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* * *
The security team began the extraction six minutes later.
Arsen would leave through the covered loading bay inside an armored vehicle, transfer twice, and disappear into a federal site Kit had arranged through Mikhail’s prosecutor.
Alessia walked beside me as the steel door rolled upward.
The cold harbor air rushed in immediately, carrying salt, diesel, and the distant groan of cranes moving containers through the dark. Fog rested low over the water. The Boston skyline glowed beyond it, beautiful and indifferent. The armored vehicle waited less than twenty feet away.
Arsen was led into the loading bay between two guards a minute later.
The first bullet reached him before the rifle report crossed the water. His body jerked, and a dark hole opened high in his chest. Without missing a beat, I caught Alessia around the waist and drove her behind the armored vehicle as the second round struck the concrete wall where her head had been only seconds before.
“Shooter across the channel,” Nikolai barked through my earpiece. “Upper warehouse. East windows.”
Another shot hit the vehicle’s rear panel. I pressed Alessia behind the engine block. One of the guards fired toward the distant warehouse. Arsen staggered and landed beside us. For a second, I watched as blood spread across his sweater too quickly. Knowing time was of the essence, I tore the fabric open and pressed both hands over the wound. The round had entered beneath his collarbone and passed through somewhere lower. Each breath made a wet sound inside his chest.
Alessia crouched beside me. “Tell me what to do.”
“Put pressure here,” I directed her.
I moved one of her hands into place. Her fingers became red almost immediately.
For one terrible second, the harbor disappeared. Mila’s apartment returned around me. A screaming kettle. Blood slipping between my hands. The woman I loved looking toward me while I tried to force life back into a body already too far gone.
“Sergei.”
Alessia’s voice cut through it all.
“Stay with me,” she coaxed gently.
I nodded and looked back down at Arsen. His body started to loosen, and then one final breath escaped his lips.
Arsen Vardanyan died beneath my hands.
The shooter didn’t escape, though. Nikolai’s men found him inside the upper floor of the abandoned warehouse with a suppressed rifle, two false port credentials, and a phone he had attempted to crush beneath his boot. Ivan brought the device to me while the medical team covered Arsen’s body. Alessia stood several feet away with Kit, her bloodied hands held beneath a bottle of water while Kit washed them clean.
A photograph filled the damaged screen.
It was Alessia leaving the armored car less than an hour earlier, my body positioned beside her. The image had been taken through the shooter’s scope.
Beneath it were four words.
Another woman. Another grave.
* * *
An hour later, while Kit remained with Alessia as she completed the formal account of the shooting, I stepped into the old office, closed the door, and called the Bellandi pilot who had brought Matteo from Sicily. He answered on the second ring.
“I need the aircraft fueled at Hanscom before sunrise,” I instructed.
“What’s the intended destination?”
“Palermo.”
“How many passengers?”
I looked through the narrow glass panel in the door. Alessia sat with Kit, drinking a bottle of water. She’d washed the blood off her hands, but some of it had stained her blouse.
