I bring the axe down.
One. Two. Three.
Powerful, thudding strokes.
They don’t see me coming until the axe is falling on them, one by one, their heads bursting into crimson liquid.
I’m making a mess, but that doesn’t matter. Not for what’s coming next.
This is the moment of truth.
Panting and blood-soaked, I pull off my filthy, sweat-stained shirt, rip open the gas tank of the largest truck and stuff it inside to soak the fabric with gas.
The fabric will work as a fuse to delay the explosion for a few seconds.
Long enough for me to take a car and get out of this place.
I have one set of keys from the guards. I try one car after another until finally, the engine of a SUV starts to turn over. It looks armored.
Good. I might need it, if there are any survivors left here.
I return to my makeshift fuse and take one deep breath. The petrol fumes clear my head a little.
I spark the lighter.
A voice makes me falter, sending me into full alert mode. I swing around, axe in hand, and Arkady Romanov looks back at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Fucking hell, kid, I could’ve blown us both up.”
“Zhukov, you weren’t going to leave me behind, were you?”
His Chicago accent always transports me to another time and place.A time when Bratva royalty like him never would have been caught dead with me.
He gives a rattling cough and I hear the wheeze of his lungs that has been getting worse this summer.
It’s like seeing a ghost from my guilty conscience.
“Where the fuck did you come from?”
I grab his arm and shove him down behind the truck. I don’t know how many guards Ivanov had and I can’t be sure that I’ve killed them all. What if someone was on the perimeter?
I lost sleep over whether to bring Arkady with me. He’s the only other patient — or prisoner, if we’re being honest about what this place is — who still has a spark of life in him. Who still seems capable of some resistance, even after spending his teenage years staring at padded walls.
I didn’t think he could make it. Arkady has been weakening lately. Mostly, I didn’t trust myself to keep him safe.Not him, not anyone else.
Arkady is twenty, but he looks seventeen, shrunken and too thin after too many years in this place.
“I knew you were up to something,” he hisses at me accusingly, staring at the silver lighter in my hand.
Fair enough. He’s right.
I don’t have time to waste with explanations or apologies. Arkady knows exactly what was about to happen to him.
I point at the car that I’ve got the keys to.
“We’re going back to New York. If you’re too slow, I’m leaving you behind.”
His jaw sets in determination and he nods his head.
