A hand closes around my arm. I flinch.
"It's me." Lukas. His face is right above mine, and there's blood splattered across one cheekbone that isn't his. "It's done out here. Stay behind me."
He pulls me up. The drive is a wreck. A graveyard in the making. Men down in the snow, red spreading, trucks pocked with holes. Lukas's people move through it with their guns up, checking bodies, clearing corners.
"Where's Afon?" I gasp. "Is he?—?"
"Inside. Stay behind me." He's leading us up toward the porch, gun at the ready. I stay glued to his back the way I promised.
We go through the front door. The big room is hazy with gun smoke, a fire roaring in an enormous stone hearth. There are men down on the floor. Lukas's people are spread across the room, weapons trained on the far end.
Down there, in a chair dragged in front of the fire like a throne, is a heavyset man with gray at his temples and a gold watch on his wrist.
Reznik.
He has a pistol in his hand, and the pistol is pressed against the head of a man tied to a chair.
Afon.
My whole body goes cold and still.
Afon's face is a ruin. One eye swollen, blood down his chin, his lip split, a fresh dark bruise spreading along his jaw. His wrists are bound behind the chair. But his eyes are open, and they're locked on me.
What I see in them isn't fear.
It's pure, animal horror. At me being here.
"Caroline," he breathes. "No. No, no, no. You're supposed to?—"
"Quiet," Reznik croons, almost gently. He doesn't take the pistol off Afon's head, but his flat, dead eyes have found me, and they crawl over the dress, the vest, the open coat, taking it all in. "Well. Aren't you a pretty sight?"
"Let him go," Lukas says from beside me. "It's over, Viktor. Your men are dead or running. You're alone."
"Lukas Lazarev." Reznik's mouth smears into a smile. "It really is a reunion. I'm honored." He cocks his head. "But it's not over. I've still got a gun against your old friend's skull, and I'll paint the floor with him before any of you can stop me."
I step out from behind Lukas.
"Caroline," Afon begs, ragged. "Get back. Getoutof here."
I do the exact opposite.
I walk forward, into the open, into the space between all those guns, and I look at the man who killed Afon's wife and sold out his brother.
"You don't know who I am," I begin. "But you poisoned my whole life."
He laughs viciously. "Good business always comes with some collateral damage, sweetheart."
I shake my head. "It doesn't have to. It's you and men like you who make the world worse for others so you can make it better for yourself. My mother screamed in her sleep because of the world you live in. My father's in a grave because of it. I'm an orphan now because of men exactly like you."
Lukas, to my surprise, remains silent at my side, letting me talk.
"And I'm still here," I continue toward Reznik. "You burned a cabin and chased us down a mountain and you couldn't get rid of me. You can't get rid of any of us. We just keep coming. We keepliving, you sad, hungry little man, no matter how many of us you put in the ground."
His jaw tightens. The pistol stays against Afon's head, but I see his eyes pass over the guns all pointed at him, then return to the woman in the wedding dress walking toward him with no fear at all.
There's no version where he walks out of here. He knows it.
"You're a brave girl," he says. "Stupid. But brave."
