Chapter 24
PAVEL
The man Molly kicked out of the car is still in the drainage ditch when I get back to him.
I had expected him to be gone. Fedor doesn’t like loose ends, so I had half prepared myself for his absence.
Instead, I find him draped on the grass, with his feet still in the ditch water and both hands pressed to the side of his head, which is bleeding with the enthusiasm of head wounds.
He’s conscious in the loose way that happens after a bad knock to the head.
He looks up when I stop in front of him. “Help.” In Russian.
I look at him for a moment, but I’m distracted by flashes of Molly in the back seat of that cursed car with a gun pointed at her torso.
The two lives she is carrying. The calculation she made, asking him to aim lower.
What would have happened if she had not been exactly who she is, which is the smartest and most composed person I have ever seen in a crisis.
“Help,” he says again.
I crouch down to his level. I look at his face, which is thoroughly fucked up from hitting the road. There’s a chance he wouldn’t survive it—that dent in the side of his skull doesn’t look good. But I’ve seen hospitals bring men back from the dead, so what do I know?
“Please,” he begs.
“No.”
I make it quick. It’s more than he deserves, and I’m aware of this, and I do it this way because there’s a woman waiting for me in my car who doesn’t need to hear more of what she has already heard enough of this morning.
I go back to the SUV. As I get in, Igor gets out to handle the body for me.
Molly quietly asks, “It’s done?”
“He will never touch you or anyone else ever again.”
She breathes a little deeper, but that’s the only reaction. “I can’t believe it was Andrei.”
“I hope he’s the only one.”
She blinks over at me. “You think Fedor has more than one spy?”
“I can’t afford to think anything else.”
“Oh.” Another deep breath, this time to steady herself. “I hadn’t thought—I didn’t think he’d be able to get to more than one guy.”
“There’s no way to know whether Vladimir was one of his.
Andrei clearly was. There could be more.
” I’m aware that Molly knows certain details of my past. But I don’t know how much she knows.
“It’s what I have done before. Which Fedor knows.
So, it would track that he’d have more than one man on the inside. He might call it poetic justice.”
“I thought he only just got out of prison.”
“He did. But men like Fedor move fast. And they likely had help before they ever left prison.” I don’t want her spinning out on these facts. “Tell me exactly what happened this morning. Every detail you remember.”
She tells it with the flat precision of someone who has run out of adrenaline and is now in the territory beyond it, where the events are recited rather than felt because the feeling part is going to require more resources than are currently available.
The longer she talks, the more time Igor has to dismantle the body, so I ask questions when I can. I listen to all of it and keep my face calm. She deserves a soft place to land when the details make her crumble.
But she doesn’t crumble. Instead, she rambles. She pushed a man out of a moving car while she’s recovering from a concussion. She did it because he threatened her babies. It wasn’t any deeper than that, and it wasn’t an accident. She tried to kill him for the threat, and she isn’t sorry.
I’m proud of her in a way that is almost incapacitating. The rest of me is terrified.
Her luck will run out. That’s the thought I can’t dislodge, sitting cold in the back of everything else while she talks. Her intelligence is real, and her composure is extraordinary, and she has resources that most people in her situation would not have.
But resources run out, composure has limits, and intelligence cannot stop a bullet. She improvised and was successful because the men sent for her were not expecting improvisation. They expected a scared, concussed, pregnant woman to be compliant. Not fierce.
The next men will expect her.
There will be next men. That is the nature of this world. There is no version of my life in which there are not next men. There always are in my world, and I was fine with that until the consequences became hers.
Igor gets back in the car, evidence gone. “We’re ready to move.”
I drive and think about Fedor’s compound in the Hudson Valley, which I have had under surveillance for two days. The floor plan is etched into my brain. I know the timing of the guard rotations, the weaknesses in the fence. The code to the safe room.
When we get home, Molly stretches and quietly says, “I need a long shower and soup. Too much soup. Do you mind—”
“The chicken and rice, or do you want pho?”
She smiles. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything about you, Molly. When will you stop doubting me?”
Her sigh is filled with all the things she’s too tired to say. She comes to me, and I hold her while she relaxes into it. “I’m sorry I yelled at you in the hospital.”
“Don’t be. I needed to hear it. Even if I didn’t hear it at the time.”
She kisses me, a chaste thing. “Pho, please.”
“On it.”
I watch as she makes it up the stairs, then text who I need to text. The pho shop that delivers. Igor. A handful of captains.
When the soup shows up, it is tested before I will allow Molly to eat. It’s not poisoned, which means either Fedor isn’t watching our orders, or he wants us to feel comfortable, or he couldn’t get to the soup in time.
Molly comes down the stairs looking far more relaxed. She sees the soup and all the components scattered on the dining table. “Perfect.”
“Sit with me.”
She smiles, and we dine on the spread, talking about nothing for a while. It’s nice and cozy, and I don’t tell her it could be the last meal we ever have together.
She’s halfway through when she yawns hard. “Oh, I think the babies are telling me it’s bedtime.”
I tuck her in and kiss her forehead as I pull up the quilt. “Dream well, my love.” I turn out the light.
But she grabs my hand before I can turn to leave. “Where are you going?”
“Business. Nothing to worry about. The usual.” I shrug, playing off the lie.
“The usual? So, urgent, too much, and probably expensive?”
I chuckle. “Yeah.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“What?”
She squeezes my hand. “You killed people today. You don’t have to bear the weight of that alone. You don’t have to run away from me. Let me be here for you.” She yawns again, but her grip is strong.
My wife breaks my heart regularly. This is one of those times.
I kiss the back of her hand. “My love, I’m not running away because of any of that. I will deal with those thoughts later. But for now, paperwork. It waits for no one.”
“Oh. Okay. If you change your mind, you know where I am.” With that, she releases my hand and snuggles into the blankets.
It’s tempting to stay with her. It’s the only thing I ever want to do.
But tonight is not about what I want to do. It is about what I must do.
With one more kiss to her forehead, I close the bedroom door quietly and signal the guards in the hallway. “Inside that room is the only treasure that matters. You will guard this door with your lives. That is not hyperbole. It is fact. She will survive this night, come what may. Am I understood?”
They exchange a slightly confused look. “Boss, that’s the job. Something up?”
“Yes. Me.” I march down the hall and gather a selection of my men in one of my soundproofed rooms in the lower level of the mansion.
Igor has made the arrangements—the long table, maps, burner phones, the works.
There are fourteen of them, plus Igor, plus Dmitri and Sasha, who have been with me long enough to have earned the places they stand in.
These are men who have been with me through years of this life, who have stood at perimeters and driven cars and handled the thousand unglamorous necessities of keeping this operation functional. They are men who have, in many cases, been with me longer than anything else in my life has lasted.
I once heard another pakhan refer to men like them as “career goons.” I wanted to smack him across the face for the lack of respect, but he was older than me and showing me the ropes. Today, I would smack him.
They are here because they choose to be here with me, and I choose them. That’s the difference I have always known between my men and Fedor’s, and I have never felt it more clearly than I feel it tonight. They are the closest thing I will ever have to brothers.
Tonight, they are brothers-in-arms.
“Fedor Vinogradov tried to take my wife this morning,” I say.
I do not raise my voice. I do not need to—the room is quiet with the attention of people who are already with me, who were with me before I said a word.
“He did this after attacking her and Vet. After he murdered Vladimir and left his body in my courtyard. He did this because he believes I can be broken. That we can be broken.” I look at the faces around the table, one by one.
Igor mutters, “Fuck that guy.”
The others nod along with the sentiment.
I do too. “He is wrong. Dead wrong. And tonight, we will show him.”
“Yes, we will,” Dmitri says firmly.
“He has hired guns,” I continue. “Men who are there for money, who will fight because they are paid to fight, and who will calculate, in the middle of a firefight, whether the money is worth the cost. They will do the math, and Fedor will come up short.”
Igor, at the end of the table, catches my eye. “And even if they stay put, it won’t fucking matter.”
I clap his shoulder in support. “We move at two in the morning. Make your arrangements, whatever they may be. We are walking into the lion’s den.
We may not all walk out. But we will fight.
We will honor Vladimir’s sacrifice. We will honor my wife, the woman who has made each of your days better for years.
She will do the same for years to come, because we will face Fedor together, and he will fall tonight. ”