Chapter 18 #3
I closed my eyes, not wanting Chenkov's face to be the last thing I saw.
Instead, I pictured this morning—Dmitry's face soft with sleep, the golden light painting patterns on his scarred skin, the weight of his arm around me promising safety I'd been too naive to doubt.
That was a better last image. That was worth dying with.
The gunshot was impossibly loud, even through the ringing in my ears.
But there was no pain. No impact. No darkness rushing in.
I opened my eyes to see Chenkov falling forward, a hole in his chest that hadn't been there before. He crumpled like someone had cut his strings, landing next to me with eyes that saw nothing, would never see anything again.
Behind him stood Dmitry, smoking gun in his hand—one he'd taken from a dead guard.
Blood covered him like paint, his own and others', turning him into something from a nightmare or a classical painting of war.
But his eyes when they found mine were desperate with love, with relief, with the kind of devotion that walked into certain death and made death uncertain.
"Eva," he breathed, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer answered. “Baby girl.”
Dmitry dropped to his knees beside me, the gun clattering forgotten as his hands found my face, my shoulders, checking for damage with fingers that shook—the only sign I'd ever seen of his fear.
"Are you hurt? Did he—" His words tumbled over each other, nothing like his usual controlled speech.
His thumb traced the cut on my cheekbone, came away bloody, and his expression darkened into something that would have been terrifying if it hadn't been born from love. “I’ll resurrect him and kill him again.”
"I'm okay," I gasped, though okay was relative when you were zip-tied to a chair on a blood-slick warehouse floor. "Dmitry, I'm okay, but Bear—"
He was already pulling out the guard's knife, sawing through the zip-ties with careful desperation.
The plastic gave way, and my arms screamed as blood rushed back into hands I hadn't been able to feel for the last hour.
The chair fell away in pieces—it had cracked worse than I'd realized when I'd hit the ground—and suddenly I was free, though my legs wouldn't quite work right yet.
"Bear!" I said again, more urgently, because his howls had turned to whimpers that were somehow worse.
Dmitry didn't hesitate. He crossed to the crate in three strides and kicked the door with enough force to tear it off its hinges entirely.
Bear shot out like a gray missile, launching himself at me with his whole body wiggling despite everything we'd just survived.
I caught him against my chest, his small body shaking as hard as mine, and buried my face in his fur that smelled like fear and warehouse and somehow still like the puppy shampoo from this morning's bath.
"It's okay, baby," I whispered to him, to myself, to the universe. "We're okay."
The warehouse had become a different kind of chaos now—organized, systematic.
Through the clearing smoke, I could see Alexei directing Volkov soldiers with hand signals, his face cold as winter while he orchestrated violence with the precision of a conductor.
Bodies littered the floor—some moving, most not.
Ivan stood near the entrance with his laptop balanced on a crate, because apparently even all-out warfare couldn't separate him from his technology.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, probably already erasing evidence, creating alibis, turning this massacre into something that never officially happened.
"We have to move," Dmitry said, pulling me to my feet with Bear still clutched against my chest. My legs shook but held, though I had to lean against him for balance.
The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving me aware of every hurt—my raw wrists, bruised ribs from hitting the floor, the cut on my face that wouldn't stop bleeding.
It was over.
The SUV's leather seats felt like clouds after the warehouse's concrete floor, though I couldn't quite shake the feeling that this was all a dream I'd wake from back in that metal chair.
Brooklyn blurred past the tinted windows—normal Saturday afternoon Brooklyn, with people walking dogs and buying bodega coffee and living lives that didn't include watching men die in warehouses.
The contradiction of it made my head spin, or maybe that was the adrenaline crash hitting.
Dmitry's jacket hung around my shoulders, heavy with the smell of gunpowder and blood and him.
He'd wrapped me in it the moment we'd reached the vehicle, like fabric could somehow retroactively protect me from everything that had already happened.
His arm hadn't left my shoulders since, holding me against his side with a grip that suggested he might never let go again.
Bear curled in my lap, finally quiet but trembling occasionally, like little aftershocks of fear.
His paws were still dirty with blood from the warehouse floor, leaving rusty smears on my jeans that looked like abstract art or evidence, depending on your perspective.
I stroked his ears with fingers that wouldn't quite stop shaking, both of us using the other as proof we'd survived.
"Hold still," Ivan said from the front passenger seat, twisted around to reach me with his field medical kit.
His hands were perfectly steady as he cleaned the cut on my cheek, efficient and gentle in a way that seemed at odds with the man who'd stood in a firefight with a laptop.
The antiseptic stung, sharp and clean, washing away Chenkov's touch along with the blood.
"This needs proper stitches," he said, applying medical glue with the precision of someone who'd done this too many times. "But this will hold for now."
My wrists were next, the raw skin where zip-ties had cut deep enough to leave marks that would definitely scar. Dmitry's jaw clenched when he saw the damage, his free hand curling into a fist.
"You came for me," I said unnecessarily, still processing the impossibility of it. That he'd walked alone into that warehouse, knowing it was probably suicide, just for the chance to save me.
"You're mine," he responded simply, like that explained everything. And maybe it did. In our world, ownership meant protection, meant violence against anyone who tried to take what belonged to you, meant burning down the whole city if that's what it took.
A phone rang—Alexei's, though he let it ring twice before answering in Russian.
The conversation was brief, his responses mostly single syllables, but I could tell from the tension in his shoulders that he was already dealing with the fallout.
When he hung up, his eyes found mine in the rearview mirror.
They were calculating eyes, weighing costs and consequences with the kind of cold logic that had built the Volkov empire. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me—the homeless girl who'd stolen a USB and stumbled into their world, now valuable enough that rescuing me had started a war.
"The Morozovs are mobilizing," he said, not sugarcoating it. "Every family in New York will have to choose sides within the week."
The weight of that settled over the SUV like a physical thing.
"Was it worth it?" I asked, needing to hear it again, needing to understand how I'd become precious enough to justify this level of violence.
Alexei's eyes shifted to his brother, something passing between them that I couldn't read. Then he looked back at me with an expression that might have been approval.
"Family is always worth it," he said simply. "And you're family now."
The word hit different this time, carrying the weight of everything that had just happened. Family meant they'd killed for me. Family meant they'd die for me. Family meant I was part of something that transcended normal bonds, held together by blood both shared and spilled.
Dmitry's hand tightened on my shoulder, and when I looked at him, his expression was fierce with a devotion that should have been terrifying.
"You're worth burning the whole city down," he said, and the certainty in his voice made it sound like a promise, a threat, and a declaration of love all at once.
The compound came into view ahead, and I barely recognized it from this morning.
What had been routine security was now a fortress preparing for siege.
Soldiers everywhere—on rooftops with rifles, at checkpoints with automatic weapons, unloading crates that probably contained things that violated every federal law written.
They moved with purpose, with the kind of energy that comes before battle, when violence is certain but not yet arrived.
We pulled through multiple checkpoints, each more heavily armed than the last. Faces I recognized from the compound nodded as we passed, and I realized they all knew what had happened.
Knew that their enforcer had walked into death for me.
Knew that their Pakhan had authorized an assault that would start a war.
Knew that I was the Helen of Troy in this particular tragedy, valuable enough to launch a thousand bullets.
The SUV stopped in the underground garage, and for a moment none of us moved. We sat in our bubble of leather and tinted glass, postponing the moment when we'd have to face what came next.
"I started this," I said quietly. "By taking that USB. If I hadn't—"
"No, no," Ivan interrupted, clinical but not unkind. "The Morozovs have been pushing boundaries for months, ever since Petrov and the change in the power structure in the city. This was always going to happen. You just determined the timeline."
"And gave us leverage," Alexei added, already opening his door. "That USB's intelligence will help us win what's coming."
But I wasn't thinking about strategic advantages or intelligence assets.
I was thinking about the girl who'd slept in a storage unit three weeks ago, stealing to eat, invisible to everyone except as a problem to avoid.
That girl could never have imagined being worth a war, being called family by men who built empires on violence, being loved with the kind of intensity that painted warehouses with blood.
Bear stirred in my lap, yawning, and I realized he'd fallen asleep despite everything. The simple trust of it—that he could rest because we were safe now—made my throat tight with emotion I couldn't quite name.
"Home?" I asked, though the word meant something different now. Not just Dmitry's apartment but this compound, these people, this family that had claimed me with violence and love in equal measure.
"Home," Dmitry confirmed, helping me out of the SUV with careful hands, Bear cradled between us.
I felt safe. Protected. Worth protecting.
I felt like family.