice trails down the line again, my mouth tugs down into a frown.
“What a touching reunion,” he says. The words are thinly veiled mockery.
My fingers close around the phone until the plastic digs crescents into my palm. All the noise in me wants to come out—a scream, a curse, a raw, animalistic plea to put my boy back on the line. Instead, I force the breath out of me in a harsh burst, steadying the tremor in my chest by pulling in another deep one.
“I’m still working on the plan,” I tell him.
He hums softly to himself, sounding completely disinterested. “The plan… Actually, I’ve changed my mind about that.”
My heart plummets. “What?”
He chuckles at me. “Oh, relax, Ivy. You will still get your son back if you cooperate.”
I grip the side of the tub to keep from doubling over. I’m hyperventilating to the point of my vision growing spotty. It takes everything in me not to scream, to beg and plead with him not to change things on me.
But then his voice cuts through my thoughts again. “Your next task is quite simple. You’re going to lure Maksim out to a specific location that I’ll send you the coordinates to. Don’t worry, it will be a simple restaurant so you will be able to talk him into taking you quite easily. Once you’re there, my men and I will take him out. He won’t see it coming. Once that happens, all of this will be over and you and your son can leave and do whatever you want. I don’t care.”
The words make my blood run cold, nausea clawing at my throat. He wants me to set Maksim up. To deliver him into Mikhail’s hands in order to execute him.
I imagine Maksim at a table with me sitting across from him, the line of his jaw I've traced in sleep ticking up from a joke I’ve told, the way his laugh crinkles the corner of his eye. I imagine that laugh cut short as a bullet rockets through his chest, blood spraying everywhere until we’re both coated in it. Then I imagine him gasping for air, reaching for me with a trembling hand before it drops lifelessly to the ground, blood pooling beneath him.
“No.” The single syllable claws out of me, barely above a whisper “You can’t… We had a plan. He was going to?—”
“I’m no longer interested in that plan,” he says, cutting me off. He sounds almost bored saying it, like it’s old news he’s having to relay for the seventh time today. “I’m not interested in running the risk of Maksim changing his mind later down the road years from now and coming back to claim his territory. Killing him will eliminate that.”
The logic in it is clinical, surgical. Begrudging logic seems obscene in the face of the thing he proposes, but some animal part of me unfortunately understands. In a world of men who rule with bloodlust and dominance, obtaining what you want can only be met through violence.
He says it as if the answer is obvious. And to him, maybe it is. It’s a simple truth that can be seen by stepping back and observing the playing field with a level head. Someone like me, entangled with emotions and personal investment, would never be able to think that way.
Perhaps that’s what makes Mikhail not only a monster, but a practical one.
I choke on that truth.
“You will do as I say,” Mikhail continues, “or you will watch your son suffer the consequences for your choices. It’s very simple.”
An ultimatum that reduces everything I am—a mother, a lover, a woman who once believed in a plan to build a better future together free from the confines of the Bratva—down to a single equation. One life for another.
There is no wail or theatrics, just the slow, relentless falling of saline that seems to come from somewhere bone-deep. Sorrow is too soft a word for this hollow feeling that rips me wide open. It’s worse. It’s the feeling of being asked to pry out a piece of my soul and hand it over in exchange for another piece.
I had thought, foolishly, that there was another path. That I could steer Maksim away from the Bratva, make him want life away from the violence and the bloodlust and the slow rot that comes with power. I had believed, in that stupid, stubborn way lovers do, that love could map a different kind of life.
The only destination I had not seen was the one already written—Maksim at Mikhail’s mercy, the last beat of his heart fading as he lay dying at his feet.
“Fine.” Saying it feels like cutting my own tongue out to stop the screams I can’t let myself make. The surrender doesn’t feel liberating. It feels like death.
On the other end of the line, a pleased sound leaks out of him, almost amused. “Good.”
When the call ends, my arm drops and I sit there for a long moment with the phone clutched loosely in my hand. My whole body shakes in small, uncontrollable tremors. I want to throw up. I want to scream until my voice is nothing but hoarse rasps.
Instead, I force myself to move.
The coordinates for the restaurant come within seconds. I pull them up on the map just long enough to memorize thename of the restaurant before closing out of the applications altogether.
