Chapter 12 Johnny
JOHNNY
I’m crouched behind the scrub brush on the side of the house when the rental car pulls into the drive.
I should be long gone by now. Natalia told me to disappear before her brother showed up, and she wasn’t subtle about it. But I want a look at the guy who makes her voice go tight and her body curl in on itself.
Just one look. Then I’m out.
The guy who climbs out is built like a bouncer. Broad through the chest, thick neck, the kind of big that’s meant to intimidate.
He moves from the car to the front door like he owns the property and everyone on it. This is a man who expects the world to get out of his way. He doesn’t knock. Just pounds with the flat of his hand and waits.
Then he turns his head, scanning the yard, and I see his face full-on—
The ground drops out from under me.
Images slam through me so fast I can’t sort them, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but grab fistfuls of sand.
A desk. Dark wood, cluttered with printouts. Grainy security stills spread across the surface. And across from me, the man from my last flashback. The man I’ve been drawing.
Broad shoulders, silver threading through dark hair, authority radiating off him like heat from asphalt.
Only now I know who he is.
My father.
Lorenzo.
His voice hits me next, fragments crashing in without order or mercy.
“Nikolai. Next in line. History of domestic violence. Extreme force against enemies.”
The face in the photograph is the guy on Natalia’s front porch. Same hard features. Same dead, flat eyes.
More fragments. A car speeding past, muzzle flashes from the windows, someone shouting that Dario’s been hit.
My father’s face white with rage. “They nearly took my fucking wife.” His fist on the desk.
The word he kept using, over and over, until it stopped sounding like language and started sounding like a verdict.
Enemy.
My jaw locks so tight my teeth ache.
“Anton Kozlov. The Pakhan.” My father’s voice drops lower, the way it does when he’s not angry anymore, when he’s past angry, when he’s already decided. “He is our enemy.”
Then one more image. One more photograph on that cluttered desk.
A woman’s face. Young. Brown hair. Blue eyes that I’d know anywhere now, the kind that shift between pale and steel depending on the light.
“Kozlov’s daughter. Natalia.” My father shrugs, barely glancing at it. “She’s a nobody. But just as corrupt and evil as her rotten family, I assume.”
The memory releases me like a fist unclenching, and I’m back in the sand, bent over my knees, fighting not to retch.
Natalia. My father said her name like it meant nothing. Like she was a footnote in someone else’s file.
Fuck that.
The woman who cleaned my blood off her bathroom floor and checked my pupils every two hours isn’t a footnote, and she sure as hell isn’t a nobody.
And whatever my father assumes about her, he’s never watched her hands shake while she talks about her family and then hold steady enough to butterfly-strip a wound closed.
He doesn’t know her. I do.
The pieces are falling together in a pattern I don’t want to see but can’t look away from. My family’s rage at the Bratva. The guns. The violence. The way my father talked about them like they were a problem he was planning to solve permanently.
There’s only one reason a family operates like that.
We’re mafia. Something rival, something just as deep in the blood and the dark.
And I came here. To her stretch of coast, her beach, her house. I came here for a reason, and the nausea twisting through me says I already know I won’t like what it is.
I force myself up. My legs feel borrowed, unreliable.
Through the kitchen window I can hear Nikolai’s voice, muffled but sharp, and Natalia’s silence beneath it.
Every instinct screams at me to go inside, to put myself between her and that dead-eyed fuck.
To plant myself in that kitchen and let him see exactly who’s been sleeping down the hall from his sister.
But I can’t. She told me to hide, and if I show my face now, I blow everything.
So I walk. Fast and unsteady, sand giving way under my feet as I cut down the beach toward town. Not Ronnie’s. I can’t sit across from someone and make small talk when my father’s voice is still rattling around my skull like a stray bullet.
There’s a bar a few doors down. Faded surf stickers peeling off the door, a chalkboard sign advertising half-price margaritas that nobody’s updated since Labor Day.
Good enough.
Inside, the place is nearly empty, which tracks.
November on the Outer Banks doesn’t exactly scream happy hour.
There’s a guy at the far end of the bar who looks like he came in last Tuesday and forgot to leave.
Behind me, near the pool table, four guys who look like they spend more time in this bar than their own kitchens.
Locals. Thick-armed, red-faced, with the permanent squint of men who’ve been drinking since the fish stopped biting.
I order a pale ale with Natalia’s cash and wrap my hands around the frosted glass.
The cold feels good. Grounding. My hands are still tingling from how hard I gripped the sand, and my head is a mess of my father’s voice saying enemy and Natalia’s voice saying my family runs the Russian mafia in Vegas and all the space between those two facts where the truth of who I am is hiding.
“The fuck are you looking at?”
One of the pool table guys. I didn’t realize I’d been staring in their direction, but evidently my face was doing something unfriendly while I did it, because the biggest of them has his cue propped against his shoulder like a weapon, already squaring up.
I turn back to my beer. “Nothing.”
A snort behind me. Low murmuring. Then something small and hard bounces off the back of my neck.
A peanut shell.
Don’t. Not here.
I take a slow sip. The beer tastes like nothing. Another shell hits my shoulder, and one of them laughs, loud and deliberate, the kind of sound designed to make sure I know it’s at my expense.
My grip tightens on the glass. I breathe through my nose. I think about Natalia. About how I’m a stranger in a small town staying in her house, and any mess I make lands at her door.
I finish the beer, set it down, nod to the bartender. He nods back. At least some people still have basic fucking manners.
Outside, the salt air hits me and I walk around to the back of the bar, where a warped wooden railing overlooks the dunes.
The ocean beyond is gray and restless, whitecaps chopping at the surface.
I lean on the railing and close my eyes.
I just need ten minutes. Ten minutes of waves and wind and no one’s voice in my head telling me who to hate.
The back door bangs open behind me.
I’m already turning when the first punch catches me in the kidney. The pain is sharp and deep, folding me sideways. I go to one knee, the sand-dusted concrete biting through my pants.
The big one from the pool table has a buddy with him, the shorter one in a red Carhartt, and two more hanging back by the door with their arms crossed like bouncers at the world’s shittiest nightclub.
Red Carhartt comes next, swinging wide and sloppy. My body moves before my brain gives permission. I duck under his arm and drive my fist into the soft spot below his ribs. He folds with a wet grunt, hitting the concrete on both knees.
The big one resets, bouncing on his toes like he’s seen too many bar fights on TV.
He leads with his right. I slap it aside with my forearm, step inside his reach, and hook him hard in the floating rib.
Something cracks under my knuckles. He staggers, and I hit him again. Same spot. Targeted. Efficient.
My breathing is steady. My body knows this. Knows the angles, the timing, the way to read a telegraph in someone’s shoulder before the punch even starts. This isn’t scrappy instinct. This is training. Thousands of hours of it, coded into my muscles like a second language.
The big one swings again, wild now, panicked. I block it with my forearm and snap a short, clean punch into his jaw. His head whips sideways. He stumbles into the railing and slides down it.
Red Carhartt is back up, half-bent, cursing. He throws himself at me in a tackle. I sidestep, grab the back of his jacket, and use his own momentum to drive him face-first into the wall. He bounces off the cinder block and crumples.
The two by the door haven’t moved. Their hands are up now, palms out.
That should be the end of it. Four guys, two down, two surrendering. Walk away.
But something hot is still buzzing through my veins, and it takes me a second to name it. Not anger. Not adrenaline.
Satisfaction.
The fighting feels good. Easy and natural. Like stretching a muscle I didn’t know was cramped. My heart rate is barely elevated. I could do this for hours.
Then red Carhartt groans and tries to push himself up on one elbow. “The fuck is your problem?” he slurs. “You’re nobody.”
I’m on him before he gets his arm straight, and the sick thing is, I’m glad he gave me a reason.
Knee on his back, fist in his collar, hauling him over and pinning him flat.
The first punch lands on his cheekbone and I feel skin split under my knuckles.
The second catches his mouth. The third I don’t even aim.
The fourth opens something up above his eye, and blood runs into his lashes, and my arm keeps going.
Drawing back, driving down. His head snaps sideways and I grab his chin and turn it back because I’m not done.
It’s not training anymore. It’s every image that just ripped through my skull.
My father’s voice saying enemy. Natalia’s photo on that desk.
The shrug. She’s a nobody. The shame of standing in that room with nothing to offer.
The fact that I didn’t wash up here by accident.
The reason I came here that I can almost taste but can’t swallow.
His nose gives under my knuckle with a wet crack.
He stopped fighting two hits ago. Maybe three.
The guys by the door are shouting but their voices are coming through water.
My arm draws back again. I can feel how easy the next one would be.
One clean shot to his temple and he’s not getting back up. Maybe ever.
And I want to.
That’s what stops me, finally. Not the blood. Not their shouting. The wanting.
My fist hovers, shaking. His chest is still moving. Barely.
I shove off him and stagger backward until my shoulders hit the railing.
The two bystanders scramble forward, drag their buddies up, and haul them through the door without a word.
No threats. No promises to call the cops.
They saw what I did, how easily I did it, and they want no part of the conversation that comes next.
The door swings shut behind them and the silence rushes in. I look down at my hands.
Split knuckles on the right. A scrape across the left. Already swelling. The pain is there but it’s distant, like my body’s decided it doesn’t rank high enough to register. The blood drying between my fingers doesn’t bother me either.
That’s the problem.
None of this bothers me. Not the violence, not the ease of it, not the dark thrill still humming through my nervous system. My hands aren’t shaking from fear. They’re shaking because stopping took more effort than any of the punches did.
I lean against the railing and stare at nothing until it sharpens into the ocean. A pelican dives into the gray chop beyond the dunes. Comes up empty. Circles to try again.
I finally start the walk back, my split knuckles throbbing in time with my heartbeat. The wind cuts through my shirt and the sand shifts under my feet.
Natalia worries about what her brother might do to me. She thinks the biggest danger in her life is the family she was born into.
She’s wrong. It’s walking itself home to her now.