Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
Dimitri
Food. We need food. I cannot survive over three hundred nights of fantasies fueled on porridge alone.
She’s scrolling through her burner phone, looking for more cute animal videos, when I roll out of bed to get dressed. I drop my bag, and a heavy thump catches my attention. That’s weird. I start to dig through the random assortment of shit, grimacing a bit when my fingers brush my suit, stiff from the blood. My brother’s cellphone sinks to the bottom of my bag and keeps slipping through my fingers until I get a grip on it.
His life was on this phone. I’m holding the last remaining physical remnant of my family. I type in his code, and my heart drops. Notifications from the security system at the forest safe house fill the screen. Ian and Nadia. The panic room was activated.
I frantically scroll back through the notifications:
Front door opened. Video footage shows three men entering the house.
Front door closed. Guns raised, they enter the foyer and yell out.
Motion detected. Nadia comes down the stairs. She freezes, turns, and runs off camera. The men follow her.
Motion detected. She runs into the bedroom and slams the door. Seconds later, the men start banging on it.
Motion detected. A hand reaches out to the camera, and the screen goes black.
Motion detected. Timestamp five minutes later. Ian sprints down the stairs, tears streaming. Seconds later, Nadia follows, her face bloody and her shirt ripped. She grabs Ian and runs.
Motion detected. She pushes a table out of the way and opens a door.
Panic Room Activated. The door slams and locks.
Motion detected. The three men stumble down the hallway and bang on the panic room door.
Front door opened. Mikhail walks in, pulling his gloves tight, wearing a new coat.
Motion detected. Mikhail fires his gun into the air and yells something into the speaker.
Motion detected. All four men fire their guns into the door. The bullets bounce off and ricochet, shattering a vase behind them.
Mikhail… he betrayed us. He’s trying to kill Ian and Nadia. There’s nothing left of our family.
I can’t see what’s happening in the panic room—there are no cameras there. But it’s stocked with food and water for three days. Ian and Nadia are safe.
The men get blow torches and try to burn through the door, but it’s slow going. Mikhail barks orders.
I can’t watch anymore. “Katya!” My hands shake as I hand her the phone. Her serious expression concerns me even more. “We have to go back!”
“We can’t.” Her voice has a harsh edge to it, but she softens it and brushes her fingers against my cheek. “We barely made it out the first time.”
“Get Uri and Markus to do it.”
Her frown deepens. “The forest house is halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s already slow going for them. And you expect them to travel with a kid and an injured cancer patient? No.”
I grab her wrists. “Please, I’m begging you. Help them.” The room feels like it’s shrinking as the pressure and fear surround me.
She stares at the phone, closes her eyes. “It will take days for them to break through the door. Even if they burn the house down, the panic room will remain intact. Mikhail and his crew simply don’t have the firepower to destroy it. Nadia and Ian will have three days before Mikhail can break through.” She rubs her temples and sighs. “I don’t know who I can trust in my agency, so I can’t call backup.” Katya studies the phone again and straightens her shoulders. “I have one resource I could call, but it’s a last resort.”
“Do it,” I demand. Ian. “Please.”
She sits on the edge of the bed and sighs, pressing the screen and lifting her phone to her ear. The phone rings four times.
The voice of a woman comes through the speakers. “Nothing good can come from this. Who are you?”
“This is Katie, your neighbor. You're my cat sitter.”
“You decided to call me at three in the morning for a check-in about the cat?” The voice on the phone sounds increasingly annoyed.
“Your name is Alana King, but you changed it about six years ago. Judging by the way you break into my apartment once a week, you’ve been privately trained by KGB, MI6, and most likely retired black ops. You don’t exist in any government databases, but you do appear on the Olympian payroll. And there are whispers that you are a Hunter.”
The woman’s sleepy voice rattles back, “And your name is Katie—last name redacted. You’re currently undercover in St. Petersburg investigating the Koslov family. That’s a dead end, by the way. Your ex is sleeping with a barista and his boss’s personal assistant. Not sure how a mid-level guy like that can get laid as much as he does, but to each her own. And Midge is overdue for her rabies shot. I’m assuming you didn’t wake me up at three am just to rattle off our resumes. What do you need?”
Need, not want.
“My team is dead, my partner en route but injured, and the Koslov family has been massacred. There’s one survivor with me. We’re safe for now. But there’s a woman and child trapped in a panic room halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow, being terrorized by the Smirnov syndicate.”
Hearing her recap the last few hours, I relive the trauma in rapid succession.
“How old is the child?” The woman asks, her voice less annoyed.
“He’s six.”
There’s silence for what feels like a lifetime. “How long have they been in there?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Do we know if they are still alive?”
Katya’s voice aches. “No.” Her eyes drift toward the floor.
I can hear Alana moving in her bed and groaning a little, sounds more out of annoyance than anything else. “So at best you need a rescue, but it could be a recovery.”
I squeeze Katya. She continues to look at the floor but she’s reading my mind as she says, “I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
Again, silence. “I want to keep Midge.”
“The cat? The cat I hate more than any living animal? Sure, I was going to tell you to keep her anyway.” Katya’s voice is light, and it creates the first lingering fragment of hope.
Silence again.
“I’ll have wheels up in six hours. I need to find a plane and get a crew together. Send me the coordinates. It’s a ten-hour flight, with on-the-ground recon and rescue, plus travel time to get to you… Give me twenty-four hours.”
“Done.”
Twenty-four hours.
That’s Uri’s ETA. Twenty-four hours, and everyone will be together. And our new life can begin.