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PROLOGUE

Sergei Morozov

New York

Thirteen years ago…

Mila’s door was wide open.

A kettle screamed from the kitchen. A light was on in the living room. The air carried the smell of boiled cabbage from one of her neighbors downstairs, rusting radiator pipes, damp wool, and even mold—but beneath all of it was the unmistakable metallic scent of blood.

I knew that smell.

Once you did, you never confused it with anything else.

I drew my gun before touching the door. I heard no voices, not even footsteps. Only the kettle and the harsh rhythm of my breathing, which I kept under control. Mila had called forty minutes earlier. I told her I would arrive in twenty, but a black sedan had repeated two of my turns on Brighton Beach Avenue, and I spent at least ten minutes making sure I didn’t lead anyone to her building before I got here.

I pushed the door wider with the toe of my boot and stepped into the apartment. The lamp beside the couch had been knocked over, its shade crushed beneath one leg of the coffee table. One of the curtains hung half-torn from the rod. Her small wooden dining chair had been thrown against the wall, and one of the framed photographs she kept beside the window lay face down beneath scattered shards of glass.

“Mila?”

The kettle continued screaming.

A man stepped out of the bedroom carrying Mila’s jewelry box in one hand and a pistol in the other. He saw me at almost the same moment I saw him, but his attention was split between my gun and whatever he had stolen.

Mine wasn’t.

I fired twice. The first round struck high in his chest. The second caught him closer to the throat and drove him backward into the doorframe, the wood splintering behind his shoulder as the jewelry box slipped from his hand. He hit the floor hard, spilling necklaces, earrings, and the silver bracelet I had given Mila on her birthday across the rug.

The gunshots exploded through the small apartment, painfully loud in the enclosed space. My ears rang, but I felt another body move behind me. I turned, raising my arm as a blade swept toward my face. The knife missed my eye by less than an inch and sliced the upper edge of my left ear and continued along the side of my head.

I felt the blast of pain immediately.

Blood rushed hot down the side of my neck, soaking into my collar. I trapped the attacker’s wrist before he could strike again and drove him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. I noted that he was younger than the first man, with a narrow face and a crooked nose.

I had seen him once before.

He had stood behind Yuri Volkov, the patriarch of the Volkov bratva family, and his son Dmitry at a club in Brighton Beach two weeks earlier, close enough to hear every word exchanged at their table and important enough that no one had asked him to move.

The recognition must have shown on my face because his bloody mouth stretched into a grin.

“Yuri said you would come.”

I twisted his wrist until the bones began to give. “Where is she?”

He laughed, and the sound of it made something inside me go completely cold.

I drove my forehead into his crooked nose. Cartilage crunched beneath the impact, and his grip loosened enough for the knife to fall. I kicked it away, wrapped one hand around his throat, and slammed him against the wall once more.

“Where is Mila?”

His eyes shifted toward the kitchen, and that was all I needed.

I threw him aside and turned. He hit the floor, rolled toward the open window, and crashed through the curtain onto the fire escape before I could stop him. I fired off a round, but the bullet struck the iron railing and threw a shower of sparks into the darkness below. The fire escape shook beneath his weight as he disappeared toward the alley.

Then Mila made a sound.

It was hardly anything. A breath caught somewhere deep inside her chest, just barely audible enough that another man might have missed it beneath the kettle and the sirens beginning to rise in the distance, but I didn’t.