Chapter 34 Daria
Daria
The helicopter lands in a frozen field outside Vyborg, where a black SUV is waiting with the engine running.
We’ve been in the air for just more than an hour.
Boris sat up front with the pilot, barking coordinates into his phone while Pyotr and I shared the back bench in silence.
I spent most of the flight staring at the landscape below, watching the city thin into suburbs and the suburbs dissolve into forest.
Somewhere down there, Bogdan is driving in the same direction we’re flying, except he’s on a highway doing seventy, and we’re cutting the distance at ten times his speed.
As soon as the skids touch the ground, Boris is out and jogging toward the SUV. Pyotr takes my hand as I climb down, and the cold hits me like a wall. It’s a different kind of cold out here. Denser. Wetter. The kind that crawls through every seam and settles into bone.
“Eduard and Marat?” Pyotr asks Boris as we reach the vehicle.
“Already in position ten kilometers north. They’ll shadow Bogdan from behind once we set up ahead of him.” Boris opens the rear door and waves me in. “Tony’s last ping puts him twenty minutes south of Vyborg. He stopped for gas, which bought us time.”
“How much time?”
“Enough.” Boris drops into the driver’s seat and adjusts the mirror. “We get to the intercept point first. That’s what matters.”
Pyotr slides in beside me, and Boris pulls onto a two-lane road that cuts through dense forest on both sides. No other cars or buildings, just trees and mud and the occasional logging road branching off into nothing.
I press my forehead against the window and watch the pines blur past. My mind keeps looping through the same two scenarios.
If this works, Bogdan is gone. Not hiding, running, or lurking in a foreign country with a new passport and a grudge.
Gone. And if Bogdan is gone, Kira comes home.
The custody filing dies on the vine because there’s nobody left to pursue it.
The safe houses and fake names and three years of sleeping with one eye open become a story I tell a therapist someday instead of a life I’m still living.
Kira starts first grade in September. I’ve already missed her preschool graduation because we were on the run, and I swore I’d never miss another milestone.
If this works, I won’t have to. I can walk her to school in the mornings and pick her up in the afternoons and make dinner in peace, without jumping every time my phone rings.
If this doesn’t work, Kira grows up without a mother.
That thought should paralyze me. Three months ago, it would have. I would have begged Pyotr to turn the car around, called Alexei, and asked him to hide me somewhere. I would have done what I always did when the stakes got too high: make myself small and pray the danger passed.
I’m not that woman anymore. The woman who called Bogdan this morning and told him to run wouldn’t turn this car around. She’d ride it straight into the fire if that’s what it took.
“You’re quiet,” Pyotr says beside me.
“Thinking.”
“About?”
“Kira’s first day of school. Whether I’ll be there for it.”
He doesn’t offer reassurance. Pyotr has never been the kind of man who makes promises he can’t guarantee, and I love him for it. Instead, he reaches over and takes my hand. His palm is rough and warm, and I lace my fingers through his and hold on.
“I called her before we left,” I tell him. “She told me Sofia taught her how to braid friendship bracelets and that Mila let her have ice cream for breakfast.”
“Mila spoils her.”
“Mila adores her.” I smile despite everything. “Kira asked when I’m coming to get her. I told her soon.”
“That’s the truth.”
“It had better be.”
Boris glances at us through the mirror but says nothing.
He’s been uncharacteristically quiet since the helicopter, which means he’s either focused or furious.
Probably both. I know he didn’t want me on this trip.
He made that clear before we left, listing every tactical reason I should stay behind while Pyotr loaded the duffel bags into the car. He wasn’t wrong.
But here I am.
The road narrows as we push farther north.
Pavement gives way to gravel, and gravel gives way to packed dirt with ruts deep enough to swallow a tire.
Boris handles the SUV like he’s driven this kind of terrain a thousand times.
The man spent a decade in military service before joining the Kozlovs, and I’ve heard enough stories from Pyotr to know that Boris has operated in worse conditions than a muddy logging road in February.
My phone dings with a text from Tony.
Target stationary. Same coordinates. Two vehicles confirmed on site. ETA to intercept zone: forty minutes.
I read it aloud, and Boris nods. “Good. He hasn’t moved. Looks like he’s set up for the night.”
“What’s the plan when we get there?” I ask.
Boris meets my eyes in the mirror. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m not worried. I’m asking.”
Pyotr answers instead. “Eduard and Marat’s teams surround the property from the tree line. Boris and I approach from the front. We cut off the road so he can’t bolt in one of those vehicles.”
“And me?”
“You stay in the car with the doors locked and the engine running.”
I don’t argue. I promised I wouldn’t, and I meant it.
The forest thickens around us. Birch and pine crowd the road so tightly that their branches nearly scrape the windows.
Every few minutes, a logging track splits off into the trees, marked by nothing more than tire ruts and a rusted chain.
This is the kind of place where people disappear.
No cameras, witnesses, or cell towers for kilometers. Just frozen ground and silence.
We round a bend, and Boris slows the SUV to a crawl. Up ahead, a narrow track veers off the main road and climbs a shallow rise. He turns onto it without a word, and the vehicle bounces over ruts and frozen mud for another two hundred meters before the trees open into a clearing.
I see it immediately.
A cabin sits at the far edge of the clearing, low and weathered, with a tin roof sagging under the weight of old snow. Two vehicles are parked outside. One is a dark sedan with plates I can’t read from this distance. The other is a beat-up van with its rear doors hanging open.
Boris kills the headlights and eases the SUV behind a stand of birch trees at the clearing’s edge. We’re about a hundred and fifty meters from the cabin, close enough to see movement through the windows.
I count heads. One man stands near the front door, smoking and stamping his feet against the cold.
Another is visible through a side window, pacing.
A third emerges from the cabin and walks to the van, pulls something from the back, and carries it inside.
Through the front window, I can make out a fourth figure seated at a table.
“Four confirmed,” Boris says. “Maybe five. Hard to tell with the layout.”
“That’s more than the two who fled the warehouse with him,” Pyotr points out. “He picked up reinforcements.”
“Probably hired locals. Desperate men with a bag of cash can always find muscle on short notice.”
Pyotr eyes the cabin for a long moment, then pulls his phone from his pocket and dials. “Eduard. We have eyes on the target. Clearing off the main road, approximately six kilometers west of the gas station. Two vehicles, four to five hostiles, one structure. How far out are you?”
I can’t hear Eduard’s response, but Pyotr nods. “Good. Hold your position until Boris signals. Nobody moves until we’re all in place.”
He ends the call and turns to me. His face is calm, but I read the thing underneath it that he won’t say out loud, because saying it would make it too real.
“Stay in the car,” he tells me. “Doors locked. Engine running. If something goes wrong, drive east until you hit the main highway and call Alexei. Don’t stop for anything.”
“I know.”
“I need you to say it back to me.”
“Doors locked. Engine running. East to the highway. Call Alexei. Don’t stop.”
He gathers my face in his hands and presses his forehead against mine, and I memorize the feel of his skin and the rhythm of his breathing. This could be the last time I’m this close to him.
“Come back to me,” I whisper.
“I always do.”
He kisses me once, hard and fast and full of everything neither of us has time to say. Then he pulls back, grabs the duffel from the seat beside him, and climbs out of the SUV.
Boris is already outside, checking his weapon and speaking quietly into his phone. Two more vehicles are idling farther down the logging track. Marat’s men, I assume, positioned there while we flew in. They must have been waiting since before we landed.
I watch Pyotr cross the frozen ground toward Boris with loose shoulders, a steady stride, and every step placed with purpose.
I see his hand drift to his chest for half a second, right over the pocket where he keeps the photo of Kira that she drew for him in crayon. The one with the stick figure holding a gun and the words “MY PIROT” scrawled across the top in purple marker.
He told me once that he carries it on him every day. I asked him why, and he said, “Because it reminds me of what I’m protecting.”
I lock the doors.
Through the windshield, the cabin hunches against the tree line like something waiting to be disturbed. Smoke curls from a crooked chimney pipe. The man by the front door flicks his cigarette into the snow and steps back inside.
Bogdan is in that cabin, fifty meters from the Finnish border, surrounded by hired guns and stolen cash, still running from the life he destroyed.
He doesn’t know we’re here. He doesn’t know that nine armed men are fanning through the trees around his hiding spot, or that the woman he spent six years terrorizing is sitting in an SUV at the edge of the clearing, watching it all unfold.
I ran from this man for three years. I packed bags in the middle of the night, fled cities, changed my name, and taught my daughter to answer a name that wasn’t hers. I slept on borrowed couches and held my breath every time a car slowed down outside.
Today, I’m done running.
Boris raises a hand, and Pyotr nods. The men in the trees go still.
And I sit in the car with the engine running and my heart slamming against my ribs, waiting for the end of everything.