Chapter 18
Ksenia
My uncle was watching me bleed.
I pressed the dirty towel harder against my right palm.
Pain shot up my wrist, sharp enough to make me gasp.
The blood had come through again. I didn’t know how much I’d lost. I didn’t know whether the shaking was from that or the cold or the fact that every time someone moved outside the office, I thought they were coming to get me.
Kostya stepped towards me, and I shrank back against the chair.
He stopped.
He had never made me flinch before.
“Drink something.” He held out a bottle of water. “Please, Ksenia.”
I stared at him. At his familiar face. His wedding ring. The little crease between his eyebrows that I had spent my whole life mistaking for concern.
Some frightened part of me still wanted his help. Wanted him to get me out of this garage, take me home, tell me everything would be all right. He was my uncle. He was supposed to be someone I could run to.
My eyes burned. I looked down before he could see.
“You’re still bleeding,” he said.
Then get me a doctor. Open the fucking door. Do something.
I couldn’t say any of it. Asking him for help would mean waiting to find out whether he would give it.
I tried to hear Daniil’s voice again.
I love you. I’m coming.
I wanted him so badly I could barely breathe. But they were waiting for him, too. That was why I was still alive.
“Once Daniil signs,” Kostya said, “this unpleasantness will be over. You’ll be released. No one else needs to be hurt.”
I lifted my head.
“Unpleasantness?”
“Ksenia—”
“Is that what you called it when you helped kill my father?”
The bottle shifted in his hand.
I watched his fingers tighten around it and remembered those fingers holding a pencil beside mine. I was twelve, crying over a maths problem. He had stayed at the kitchen table until I understood it. I remembered how patient he had been. How safe I’d felt.
A sob caught in my throat. I swallowed it so hard it hurt.
“When you gave them the code,” I said. “When you walked out of Volna and left him upstairs. What did you call it then?”
He put the water on the desk. Carefully. As though spilling it was something we needed to worry about.
“Your father—”
“Don’t.”
He fell silent.
“He trusted you.”
My voice broke. I hated that he could hear it. Hated that I wanted an answer from him, something that would make the man standing in front of me fit inside the life I remembered.
“We both did.”
Kostya opened his mouth.
I waited, shaking, with my wounded hand clutched against my stomach.
“Mikhail made—”
“Don’t you dare tell me what he did wrong.”
He looked away first.
I got up because I couldn’t bear to sit beneath him any longer. My knees almost folded. I caught the edge of the desk with my good hand and waited until I could trust my legs.
Kostya reached for my elbow.
“Don’t touch me.”
His hand dropped. I moved to the office window.
Beyond the glass lay the repair bay, empty except for two vehicle lifts and Oleg’s men.
Across it, a steel door stood open to the yard.
A brick held it against its closer. I had stumbled through that doorway when they brought me in.
I remembered the metal against my shoulder, Oleg’s hand between my shoulder blades.
I looked for a way out even though I knew he had men at the door.
The wide black garage shutter beside it was down. Through the open doorway I could see the back of Oleg’s SUV and part of the yard’s open gate. The road lay beyond. People were driving along it. Going to work. Going home.
None of them knew I was here.
Oleg stepped into view, looking at his phone. He stopped just inside the repair bay, and a voice came from the speaker.
“I am stepping down as Pakhan of the Sokolov organization, effective immediately.”
Daniil. Daddy.
My good hand went flat against the glass.
“Administration of the Sokolov freight operation—the yards, the routes, the dispatch system, the labor contracts—is being transferred to Viktor Voronin.”
I waited for him to say something else. To refuse. To tell them what they could do with their demands.
The recording ended.
Oleg played it again.
“There,” Kostya said behind me. “You see? It will all end well.”
I couldn’t look at him.
Daniil was giving them everything. The men who depended on him. His brothers’ inheritance. The alliance he and Anton had fought to keep together. All the things we had talked about in bed as though we would have years to work them out.
I had told him I loved him on the phone. I should have told him not to do this. I should have made him promise.
But I had wanted him to come.
God help me, I still did.
Oleg laughed at something on the screen. His split lip pulled open, and he touched it with his thumb.
I wanted to hit him again. I wanted him to hurt so badly he couldn’t stand there enjoying my husband’s voice.
An engine sounded outside. Oleg lifted his head.
A dark car passed the open doorway and stopped in the yard. I leaned sideways, trying to see. Oleg went out to meet it, leaving the doorway clear.
Nikita was behind the wheel.
Then the passenger door opened, and Daniil got out.
My breath came out in a sound I couldn’t stop.
He was here. He was really here.
His shirt was creased, his jacket open. No coat. He showed Oleg his empty hands, turned enough to let him see beneath the jacket, then faced the garage again.
He was looking for me.
I moved along the window until I stood directly opposite the open door. His eyes found mine through the bay.
For a moment I forgot Kostya. I forgot the blood and the men and the fact that Daniil had just given our enemies everything they wanted. I could see him. His mouth moved around my name, too far away for me to hear.
I put my hand against the glass.
Please, I thought. Please get me out of here.
Kostya took my arm.
“Come.”
I wanted to pull away. Instead I let him lead me out of the office, because he was taking me towards Daniil.
My knees hurt with every step. I tried not to limp. I didn’t want Oleg to think I couldn’t make it to the car.
Daniil waited outside the steel door. I could see the shadows under his eyes now, the stubble along his jaw. He looked at the towel around my hand, and his expression changed so abruptly that I pressed it against my stomach.
I didn’t want him looking at the blood. I wanted him looking at me.
“I’m all right,” I said.
His eyes came back to mine.
“I know, baby.”
It was such an obvious lie. We both knew I wasn’t all right. But his voice was the one I knew from home, from our kitchen and our bed, and hearing it here nearly undid me.
I took a breath. Then another. He watched me do it.
Oleg stood just inside the doorway, beside Kostya. Beyond Daniil, Nikita’s car waited with its engine running. The black SUV was parked along the fence; its driver watched us through the open window. There was space to get past it to the gate.
So close.
“Ksenia goes to the car first,” Daniil said. “Then I come inside.”
“Sir, I remember our agreement.” Oleg smiled. “You have the papers?”
“In my jacket.”
“And you’ll sign them.”
“When she’s with my brother.”
Oleg glanced at Kostya. The fingers around my arm loosened.
I looked at Daniil. He was going to let me walk past him. He was going to stand here while I got into the car, and then he was going to go into that room with them.
I couldn’t make my feet move.
“Daniil.”
“Go to Nikita.”
“What about you?”
His jaw tightened. He looked straight at me.
“I love you. Go to the car.”
He hadn’t answered. Behind me, Oleg shifted, impatient, and I understood that if I stayed here arguing I would give him a reason to stop this.
I stepped over the threshold.
Daniil was within reach. So close I could have put my hand on his chest. So close I could have kissed him.
I looked at the car instead.
Oleg’s phone rang.
“Papa.”
The word stopped me.
Behind me, Oleg listened. I took another step. Perhaps if I reached the car before the call ended, perhaps if I could just—
“Hold her.”
Kostya caught my left arm and jerked me backwards.
“No.” The word tore out of me. “No, you said—”
“Be still.”
He pulled me back to the threshold. My heel caught the sill. Pain went through my knee, and I grabbed the frame to keep from falling.
Daniil moved towards us.
Oleg stepped back into the bay and drew his pistol.
“Stay there.”
He aimed through the doorway at Daniil’s chest.
I stopped struggling.
The gun was steady. That was what frightened me most. Oleg wasn’t shaking. He wasn’t frightened. He could pull the trigger without needing to gather himself first, and Daniil was standing in front of him with nothing in his hands.
“Your captains are refusing to hand over the yards,” Oleg said. “So are the Orlovs.”
He ended the call without taking his eyes off Daniil.
“My father has your resignation. They’ve seen it. They’re telling him it means nothing.”
Kostya’s fingers tightened painfully.
“You told them,” Oleg said. “Before you came here.”
“Let her go.”
“You think you can make a fucking fool of us?”
“I think you agreed to release my wife.”
“Come inside. We’ll see what your men say when it’s you on the phone. Or . . . I could kill you?”
I looked at Nikita. He hadn’t got out. He was watching us, his face still, and for a horrible moment I wanted to scream at him to do something.
Then I felt Kostya shift behind me. Keeping me in the doorway. Keeping hold of me while Oleg pointed his gun at my husband.
They couldn’t do anything while he had me.
Daniil looked at the hand on my arm.
“You’re hurting her.”
Kostya said nothing. He didn’t loosen his grip.
“Let her walk to the car,” Daniil said. “You can keep the gun on me. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ve finished negotiating.” Oleg took another step back, making room for him to enter. “Inside. Now.”
Daniil’s eyes met mine.
I knew he would do it. Whatever he had told his captains, whatever he had hoped would happen here, he would walk into that garage if it meant they might let me go.
I couldn’t watch my husband die.
Beside my foot, the brick held the steel door open.
I looked at it.