36
AFON
I walk into the logging camp at noon with my hands open and my coat unzipped so they can see I'm not carrying. The snow is deep and untouched except for two sets of snowmobile tracks coming in from the east.
It's abandoned once again. The clear, cold sky opens up over complete and total stillness. No men. No trucks.
I stand in the middle of the clearing and I wait.
It only takes about three minutes. Then a snowmobile comes whining up the eastern trail, two men on it. One drives. The other has a rifle pointed at my chest the whole way in. They stop a few dozen feet off.
"Hands behind your head," the gunman says.
Once I do it, the second man gets off and pats me down. He finds the folding knife in my pocket and takes it, but there's nothing else to find.
"Where's my nephew?" I ask.
"You'll see him soon enough." He zip-ties my wrists behind my back, tight, the plastic biting into the skin. Then he hauls me onto the back of the snowmobile between him and the driver, and we go.
We climb a ridge, drop into a drainage, follow a creek, and then come up on a long drive with a gate that somebody's chained open. At the end of it sits a big timber lodge, two stories, with a wraparound porch and a stone chimney pumping smoke. Outbuildings on either side. There are men everywhere—on the porch, by the trucks, walking the tree line.
So this was the real spot. The camp was theater. I figured it would be.
They drag me off the snowmobile and march me up the steps and through the front door. Inside, it's warm, a fire roaring in a fieldstone hearth big enough to stand in. Trophy heads hang on the walls, elk and bear, the glass eyes catching the firelight.
At the far end of the long room, in a chair that somebody dragged in front of the fire like a throne, sits Viktor Reznik.
The years have changed him. He's heavier through the shoulders, sturdier in a way. The hungry kid Gervasii pulled out of a Kingston gutter has grown into a thick, well-fed man in a good coat, gray salting his temples, a gold watch on his wrist.
But the eyes are the same. Flat and dead like a shark's.
"Afon Satyrin," he says with a broad, friendly smile that shows a flash of gold tooth. "It's been a very long time."
"Yes," I agree, "it has. You look like you've done well for yourself."
"I have indeed." He spreads his hands wide. "You should see what I built. You and Gervasii, you ran a few kilos over a few mountains and thought you were kings. I run the whole range now. Both sides of the border. You wouldn't recognize the Lastochka."
"It's not the Lastochka," I say. "The Lastochka died with my brother."
He laughs. "Still a sentimental bastard, I see. Well, that's good, because I've got some more sentiment for you." He waves at someone behind him. "Bring the boy."
Two men go through a side door and come back dragging Matvei.
He's alive but badly beaten—lip split, one eye swelling shut, a bruise spreading along his jaw, his expensive suit torn at the shoulder and stained with gore. But he's on his feet, more or less. His good eye finds me across the room and goes wide.
"Uncle Afon," he rasps. "No, goddammit. You shouldn't have?—"
"Shut up, Mat," I interrupt.
I hate seeing him like this. After all that we both went through to get free and clear of the Bratva life, seeing it put its hands on him again makes me sick to my stomach. He wasout.Married, happy,free.
Then Reznik pulled him in, just to get to me.
"There," Reznik says. "You see? Alive and unharmed, more or less. I'm a man of my word, Afon. Just like you. You came alone, you came unarmed, and so the boy goes free." He nods at his men. "Walk him to the road and send him on his merry way."
The men start to move Matvei toward the door.
"Afon," Mat snarls again, struggling against them, "don't do this. Whatever he told you?—"
