Caroline
The convoy stops a mile out from the lodge.
We're parked in a string of trucks along a forest road, snow piled high on either side. All the drivers turn their engines off so we don't give ourselves away.
I'm in the back seat of the lead vehicle, squeezed between Cass and the door. The bulletproof vest is crushing my ribs and the ivory silk is bunched up underneath the big, black coat.
But I feel like I've never looked better.
Up front, Lukas is on the radio. Kir is staring at a tablet with the drone feed on it, a gray-and-white aerial picture of the lodge and the woods around it, with infrared glows surrounding the heat from anything alive.
"Six men outside," Kir reports. "Maybe eight, nine inside. Hard to tell through the roof."
"Matvei?" Lukas asks.
"There." Kir points at the screen. A small heat shape moving away from the lodge, two bigger shapes flanking it. "They're walking him out. East side. Toward the road."
My heart jumps. "They let him go?"
"Reznik keeps his word," Lukas says. He keys the radio. "Team two, alert: Matvei is on foot moving east. Two escorts. Take them quiet and get him clear. Do not fire toward the lodge."
A crackle of acknowledgment.
As I watch the little shapes on the screen, two more emerge out of the trees and close on the escorts. There's no sound from here. Just the shapes meeting, tangling, going still. Then the blurry red haze that is Matvei gets folded into the group and pulled into the tree line, away from the lodge.
"Matvei's clear," a voice announces over the radio. "He's beat up but walking. We've got him."
Cass sighs next to me, a single broken exhale of relief, and presses her hand to her mouth. I grab her other hand and squeeze it.
"That's one," Lukas says, though his voice has lost none of its edge. "Afon's still inside."
I look at the screen. There's a cluster of heat shapes in the big main room. One of them is sitting down, lower than the others. Stationary. Surrounded.
I know it's him. I don't need anybody to tell me.
"They're not moving him," Kir says after a moment of silent watching. "He's staying in the lodge."
"Then so is Reznik," Lukas concludes. "He wants it done where he can watch." He turns around in his seat and looks at me. "It's time. You understand what you're doing?"
"I walk up the front drive. Slow. I keep his eyes on me," I recite, just like we practiced. "And while he's wondering what the hell I'm doing, your people come through the back."
"You stop the second anyone tells you to stop. Remember that part?"
"I know."
"Caroline." His gray eyes hold mine. "If this goes wrong, my men have orders to put themselves between you and the guns. That means men might die so you don't. Do you understand the weight of that?"
I understand it more than he would ever guess. You don't bury your parents as young as I did without learning something about the heaviness of death.
"Then don't let it go wrong," I say boldly.
He nods, then turns away from me.
"Convoy's quiet from here," he rumbles into the radio. "Teams on the back approach, hold at the tree line until I call it. Decoy on the drive in three minutes." He looks at me one more time. "Go."
The walk up the drive is the longest walk of my life.
The lodge sits at the end of a quarter-mile of churned snow. The trees crowd close on either side, and somewhere in them, behind me and to the sides, are Lukas's people. I can't see them. Then again, I'm not supposed to. So job well done to those guys, I guess.
I keep my hands out of my pockets so they're visible. I left the coat open. Underneath it, the ivory dress catches the light, bright against all that black and gray. A bride walking up a snowy drive toward a house full of killers.
I get about halfway before a man steps out from behind a truck near the porch, rifle swinging up.
"Stop right there!"
I freeze.
He stares at me. I watch him try to make sense of the sheer absurdity of the situation. I get his confusion—it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, either. It certainly wasn't how I envisioned my wedding day going.
"The hell is this?" he shouts back toward his fellow soldiers on the porch. "There's a—there's a woman out here. In a wedding dress."
Another man comes out onto the porch. Then a third. Exactly like I said. A crazy bride is a thing you stop and look at, no matter who or where you are.
And that's precisely what we needed to happen. Every second they look at me is a second they don't look at the trees behind them.
"I'm here for Afon Satyrin," I call out. "He's supposed to be getting married today. To me."
The men look at each other.
"She's nuts," one of them declares.
"Go tell Reznik," another mutters.
The first one starts backing toward the lodge door, not lowering his rifle, keeping it on me. I keep walking, slow, one careful step at a time, watching his trigger finger, my heart going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Inside, Afon hears it too.
I don't know that right now, of course. I won't find out until later how it went, this part I couldn't see. The fist driving into his kidney, his head snapping back, blood in his mouth. Reznik lounging on his throne by the fire, sipping from a glass, telling his men to do it slow.
And then a man bursting through the front door saying there's a woman outside in a wedding dress asking for him.
And Afon, who came up that mountain to die, who left his ring on my pillow, who said his goodbyes and meant them, lifting his swelling, bleeding head and feeling the bottom drop out of his stomach.
Because there's only one woman in the world that could be.
And she was supposed to be a few hours south, safe.
The first shot doesn't come from the front.
It comes from the back, from the woods. A single crack that splits the cold air.
And then the world comes apart.
The men on the porch spin toward the sound. The young one with the rifle on me whirls, and for one second, his back is to me.
That's all the time the figure that comes out of the tree line on my right needs. I don't even see him until his damage is done. The young man goes down and doesn't get up.
"Caroline, down!" somebody roars. Lukas's voice, somewhere close.
I drop into the snow. The vest knocks the wind out of me.
Above me, the air fills with noise. Gunfire, men shouting, the heavy thud of bodies moving fast through deep snow. I press my cheek to the cold ground and I do exactly what I was told—I stay down, I make myself small, and I don't move.
It doesn't last long. A burst here, a shout there, a man crying out, then cut short. Boots pounding the porch. Glass breaking. The deep boom of a shotgun from inside.
Then less.
Less.
Less.
Until…
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. Get out of 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 keep living, 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."
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
For one long second, nobody moves.
Then Afon does.
I don't see how he gets his hands free. But all at once, Afon is up out of the chair, and his shoulder drives into Reznik. The pistol goes off—the shot punching into the ceiling, plaster raining down—and the two of them fall to the floor in a tangle in front of the fire.
"AFON!"
It's over fast. Afon is bigger and meaner and he's got twenty years of grief in his hands. Reznik is heavy but soft, a man who's spent two decades giving orders instead of doing the work. The pistol skitters away across the floorboards. Lukas's boot comes down on it.
And then Afon is on top of him, knee in his chest, one scarred hand around Reznik's throat, the other drawn back in a fist.
Reznik laughs. Blood in his teeth, gold tooth gleaming, choking out a wheezing cackle.
"There he is," he breathes. "There's the beast I knew. Do it slow, Afon. Make it hurt. Be what you are."
Afon's fist trembles in the air.
The whole room holds its breath. Lukas doesn't move. Nobody moves.
This is Afon's moment. We all know it. Whatever happens next is his and only his.
I watch his face. The rage in it, twenty years deep, a black storm. The blood and the bruise and the swollen eye. His hand shaking with how badly he wants to do exactly what Reznik is begging for.
"Afon," I say. Quiet. Just his name.
His eyes don't leave Reznik. But I see him hear me.
"Don't be what he wants," I say. "Don't give him that."
His fist stays in the air, shaking. Reznik keeps laughing under him, blood on his teeth, daring him to do it.
Then Afon's hand drops.
But he doesn't hit him. He lets go of Reznik's throat and pushes himself up off the floor, slow, every part of him hurting. His knees crack. He stands there over the man for a second, breathing hard, then says, "No. I'm not what I once was. Not anymore."
He turns away from Reznik like he's already forgotten him. He crosses the room to me. His face is a wreck and his eyes are damp as he wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his chest. I grab two fistfuls of his shirt and hold on.
"You came," he says into my hair. "You stupid, brave idiot. You came."
"Yeah," I breathe. "I'm still not very good with respecting boundaries."
He holds me tighter.
Then, over my shoulder, without looking back, he tells Lukas, "He's all yours. Do whatever you want with him. I don't care anymore. Everything I need is right here."