Chapter 37
37
DARYA
T he intercom crackles to life at half past one in the morning.
One of the guards in the room crosses the floor. “Who is it?”
“I’m one of Mak’s team. We’ve secured the area.”
Mak said he’d call to tell us when his team was close. I get a bad feeling.
The guard, Anton, glances at me, and I shake my head. No. I hold up my phone to show him I’m calling Bryce’s number. Anton nods and depresses the intercom button. “Where’s Bryce?”
“He got hit.” The intercom cuts out then back in again. “I guess you can’t hear anything inside there, because there’s been a hell of a fight upstairs.”
Bryce’s number is ringing, but there’s no answer. I circle my finger in the air, signaling the guard to keep the man talking.
“Nobody contacted us,” he says, watching me.
“We didn’t exactly have time to send a fucking memo.” The man sounds impatient.
Anton’s eyes narrow. “Where are the rest of our team?”
“Locking the fucking place down. Wiping the blood off. They came at us hard.”
Bryce’s phone rings out. Anton raises his eyebrows at me, and I shake my head. This isn’t right, and we both know it. He depresses the button again. “We’ll wait in here until we get word from Roman.”
There’s a moment’s silence, then the intercom sounds again. “That might be difficult.” The man’s voice sounds heavy. “The news out of Miami isn’t good, I’m afraid.”
My heart lurches, then settles again.
It’s a line. A story. He just wants you to open the door.
But despite what I tell myself, nothing can stop the icy chill stealing through my body, nor take away the visible fear in Rosa’s face.
Roman, riddled with bullet holes, eyes wide open.
Ofelia and Masha, strapped to Orlov’s table, knives carving into their flesh.
I shudder and press Roman’s number on my phone.
“What happened in Miami?” Anton asks through the intercom. He’s been joined by the other guard, Karel, who has his gun trained on the door.
The disembodied voice comes again. “Mak lost comms with Roman’s team just after they went through the gate. We got here minutes later, just in time to meet an attack force trying to get in. It’s all turned to hell. Mak wants to move you before the attackers send another team.”
Roman’s phone rings out. Then again, it would, if he’s in the middle of a battle. I try to stifle my rising panic.
I look at Anton. “Call Mak.”
He shakes his head. “Bryce has that number.”
I should have made sure I had it too.
In hindsight, it’s a massive error.
Anton presses the intercom again. “My orders are to wait. So we’ll wait.”
“We don’t have time for this.” The man’s tone sharpens. “Open the door, or Mak will put a bullet through you himself.”
“I don’t answer to Mak,” says Anton curtly. “I answer to Bryce and to Roman Stevanovsky. Until I get word from either of them, in person, this door stays closed.”
“Then you’ll likely fucking die in there. Bryce is leaking the red stuff everywhere, and going from what I hear, Stevanovsky has walked into a shit storm in Miami. If you want to stay alive, then I suggest you open this door right now.”
We don’t bother answering that one. Whoever is standing outside that door isn’t a friend.
“This safe room can take a hell of a lot,” Anton says to me, but his grim face doesn’t reassure me at all. “It’s the best place for us, at least for now.”
I nod. “I agree. Let’s keep trying every number we can think of.”
But before I can make another call, the intercom crackles to life again.
“Miss Petrovsky.”
I freeze.
I know that voice.
“You seem to have learned a little more caution since we last met. Then again, you have learned from the best, haven’t you?”
I close my eyes. For a brief moment, I’m strapped to the table again, Vilnus’s knife on my skin. The man with the cold, dead eyes is standing over me, talking to Vilnus. “What we need is the man who built that vault, but you’ve already killed him, Vilnus, haven’t you? So now we have to find someone who knows what he does...”
Oh, God.
That man was Fedorov.
The realization snaps into my brain like the last piece of a missing puzzle. It was Fedorov who came to our house all those years ago. Fedorov who had the tattoo of a rose entwined in barbed wire.
Fedorov is the only person of whom Vilnus Orlov is truly afraid.
And now he’s standing outside our door.
I walk over to the intercom like I’m sleepwalking and press the button.
“Ilyan Fedorov.” It takes all my will to maintain a calm voice.
“I see you’ve done some research as well. Or has your papa been telling tales? Don’t answer that.” There’s a light note to his voice, as if he’s smiling. “Let’s ask him ourselves, shall we?”
My eyes meet Rosa’s, my horror mirrored in her own. There’s the sound of a scuffle through the intercom, then my father’s voice booms through the speaker, loud and authoritative in Russian. “Do not open that door, Darya, no matter what you hear—”
I wince at the sound of the flesh meeting flesh, my father’s grunt of pain.
I press the button so hard my finger turns white. “So you torture old men now, too, Fedorov? Little girls and old men. That’s some record you have.” My voice shakes, but not with fear.
The thought of that bastard hitting my father takes my fear and turns it to fury.
“Oh, I’ve been waiting a long time to repay Sergei Petrovsky his due, believe me.” Fedorov’s voice is as cold and dead as I remember, any momentary lightness gone from it. “To take back what he stole from me.”
“Really.” Keep him talking. “From what I understand, it was you who did the stealing back in Paris.”
“My old friend has been telling you some tales, then.” The sound of another blow comes through the intercom. “I imagine Sergei left out the part where he betrayed his promises to my family. Then again, that part of the story hardly reflects well on the noble Naryshkin name, now does it? The old Graf wouldn’t have approved of that, Sergei, now would he? His only son betraying the guard that helped him survive the gulag? No, the noble Graf wouldn’t have liked that at all.”
Even through the crackling intercom, Fedorov’s caustic hatred is palpable.
To my intense relief, Papa’s voice is the next I hear, his anger masked beneath a carefully measured tone. “The debt to your father was repaid long before Aleksander and I reached France, Fedorov. Your father was rewarded for the help he gave mine. As you know very well.”
“But I wasn’t!” the man hisses. He puts his mouth close to the intercom, his venom almost spitting into the room. “I was his son. The son of the man who fed you out of his own pocket when you were a baby. I grew up behind the same damn bars you did, even if it was in the guardhouse. My father always told me we would be wealthy when we got to France, because the Graf would take care of us.”
“And he kept that promise.” Papa’s voice sounds resigned. “Your father was received in Switzerland by Fabergé himself, who personally handed him one of the rarest imperial eggs as a gift. It isn’t our fault you sold it for less than it’s worth the moment your father was dead.”
The sound of Fedorov’s blow is so vicious that I wince. The intercom cuts out, and I take the chance to press the button on our side.
“If this is a question of money,” I say, desperate to stop him beating Papa, “I know we have more than enough to repay your father’s kindness.”
It’s a long time before Fedorov answers, and when he does, he’s breathing heavily.
“Oh, we’re long past money.” His voice shakes with rage and the effort of beating my father. “Money I have, Darya Petrovsky. More than every one of those arrogant fucking dvoryanstvo who looked down on us back in the gulag. They never learned, not even after their dachas had been burned and their tsar had been shot. Even decades later, in France, they looked down on us. All I wanted was to take what my father was owed, for the years he helped men like your father and grandfather survive when they might have died. A necklace here, a trinket there. But even that, the exiled nobility of Russia could not spare for those they considered so far beneath them. Where was loyalty then, when I was starving in the Paris streets and came begging at their doors? Is it any wonder I took what I was owed at the end of a knife?”
Inside our safe room, Anton is muttering into his phone. He gives me a thumbs-up, then circles his finger again.
He’s found someone who can help us.
I almost slump in relief.
Keep Fedorov talking.
“They should have helped you,” I say carefully. “You had every right to be angry.”
“I didn’t need their help.” His voice is detached and cold. “I discovered your scheme myself, didn’t I, Sergei?” I wince as I hear the thud of Fedorov delivering another blow. “The Russian KGB had never found the men who broke into the Naryshkin dacha. Even if it was the sons of Prince Naryshkin and Count Borovsky who opened the vault, people speculated they must have been robbed and killed soon after or sold the contents. There was no way such vast wealth could have been carried across the steppe, if that was even where they’d gone. By the time Sergei and Aleksander did finally make it to France, they were all but forgotten, the story of the missing treasure little more than myth.” Another blow makes a brutal sound, and I flinch. “That was until I discovered the treasures hidden inside crates of Graf vodka.”
Graf vodka?
Instantly I see my father’s hand pouring the bottle, hear him saying, “ You can’t buy it here in Spain...”
I see Graf vodka sitting on Roman’s table, the only time I’ve ever seen that brand since Miami.
“It was an ingenious scheme, Sergei, I will allow that.” Fedorov hits Papa again, making sure the sound travels through the intercom. Papa grunts, and I feel a surge of hope.
At least he’s still alive.
“Let’s lean something against this to hold the button down, shall we, Sergei?” Fedorov is slightly out of breath. “If your daughter can’t watch us, at least we can make sure she listens.” The sound cuts on and off, then buzzes back into life. “You would have been proud of your papa, Darya,” he says in a conversational tone. “He was clever, were you not, Sergei?”
I wince at the flat sound of flesh thudding into flesh, relieved when Papa grunts again.
“Sergei’s hands were nowhere near it,” Fedorov says. “A vodka company owned by the same gulag guards back in Russia who had known him since he was a boy. Each shipment of vodka sent to France with a treasure hidden in the bottom of the crate, all delivered to a warehouse on the Marseilles docks. Then smaller deliveries that eventually made their way to Russian households in Europe. Who would ever think to question Russian immigrants having their favorite vodka delivered? Once I discovered the system, it was like taking candy from a baby. Follow the vodka, pluck a treasure from the family who received it. I was careful, of course. I murdered the families, burned their businesses, made it look like common thievery. In most cases I did them a kindness. Not all of the Russian aristocrats adapted to life in exile, did they, Sergei? The pampered sons and daughters of the old dvoryanstvo didn’t like getting their hands dirty.”
“They had survived.” Papa’s voice is hoarse, but to my deep relief, still strong. “They had rebuilt. They deserved a new life, just as you and your father did. The treasures you stole were small things, a fraction of what they’d left behind. Sentimental items they’d risked their lives to hide in my family’s dacha. Pieces that might be enough, perhaps, to buy a house, to start a business. Enough for a future. But you stole that future from them all, Fedorov.” His voice strengthens with each word, and although I am on the other side of the intercom with a thick wall between us, I know that tone. Know that whatever beating he has taken is not enough to bow my father’s shoulders. I can picture him in my mind, still facing Fedorov down, his piercing blue eyes flashing arctic fire.
I know how formidable my father is when he steps into his full power as pakhan . Despite the desperation of our current circumstances, I feel a surge of pride—and of anger.
My father doesn’t die like this. Neither of us do.
“Enough!” Fedorov’s voice rises. “You caused this, Naryshkin. You caused all of it. All you had to do back in France was hand over a chunk of that fortune, just a few decent pieces. If you had given me what I asked for, all those lives could have been saved.”
“Those pieces weren’t mine to give.” Papa’s voice is ice-cold. “They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. Our fathers swore to safeguard the future of every family who entrusted their treasures to us. Aleksander and I were raised knowing our duty was to honor that promise. We dedicated our lives to restoring every piece to its rightful owner. It was never about hoarding a fortune for us, Fedorov. That is what you have never understood. What you can’t possibly understand.”
“Then why did you steal them all back from me, Sergei?” Fedorov lands another sickening blow. “You like to pretend you have a noble purpose. But the truth is you’re a criminal, a common thief, raised behind bars amid mud and blood.” His voice drops, becomes low and dangerous, with a dark, bitter edge. “Do you remember the day the guards made us fight in the yard?”
This time the sound of his fist is hard enough to send ice through my veins.
“Tell me that isn’t what this has been about, all these years.” Papa’s speech is slightly slurred, and I hear him spit on the floor. “Tell me you didn’t murder my family in Paris because of a childhood humiliation.”
“You beat me half to death in that prison yard!” Fedorov’s smooth composure has disappeared, his Russian accent thick and harsh. “And my own father was so afraid of yours that he let you do it.”
“You raped my sister!” For the first time I hear true rage in my father’s voice. “Your father was an honorable man, and you shamed him. In a just world, outside the walls of that damned gulag, you would have paid with your life. Putting you in the yard with me, a starving child three years your junior, was what little your father could offer mine by way of apology.” Papa’s tone is scathing.
There’s a barrage of thuds and the sick sound of my father’s grunts. I wince, gripping Rosa’s hand.
He can’t take much more of this.
“You were nothing but gulag rats, and my father was a weak fool.” Fedorov intersperses his words with blows. “I killed him in the end, did you know that?”
“I guessed.” Papa coughs.
“My father would have let us starve to death, when he had a Fabergé egg hidden beneath the floorboards of our room in Paris. I begged him to sell it a hundred times, but he wouldn’t do it. He said we should wait , keep it hidden until its value increased . I’d been waiting my entire life,” he says bitterly. “So I killed him. I sold the egg the same day. But even with coin in my pocket, I wasn’t good enough for you and your friends.”
“You were a criminal, Ilyan.” Papa’s voice rasps with exhaustion. “None of us wanted anything to do with that life.”
“No. You tried to leave the gulag behind, didn’t you? Pretend you never slept in the mud and fought for scraps. You hid your treasure and tried to disappear. But I found you, Sergei. I found you all, one by one. And I made you all remember where you came from, in the end. You should have admitted defeat, back in Paris. Crawled back into the gutter you came from. If you’d done that, this would have all been over. But you just couldn’t let it go, could you? You couldn’t stand to see your precious treasures in my hands, even then.”
“I told you.” Papa’s voice is thready, his words slurring together. “They don’t belong to me, any more than they belong to you. Your crimes cost hundreds of lives. Futures that can’t be put back together again, families that can’t be rebuilt.”
“Don’t talk to me about rebuilding!” I hear a clatter that sounds like Papa’s wheelchair toppling onto the tiles and a heavy thud that makes my heart sink. “It took me half a lifetime to build another empire,” Fedorov hisses, “and find you again. And even when I did, when I tracked you to Miami, still you and that bastard Borovsky tried to outsmart me. Because you always knew I would come for you, didn’t you? I promised you that night in France that I would see the end of the Naryshkin line, if it took me until my last breath to do it. I’ve kept my promise, Sergei. This war is finally over, whether you accept it or not.” He puts his mouth close to the intercom. “Open this door, Princess Darya Naryshkin, or your father dies, here and now.”
I hear the snick of his pistol, and my heart skips.
“ Do not open that door, Darya .” My father’s voice is cold, hard steel. “Shoot me if you will, Ilyan Fedorov. I have lived my life. I have lived more lives than any man has a right to. But my daughter will not die for your greed and corruption. And so long as that vault is closed, you need her. Eventually you will die for this, whether by my hand or by that of Aleksander’s son.”
“Roman Borovsky?” Fedorov’s voice quavers with an almost hysterical excitement. “By now he has opened the vault—and killed your son. Poetic justice, isn’t it, for Aleksander’s son to kill yours?” He lands another blow. “You aristocrats always did love your poetry. Do you think we didn’t know Borovsky was planning an attack? I have an entire army going after him. He won’t ever make it out of that fortress you built.”
“And the children?” Papa’s voice is hoarse. “Did you kill them too, Fedorov? More innocent lives lost for your insane treasure hunt?”
“Children have never mattered to me, Sergei.” He gives a strange, high-pitched laugh. “You, of all people, should know that. What was your youngest girl’s name, back in Paris? Irina? She was eight, if I remember—”
“You bastard!”
There’s a flurry of indistinct sounds, then the intercom cuts out abruptly, leaving Rosa and me staring at each other, white-faced, both of us pressed against the wall on either side of the intercom.
“Don’t open it,” Anton says warningly. “I’ve got Pavel on the line.” He holds up his phone. “Mak has reinforcements on the way. His first team was intercepted by Fedorov’s men, who stole their radios, then impersonated them to take out Bryce and most of his team. But their replacements are only minutes away.”
“By which stage my father will be dead.” I stare at the locked door with clenched fists, my heartbeat slow and painful.
Nobody tries to argue with me.
One man in a wheelchair, against an army of Fedorov’s killers? We all know the odds.
“Sergei wouldn’t want you to go out there.” Rosa grips my hand, tears rolling down her face. “He didn’t come so far, endure all he has, to watch you die, Darya. You have to honor his wishes.” Her eyes drop to my belly. “It isn’t just you now—”
“Don’t you think I know that!” I spin away from the door, passing a shaking hand over my face. I can’t cry. I’m too furious and too heartbroken. “What do they say about Roman?” I stare at Anton, who shifts uncomfortably. “Don’t lie to me,” I say in a low voice. “Tell Pavel I want to know what is happening in Miami.”
Anton and Karel exchange a look. Anton murmurs a question into the phone, then covers the receiver, his eyes dark.
“Roman missed the first extraction point,” he says reluctantly. “Pavel says they’re taking heavy fire.”
Rosa blanches. She staggers to the sofa and slumps heavily into it.
That means it’s possible nobody is coming for us.
I’m frozen by the door, straining for the slightest sound from beyond it, but there’s nothing. “How do we not have a video feed down here?” My body is rigid with frustration.
“Roman didn’t want one.” Karel looks at me apologetically. “In case the children were watching. He didn’t want them to see people get hurt.”
Yes, that sounds like Roman.
But if we survive this, we’re doing things differently. Our life is dangerous. That is the way it is. The only true protection is preparation and training. I put my hands over my belly, feeling the slight swell of our little Borovsky.
If we make it out of this , I swear silently, I will raise you to know our world—and to know how to meet it, whether you’re born a boy or a girl.
There has to be a way to live with our legacy and also to live in the world.
“God, I hate this,” I mutter. “Hiding behind a locked door like some kind of helpless victim.”
“Don’t blame Sergei, Darya.” Rosa’s voice is muffled behind her hands. “This isn’t his fault. None of it is.”
“I know that!” That’s the worst of it. After all my anger at his secrecy, hearing my father’s conversation with Fedorov made me realize, with heartbreaking clarity, that my father has only ever done what he thought best for everyone.
And now he is dying on the other side of that door.
I depress the button on the intercom. “Papa?” My voice breaks on the word.
For a long moment there’s nothing but dead silence. My fingers itch to open the door, but I’m more than aware of Anton and Karel watching me tensely, clearly ready to leap if I so much as reach for the keypad.
Then the intercom crackles to life, and a familiar, if unexpected voice, speaks uncertainly. “Darya?”
I stare at the intercom in shock. “ Inger? ”
I frown questioningly at Anton, who still has Pavel on the line. He murmurs into the phone then shakes his head at me, shrugging to indicate he doesn’t know what is happening.
“You have to open the door!” Inger’s voice is high and terrified. “Ilyan has wired me to a bomb, Darya. Please!” She’s sobbing. “He’s gone upstairs. If you don’t open the door, he’ll press the button and blow it apart. Your father will die. You could be hurt. My children will be left without a mother...” She begins crying in earnest.
“Papa.” My voice is shaking. “He’s still alive?”
Rosa swings around on the sofa, hope rising in her face.
“I just told you he was!” A familiar, strident note sounds through Inger’s tears. “But he won’t be if you don’t act soon.”
And just like that, I know she’s lying.
I press the button again. “What did Ilyan promise you, Inger?” Anger pulses through me, slow and thick. “What could Fedorov possibly have offered you that was worth risking your children’s lives?”
For a moment, there’s no answer.
When Inger’s voice comes through again, there’s no trace of her earlier tears. “My children are lost to me, Darya. Mikhail made sure of that when he gave them away to Roman.” Her tone is sullen and angry. “Ofelia said so herself. She told me to go, so I did. All I want now is Nikolai, and one of the Fabergé eggs. Enough to start a new life.” She puts her mouth close to the intercom. “Give me the code to Roman’s safety deposit box in Switzerland, tell me where Nicky is, and I’ll try to convince Fedorov not to kill you. But if you don’t, I’ll push the button on this bomb myself and take you with me. I swear I will.”
“Nikolai is dead, Inger.” I say it flatly.
“Dead?” To my surprise, it’s Vera’s shrill voice that shrieks down the intercom, talking over Inger’s protests. “My son is dead? ”
“No!” Inger gasps. “No, he can’t be. You said he’d be safe—”
The intercom cuts off abruptly.
I stare at the door, utterly confused, trying to imagine what is happening on the other side. Then Anton moves, holding up his hand to get my attention.
“They’re here,” he says tersely. “Mak’s team is here.”
We stand by the door, all four of us frozen in place, just waiting.
Finally, the intercom crackles again.
“Darya.” It’s Papa’s voice, weak but still unmistakable. “Open the door, docha . We’re safe.”
“Papa.” Tears of relief stream down my cheeks, but Anton is still barring the keypad, his face wary. He snaps a question into the phone, and his face slackens in relief. He nods at me.
“Open it.”
I punch in the code, my heart thudding, and the door slowly swings open.
It stops when it hits the inert body of Ilyan Fedorov. His shocked eyes remain open in death, a single bullet hole between them.
My father, Fedorov’s pistol still in his hand, lies slumped barely a foot from Fedorov’s body. His eyes are closed, his face bloody with the beating he’s taken, and he’s clearly lapsed back into unconsciousness. Rosa rushes straight to him.
“Sergei,” she whispers, tears streaming down her face, gripping his hand in hers.
His eyelids flicker, his mouth tugging painfully at one corner. “Rosa.” He tries to sit up. “Darya—”
“Safe, lyubov’ moya .” Leaning over, Rosa presses a kiss to my father’s forehead. “She’s safe.”
“A medical team is on their way,” one of Mak’s men says, smiling at me reassuringly. “They’re coming downstairs now. Your father is strong,” he adds. He gives Papa an admiring glance. “In a wheelchair, after a beating that would have taken out men half his age, and he still managed to get Fedorov’s gun and take him out. He’s one tough old—” He shoots me an apologetic grin. “What I mean to say is that he’ll be fine, Darya.”
I tear my eyes away from my father’s inert body, Rosa bent over it.
I’m too scared to ask the question I need to.
“Where’s Inger?” I ask instead as Anton rolls Fedorov’s body away from the door.
“Dead,” Mak’s man says shortly. “Vera shot her. We took her outside in case her body was wired to blow.”
“And the bomb?”
He shakes his head, his face contemptuous. “There was no bomb.”
I should have known.
“Vera’s upstairs,” Anton adds. “She’s hysterical.”
I’m not ready to deal with Vera. Not yet.
I swallow, bracing myself.
“Roman,” I whisper, clutching my throat. “The children?”
“Safe.” Anton grips my shoulder, staring into my eyes so I can see the truth in his. “Safe, and about to board a plane as we speak. You can call them before they take off if you like.”
“Oh, thank God.” I bury my face in my hands, my legs finally giving way beneath me, and slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor, heedless of the blood smeared across it. “Thank God.”