31. Clara
Chapter 31
Clara
W e had to rent a fucking house for this.
The fact that not one of us has a place big enough to fit all the Costa cousins and their partners for two nights is unbelievable. Charlie and Gwen have more space than the rest of us, but there’s a teenager living in that house. Gwen would sleep on our apartment floor before subjecting Ana to any of this.
Instead, she found a cabin in the woods of Maryland, near the border of West Virginia, and paid the owner in cash. I’m pretty sure Gwen gave the cover of us being swingers, because there are multiple notes all over the house reminding us to clean up any stains and fluids. Every time I see one, I have to repress a gag.
We have all spent the past month verifying the information Lev gave us, following leads and pulling threads until we felt prepared to come together and create a plan. While no one has found definitive evidence that Ilya was in Istanbul, we’ve kept each other updated on any developments, and this is the first time we’ll have a tangible course of action to enact our revenge against Konstantin and Ilya.
Deniz and Emily sit in front of a makeshift command center at the dining table, multiple computer screens connected to their laptops. They share information back and forth, taking bits and pieces that the rest of us provide to create the larger roadmap of our plan.
Charlie and Gwen sit next to each other on the couch, reviewing handwritten notes from contacts in western Russia. Bea is standing in the kitchen, staring out the window.
“You okay?” I ask, sliding beside her and filling a glass with water. She doesn’t look at me, but stares into the melting frost of the Maryland spring.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she says quietly, her expression as calm as always. I stare into the treeline, searching for what she sees, listening for the whispers she hears.
“Me too,” I admit, gripping the edge of the counter with one hand. I’ve had the same sinking feeling for a while now. None of our searches on the women of Gia’s team have turned up anything. Even if we figure out a way to get to Konstantin and survive long enough to kill him, there’s still an internal threat lurking in the darkness. The fact that Bea hasn’t figured out who it is speaks to how dangerous they are.
“We’re missing something, and it’s driving me nuts that I can’t see it,” she whispers, frustration clear in the knit of her brows and the lines bracketing her mouth. Bea never wears her feelings so plainly.
“Give it time, Bea,” I placate, trying to provide her comfort I don’t feel. “We’ve got leads on Konstantin now. We’ll find him, and whoever’s turning people from inside our ranks.”
Her arms are crossed over her chest, and she’s gripping herself so tightly I can see the whites of her knuckles. She doesn’t respond, maybe she doesn’t know if I’m right. It’s been almost two years and we still haven’t been able to take down Konstantin.
I pull my sweater tighter, the chill outside the window starting to nip at my skin. It’s cold for April, the frost lingering much longer than it usually does here. I miss the warmth of southern California. Maybe, when this is all done, Deniz and I can hide away in the desert for a while. I’m sure Chase would love the company.
“I found it.”
Deniz’s voice is quiet, but the severity silences every other noise in the room. The rest of us join Deniz and Emily at the table, staring at a looped video of Ilya Andreeva standing beneath falling snow.
“What do you mean?” I ask, but Emily speaks over me, her tone vicious.
“He’s in Burns, Oregon. About five hours east of Portland,” she says, waving at a map that has about a dozen virtual red pins stuck in it, starting in Alaska and spanning throughout the northwest corner of North America.
“He’s going to Portland next, or maybe Eugene,” Deniz says, zooming in on the map and hovering over the pins. “Always two small towns and one big city, in that order. We could intercept him there.”
“Hold on,” I demand, putting my hand on Deniz’s shoulder. My touch seems to pull him out of tunnel vision. He turns and looks at me, determination clear in his eyes. “What do you mean, you found it ?”
But I already know. Only one thing could ignite this much rage and resolution in him.
“He was there. He helped set the fire,” Charlie says from behind us, staring at the screen.
“Tell me how you know,” I demand, placing my hand on his cheek, telling him without words that we’re in this together. That we’ll make him suffer for what he did to those we love, like we did with Lev.
“Four days before the attack, he and Lev are in Batumi. In Georgia,” Deniz says, pulling up what looks like a roster for a shipping company. “They came in as employees on an airmail flight.”
“From there, they were harder to track, but I swear to god, Clara, I think they fucking drove from Batumi to Istanbul,” Emily cuts in, her brows furrowed in concentration as she skips through traffic camera feeds on Deniz’s surveillance system. “The footage is fucking awful, and it’s captured in ten second stills, but I’m almost positive this is them at a gas station in a tiny town halfway between the two cities.”
We all watch as cut frames switch on the screen, showing two men pulling up to a station and getting out of a small car to pay the attendant.
“This footage is almost two years old, how is it possible they still have it?” I ask, looking incredulously at Deniz.
“I didn’t pull this directly from the traffic camera. There was a robbery down the road, and the Turkish Police Organization saved the footage. I got it from their archives.”
We don’t have time for me to ask how he accomplished that feat. Instead, I scan the screens, looking for proof of Ilya actually setting the fire. Or at least that he was in Istanbul.
“Deniz, I don’t see…” I start, but he pulls his hand into mine. He does that a lot lately. Every time, it makes time stop.
“Look at his hand,” Deniz says.
All of us shift our gaze to the video with the snow. Ilya stands huddled under a storefront awning, bundled in a coat and hat. He glances over his shoulder before tugging off his glove and lighting a cigarette.
His hand is covered in burn scars. Even in the grainy feed I can see them, so similar to my mother’s, crawling up his thumb and palm.
“It’s enough for me,” Charlie says, his tone final.
“We still have to confirm. We have to be certain,” Bea says, and I know she’s right. Still, it makes more sense than any other theories we’ve had. The Andreeva brothers were the closest thing to sons Konstantin had, and they continued working for him long after his daughter Alisa’s disappearance. They would have done this together, perhaps to prove themselves to Konstantin. Perhaps because they were inseparable.
“Lev’s silence was proof in and of itself,” Gwen says, and I can’t argue.
“I’ll keep working on it,” Emily mutters, cracking her neck and pushing onward like she didn’t hear Gwen. She’s been uncomfortable for the past day and a half, and it’s setting me on edge.
“What is he doing in the States? Looking for his brother?” Bea asks, leaning against the arm of the sofa.
“I don’t think so,” Emily replies, stretching in her seat uncomfortably again. “They came to Alaska together and stayed together until Calgary. It’s a good bet that he knew Lev was headed south.”
“If Konstantin sent them here to kill me, they both would have been at the docks. And there would have been no reason for them to be in Alaska. It’s not like my city of residence is a secret,” I say, refusing to give voice to the rest of the thought. That if both Andreeva brothers had been there, I wouldn’t have survived. That we’re vulnerable, that fear of the retribution of The Syndicate of Fate is no longer enough to keep the evil we fight from biting back. At least not for Konstantin, especially knowing how long he’s gotten away with it.
“Why else would they be here? They don’t have a strong foothold in any of the ports that far north,” Charlie muses, stepping around me to get a closer look at some of the travel information Deniz and Emily have collected.
“Maybe they’re trying to build those relationships?” Gwen asks, but I shake my head.
“They wouldn’t send someone that high in their ranks this early, and we would have heard if they had been making moves in Anchorage before now.”
We pass around other ideas, from finding American and Canadian recruits to scoping out safehouses. They all feel wrong, incomplete, unsupported by the evidence piled before us. Throughout, Emily is silent, clicking and typing in the controlled, methodical way she does when she’s determined to find an answer.
“Oh my god,” she whispers. I barely hear her with everyone talking over one another, but the pale, shaken look on her face is what catches my attention.
“What, Emily?” I ask, making the room fall silent again. She drags an official-looking record to the forefront of the screens.
“What day did Ilya and Lev first enter the United States?” she asks, eyes wide and focused.
“Three months ago,” Deniz responds, clicking through a few documents before clarifying. “January fifteenth.”
Emily swallows hard, staring at what I now realize is a death certificate.
“Mikhail Shevchenko died on January eleventh.”
“Who is Mikhail Shevchenko?” Gwen asks.
“Alisa Zakharov’s maternal uncle,” Bea replies.
I don’t have time to wonder how Bea knows that. Instead, I focus on Emily.
“The timing is odd, but why is this important?” Charlie asks.
“Uh…” Emily stutters, shaking her head. Why is she so affected by this information?
“There were whispers that Alisa Zakharov didn’t die, but was smuggled out by her mother’s family. They’re not loyal to Konstantin, given the violent way Alisa’s mother died,” Bea says. I’d never even heard that this was a possibility. Most people in our world believed Alisa to be dead, or at least hidden from the world by her father and fiancé.
“You didn’t think this would be important to share?” I ask, annoyance coloring my tone. Bea, as usual, is unperturbed.
“It was a rumor. And seeing that Konstantin hadn’t ordered any hits on his late wife’s family, few thought it had merit. It’s still much more likely that either Konstantin or Ilya killed Alisa. Konstantin would rather have a martyr for a daughter than a traitor.”
“Unless they couldn’t get ahold of Mikhail until now,” Gwen suggests, her tone cold. “If he smuggled Alisa out, I assume he’d put himself into hiding. Or maybe the girl faked her death, and Konstantin just now uncovered the truth.”
If Alisa is alive, Konstantin would set the world on fire to bring her home. In his more public days, she was a princess on his arm, and he traipsed her around like a pretty little accessory at every opportunity. She was a shining jewel, both proof of his humanity and a pawn in his games. Her death would be viewed as a tragedy among his allies. But defection? Abandonment? That would be an embarrassment that he couldn’t abide.
If he found her, I couldn’t say if he would bring her home and force her to comply with his will, or kill her.
“If Mikhail is dead, we have to assume Konstantin and the Andreevas got some sort of information out of him,” Charlie says. “It could be why they came to the States. Did Alisa’s mother’s family have any connections here?”
He’s looking at Emily for an answer, but she still seems a little shell-shocked. Deniz jumps in when he realizes she isn’t going to respond.
“Nothing we’ve found so far, but we’ve just started looking. It’ll take time.”
“Start in the places Ilya has already been and expand to the Oregon-California border and out to Idaho. We have to get one step ahead of him,” I order. Deniz doesn’t balk at my tone, hunkering down with his fingers flying across the keyboard.
“So we have three paths now. Use the information Lev provided to infiltrate Konstantin’s ranks. Find Ilya and make him pay for his part in the attack in Istanbul. And find the girl,” Bea confirms.
“Find the girl?” Emily finally says, her head snapping back around to us. “For what?”
“She could have useful information on her father’s operations,” Bea shrugs, her emotionless facade betrayed by a glint of curiosity at Emily’s reaction.
“She was presumed dead years before the attack,” Emily argues, her muscles tense and her grip on the computer mouse tight.
“Still, she could be useful. Even as bait.” Bea’s words get the reaction she’s needling for. Emily’s face tightens, and she looks at me with outrage in her eyes. I keep my expression purposefully neutral.
“She’s a target. Hunt her.”
Emily blanches before she turns around, frustration pouring from her like a noxious cloud. Now is not the time, and here is not the place, but soon I’ll have to find out what bothers Emily so much about Alisa Zakharov.
The house is quiet. Emily took off not long after I gave her orders, hitching a ride with Gwen and Charlie back to the city and heading for the airport. Bea stayed awhile, sifting through the profiles of the women on her mother’s team again. We’ve narrowed it down to a few options—none of them good. Gia’s personal translator for Cyrillic languages, two security guards that would have ample information about the Costa family’s movements, and a couple others. We’ve been running in circles, but even with Lev’s information, I empathize with Bea’s frustration. It feels like we’re getting further and further from our answer.
Bea departs as the sun sets, leaving Deniz and I alone in the house for the night, with late afternoon flights booked tomorrow. As we’ve puttered around the cabin, packing and cleaning, we’ve reviewed every detail and confirmed our plans, coming to an agreement about the hell we will rain down on Ilya when we find him. And now it feels like there’s a sliver of peace between us.
I stand at the kitchen sink again, watching the shadows from the trees blend into one another until a silent, black mass looms before me. I can see why others find this silence peaceful, but I already miss the sounds of car horns and freeway traffic. I want to go home.
Deniz appears at my side, his hair damp from the shower. This might be the first moment of calm we’ve had since the night he found me in his surveillance room. He presses his shoulder against mine, his warmth seeping into my bones.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I say, my eyes still trained on the dark woods. Deniz hums, swaying into me.
“And a wedding to plan,” he mutters, a whisper of humor in his tone. I can’t repress the corner of my mouth from twitching into a smile before I let out a long sigh.
“This is much more than you signed up for,” I tell him, leaning more of my weight against the counter, letting it support me as the never-ending exhaustion crawls through me again. “Killing me would be a lot less complicated.”
He huffs a laugh and threads his fingers through mine again, neither of us breaking to look at the other.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says lightly, squeezing my palm. “But I love complicated.”
Despite the cold bleeding through the window, a warmth like sunshine on the summer sand spreads through my body, lighting me up from the inside out. I have to breathe deep to steady my voice, to hide the uncharacteristic tears of euphoria brimming in my eyes.
How ridiculous.
“Have it your way—it’s your funeral,” I say, not nearly as steadfast as I was aiming for. Finally I break, catching Deniz’s eye in the reflection of the window.
“Are you still going to kill me, Clara?” he asks, bringing my hand up to brush my scarred knuckles against his lips. Lightning sparks under my skin where he touches me.
“Seems like such a waste of a good love story,” I admit, letting a single tear fall as Deniz breaks out in a smile I can’t help but turn to look at directly.
“You can take some time to think about it,” he offers, brushing the tear away with his thumb. He cradles my head, dipping down to press his lips to mine. “I’ll still love you if you do.”
“I love you too, Deniz,” I tell him as I wrap my arms around his waist, pulling our bodies flush as we taste the truth on each other’s lips.