ROMAN
I don’t think. There isn’t time for that.
I press the SOS button on my phone that sends an immediate text to Mikhail with my location.
The glass by my hand explodes, and Katerina’s face changes across the table in the same instant mine does. She knows. Not what, not yet, but enough. Enough to grab for Sofia before the next round starts.
I’m out of the chair before the sound is finished.
“Nikolai, down.”
He obeys immediately.
I grab the back of his jacket and pull him with me as I drop low beside the table. Katerina has Sofia half under her already, one hand over the back of the girl’s head, the other braced on the grass. Vika is screaming. Useless, high-pitched, furious screaming, as if outrage can stop bullets.
“Down,” I snap at her.
She looks at me like she wants to argue.
Then another shot tears through the edge of the table, and she finally drops.
The angle is wrong.
That’s the first thing I notice once everyone is low.
The shooter isn’t far enough out for a perimeter hit. The rounds are coming low and fast from inside the grounds or just beyond the hedge line, not from the road, not from the river. Whoever took the shot had line of sight on the lawn and knew exactly where lunch was set.
“Inside,” I say.
Katerina looks at me like she wants to argue.
I don’t give her the chance. I grab the back of Vika’s arm, haul her up when she freezes, and shove all three of them toward the terrace doors while staying between them and the line of fire. Another shot cracks over us and buries itself in the hedge behind the table.
Whoever it is, they’re losing nerve. Or time.
The children move. Katerina half-drags, half-carries Sofia. Nikolai runs low beside her. Vika stumbles once in the grass, catches herself, and keeps moving. I stay behind them until they make it to the doors, then push them inside and turn back toward the lawn.
There’s nothing. No movement in the trees now. No second shooter.
Still, I go after them.
I cut across the lawn, vault the low hedge, and hit the outer path at a run.
One of the side gates is open by six inches.
That tells me more than the shooting did.
Someone came in knowing exactly where not to be seen, fired just enough to send a message, then got out before the house security could close in.
I follow the path to the rear service lane, but by the time I get there, it’s empty. No car. No bike. No footman running. Only the river wind, the gravel, and the ugly certainty that whoever did this knew the compound better than they should.
I stand there for one hard second, breathing fast, and feel anger settle in properly.
By the time I get back to the house, Sergei Markov has arrived.
He must have been called the moment the first shot hit. He’s striding across the lawn path with two of his men behind him and murder on his face. He sees me coming in from the side path and his expression gets even harder.
“What happened?”
“Someone got inside your perimeter and opened fire on lunch,” I say.
He frowns. “That’s not possible.”
“And yet, it’s what happened,” I shoot back at him.
His men spread out at once. One moves toward the lawn. Another checks the wall line. Useless now, but they need to be seen doing something.
Sergei looks past me toward the shattered table. “My grandchildren were here.”
“Yes,” I say. “They were.”
He hears the meaning in that and doesn’t like it. Neither do I.
Because there was a security lapse, yes. That much is obvious. But something under it doesn’t sit right. A Markov compound is not a pier restaurant. You don’t just wander into a house like this with a rifle and a guess.
I don’t say it. Not yet.
But the thought is there. Who could get a shot off inside the Markov compound unless Markov security let them?
Sergei’s jaw tightens. “You have something to say?”
“No,” I tell him. “Not until I know whether your men are incompetent or disloyal.”
That gets a real reaction.
One of his guards takes a step forward. Sergei lifts a hand and stops him without taking his eyes off me.
Then he says, very softly, “Careful.”
I’m about to answer when Mikhail arrives. He moves quickly, takes in the broken glass, the overturned chairs, the spread of food and dirt across the lawn, and comes straight to me.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
“The children?”
“Alive.”
Mikhail nods once and immediately starts doing what Markov’s men should already have done properly. Angles, lines, shell casings, likely entry and exit points, wall height, gate access, roof sight. I join him because I trust my own eyes more than Sergei’s people.
We find very little.
That bothers me more than finding nothing would have.
Two shell casings near the west hedge. Cheap rifle ammo.
Nothing professional. A scuffed patch by the service path where someone pivoted hard before running.
No blood. No dropped gear. No obvious entry wound in the wall, which means they likely came through a gate or were already inside the grounds before they fired.
Mikhail crouches near the west hedge, glances once toward the lunch table, then back at the line of sight.
“It’s obvious who they were shooting at,” he says quietly.
I don’t answer because I already know.
He looks up at me. “You.”
“Yes.” That should reassure me in a narrow, ugly way. Better me than them. But I’m still worried.
Because the children were there anyway, and once bullets start moving, intention stops mattering.
Mikhail touches his jaw thoughtfully, “They knew the layout.”
“Yes.”
Mikhail says, “That doesn’t mean they came from inside.”
“No,” I say. “It means they had help from inside, or they’ve been here before.”
Katerina finds us just as Mikhail is finishing with the hedge.
She comes across the lawn fast, not running, but not far from it either. Her face is pale in that dangerous way people get after fear has worn off and anger has taken over.
She stops in front of me and looks from the shattered glass on the grass to the table on its side, then to my face. “This is because of you.”
I look at her for a second before I answer. “You don’t know that.”
Her laugh is short and ugly. “Don’t insult me.”
I don’t say anything.
She takes a step closer. “The second you showed up, this started. At lunch. In our house. My children were sitting at that table.”
“I know where they were.”
“Do you?” she snaps.
I hold her gaze. “And I was the one who got them moving before the second round came in. I didn’t see your father’s underlings anywhere.”
Her jaw tightens. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t stand there and make yourself sound like the hero.”
My jaw ticks.
This isn’t the time for temper. She’s frightened, humiliated, furious, and not wrong about the danger. I know all that. I also know the only thing she can see right now is the line between my arrival and the gunfire, and I can’t blame her for drawing it.
“I’m not making myself sound like anything,” I say. “I’m telling you what happened.”
“What happened,” she says, voice shaking now, “is that my children were in danger because of you.”
Mikhail steps farther off to the side, smart enough to make himself invisible without actually leaving. Sergei is still near the terrace with two of his men, speaking in low, furious bursts to someone on the phone, but I can feel him listening too.
Katerina lowers her voice. “You bring this with you.”
That gets under my skin.
I keep my voice level anyway. “You think I arranged for someone to fire at a lunch table?”
“No.” She folds her arms tightly, like she has to hold herself together. “I think men like you have enemies, and the rest of us pay for it.”
I look past her for a second, at the west hedge, the broken glass, the line of sight. Cheap rifle, sloppy exit, too much access. Someone got inside this property or close enough to use it. That’s still bothering me. It should be bothering her father more too.
When I look back at her, she’s still staring at me with that bright, furious look that means she’s one thing away from making this worse for both of us.
“I should tell them who you are,” she says.
The words are quiet.
I say nothing.
She takes my silence for space and pushes into it.
“I should tell everyone,” she says. “Tell my father, tell Vika, tell anyone who’s stupid enough to sit near you. Let them all hear that you’re a Morozov and see how they like that.”
For a second, I just look at her.
But she keeps going. “You’re the reason Lev is dead.”
Everything in me goes still. So, this is about Lev. Of course. I should have known better. It’s about Lev, the father of her children, the one she lost, and she thinks it’s because of me. But I’m not her villain.
“No,” I say.
She opens her mouth, ready to keep going, and I cut across her.
“No.”
The second time I say it, she stops.
I step closer.
Not enough to touch her. Enough that she has to lift her chin to keep looking at me the way she is.
“I was not behind Lev’s death.”
Her eyes flash. “Why would I believe that?”
“Because I’m telling you the truth.”
“Now?” she says. “Now you care about the truth?”
I let that go. There are ten things I could say to that, and all of them would make this uglier. But instead, I tell the truth.
“Someone I trusted sold me out. After that, everything started moving at once. Old deals, old grudges, people picking sides, people getting killed because they were in the wrong place or backing the wrong man. Lev got caught in that.”
Her face hardens. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the truth.” I keep my voice flat. “I didn’t send anyone after him. I didn’t set him up. By the time I knew where things had gone, he was already dead.”
For a second she doesn’t say anything. She’s still furious, but now she’s actually listening.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to stop saying I killed him when I didn’t.”
She folds her arms tighter across herself. “Convenient.”
“No,” I say. “Convenient would be lying to you.”
For years I kept that part buried. I let people think what they wanted because admitting I’d been betrayed felt too close to weakness, and weakness is the one thing men like me don’t survive being known for.
But this is Katerina.
And that’s the problem.
I care what she thinks. More than I should. More than makes any sense, standing here on her father’s lawn with shell casings in the grass and her looking at me like I brought death to her door.
“And if this happens again—”
“It won’t.”
She gives me a furious look. “You can’t promise that.”
“Yes, I can.”
That only angers her more. “You always talk like that. Like you can force everything into place if you decide hard enough.”
“No,” I say. “I talk like that because I know what I’m doing. Besides, you’re perfectly safe. The bullets were meant for me.”
She barely flinches at that.
“That’s not supposed to make me feel better.”
“It isn’t.” I look at her. “It’s supposed to make you understand.”
Her mouth twists. Then she says, lower now, “This is why I ran.”
And I believe her.
The bitter part is that I can even understand it. The worst part is that I still care. Too much.
Enough that I’m standing here trying to make her believe me while she raises another man’s children under her father’s roof.
Enough that the sight of her still wrecks my judgment.
Enough that the irony of it feels almost cruel: wanting her this much while thinking those children belong to my half-brother who still haunts me even after his death.
Before I can answer, Mikhail comes back across the lawn with a casing in his hand. He slows when he sees us still standing there.
“We’ve got the caliber,” he says.
I nod once.
Katerina looks between us, and whatever had almost shifted in her face closes up again. “Good,” she says. “Then figure it out.”
Then she turns and walks back toward the house.
I watch her go.
Mikhail comes up beside me and says quietly, “That went well.”
I look at him.
He shrugs. “Better than it could have, I mean.”
That, unfortunately, is true.