Chapter 35 Pyotr
Pyotr
Boris gives the signal, and the tree line erupts.
We move in a staggered line through the birch trees, eight men fanning out across the clearing in pairs.
Eduard’s team takes the left flank, and Marat’s covers the right. Boris and I push up the middle toward the cabin’s front door with Grisha one step behind us.
Fifty meters. Forty. The snow crunches under our boots, and I keep my Makarov level with the front window, where I last saw the fourth man sitting at the table.
Thirty meters. The door swings open, and the smoker from earlier steps onto the porch with a cigarette between his lips and a pistol in his waistband. He sees us at the same moment I see him.
His hand drops to the gun, but I put a round through his kneecap before he clears the holster.
He screams and crumples sideways off the porch, and the cabin comes alive behind him. Glass shatters from the side window as someone punches a rifle barrel through. A burst of automatic fire rips across the clearing, chewing snow and frozen dirt in a line three meters to my left.
“Contact front! Rifle in the east window!” I bark.
Boris drops to a knee behind a birch trunk and returns fire. Two rounds punch through the window frame, and the rifle barrel jerks back inside.
I sprint for the porch. Grisha is right on my heels, and we flatten ourselves against the cabin wall on either side of the open door.
Inside, someone is shouting something panicked and garbled in Russian.
Furniture crashes. A second burst of gunfire explodes from the rear of the cabin, aimed at Eduard’s team coming through the tree line.
“Marat, cover the back!” Boris shouts into comms. “Nobody leaves through that rear door!”
I pivot around the door and sweep the front room. The man from the table is crouched behind an overturned couch with a shotgun braced against the cushions. He fires wildly. The blast tears a chunk from the doorframe six inches above my head, and splinters pepper my face.
I fire twice. Both rounds hit center mass. He drops behind the couch and doesn’t move.
Grisha pushes past me toward the hallway. A door on the left flies open, and a thick-necked man barrels out swinging a crowbar. Grisha sidesteps and drives the butt of his pistol into the man’s temple. He goes down hard.
“Front room clear!” I call out. “One down, one subdued!”
“East side, two hostiles pinned in the kitchen!” Eduard’s voice crackles through my earpiece. “They’re barricaded behind the—”
The rest of his sentence vanishes under a volley of gunfire. I move down the hallway toward the kitchen, and that’s when the bedroom door on my right opens.
The man behind it is faster than I expect. He fires a handgun point-blank from three feet away, and the round punches through my left biceps before I can turn. The impact spins me sideways into the wall. My shoulder hits the plaster, and pain floods from my elbow to my collarbone.
I fire back with my right hand. Two shots. The first catches him in the chest. The second takes his jaw. He folds backward through the doorway and lands on the bedroom floor.
“Pyotr!” Boris’ voice is somewhere behind me.
“I’m hit. Left arm. Still moving.”
My biceps is screaming, and blood is soaking my jacket sleeve, but the fingers on my left hand still curl when I tell them to. Through-and-through, I think. No bone. I’ve taken worse damage.
The kitchen fight ends thirty seconds later. Eduard’s team breaches from the side window, and the two men behind the barricade surrender the moment they see four gun barrels pointed at their faces. Grisha zip-ties them on the kitchen tile while Boris sweeps the rest of the cabin.
“Clear!” Boris announces. Then, a beat later: “Where’s Bogdan?”
The question makes my stomach drop. I scan every face on the floor. The smoker on the porch, still moaning and clutching his knee. The man I shot in the front room. The crowbar swinger, unconscious. The one from the bedroom, dead. The two from the kitchen, zip-tied and bleeding.
None of them is Bogdan.
“Back door’s open!” Marat reports through comms. “Fresh tracks heading northwest into the forest. He rabbited during the firefight. Fuck! There are snowmobile tracks. And blood. Decent amount of it. Looks like he caught a round on his way out.”
“How much blood?” Boris asks.
“Enough to follow without trying. It’s painting the snow all the way to the tree line.”
Boris turns to me, reads my arm, and makes the call. “Eduard, take three men and follow those tracks. Marat, hold the perimeter. He’s wounded and on a snowmobile in dense forest. He won’t get far on that thing before the trees force him off it.” He grabs my good shoulder. “You need a medic.”
“I need Bogdan.”
“You need to stop bleeding first. There’s a safehouse two kilometers east. Tony set it up as a fallback. We’ll regroup there.” His voice leaves no room for argument. “Eduard will track him. Bogdan is on foot in the snow with no coat, no vehicle, and no allies. He won’t get far.”
I want to argue. Every instinct I have is screaming to follow the tracks into the trees and finish what I started.
But Boris is right. The blood running down my forearm is dripping off my fingertips, and my left hand is losing grip strength.
If I chase Bogdan into the forest and pass out from blood loss, I become a liability.
“Fine,” I grit out. “Two kilometers. Then I’m back on comms.”
Boris keys his comms. “Grisha, scene is secure. Bring her up.”
Two minutes later, footsteps crunch across the clearing. Grisha is walking Daria toward the cabin with one hand on her arm, and when she spots me on the porch steps, she tears free of his grip and breaks into a sprint.
She slams into me before Grisha can catch up. “You’re bleeding,” she shrieks.
“It’s through-and-through. I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. Sit down.”
“Daria—”
“Sit. Down.”
I sit on the porch steps because arguing with her right now would take energy I don’t have.
She strips my jacket off my left side and examines the wound with the focus of a woman who has cleaned up blood, though never under circumstances like these.
Boris appears with a med kit and sets it beside her.
“Safehouse is two klicks east,” he tells her. “Can you drive?”
“Yes.”
“Take him. I’ll send Grisha with you as an escort. We’ll handle the rest here.”
The SUV is still running where we left it.
Daria drives with white knuckles on the wheel, and I lean my head against the seat and press a wadded field dressing against my arm.
The safehouse is a hunting lodge tucked behind a ridge, stocked with supplies and a woodstove that someone has lit.
Grisha clears the rooms, posts himself on the porch, and leaves us alone.
Daria sits me at the kitchen table and opens the med kit with trembling fingers.
She peels the field dressing away and cleans the wound with antiseptic, and I watch her face while she works.
Her jaw is locked tight. Her breathing is uneven.
Every few seconds, she blinks hard and fast like she’s fighting something that wants to pull her under.
“What were you thinking?” I ask her.
She wraps the bandage around my biceps with hands that won’t stop trembling, pulling it snug and tucking the end the way I showed her weeks ago. “I heard the gunfire from the car, and I didn’t know if you were alive or dead for almost four minutes. Once it stopped, I took my chance to find out.”
She ties off the bandage and checks it once.
Then, instead of pulling away, she drops her forehead to my shoulder and folds her body into mine.
A sound comes out of her that is deeper than a sob.
More primal. The sound of a woman who spent the worst four minutes of her life waiting for news that might have destroyed her.
I wrap my good arm around her back and hold her against me. Her breath comes out uneven against my neck, and I can feel her pulse hammering through every point where her body touches mine.
“I’m here,” I reassure into her hair. “I’m right here.” I tilt her chin up with my good hand. “Look at me. I’m right here.”
She kisses me then, smashing her mouth against mine like it’s the proof she needs to believe the bullet didn’t kill me. I taste salt on her mouth and know she’s been crying.
I try to pull back. “Daria, I’m bleeding—”
“I don’t care.” She grabs a fistful of my shirt and drags me closer. “I need to feel you. I need to know you’re real.”
Her mouth finds mine again, and this time, I stop fighting it. She climbs onto my lap at the kitchen table and wraps both arms around my neck. My left arm protests, a bolt of white heat from shoulder to wrist, but I brace it against her hip and pull her tighter against me with my right.
“Tell me yes,” I breathe against her mouth.
“Yes.”
“Eyes on me.”
She locks her gaze onto mine, and I can see everything. The terror, the relief, the need that’s been building since I walked out of that SUV and toward the cabin. I kiss her throat and feel her pulse slamming under my lips.
She pulls my shirt over my head, careful around the bandage, and presses her palm flat against my chest. I undo the buttons on her shirt one-handed, fumbling the third one before she reaches down and finishes the job.
The fabric falls open, and I drag it off her shoulders.
Her bra is plain white cotton, nothing designed to seduce, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen because she’s alive and sitting in my lap with her heart racing against mine.
I unclasp her bra and toss it aside. She molds against me, bare skin to bare skin, and the contact punches the breath from both of us. I cup her breast with my good hand and drag my thumb across her nipple. She gasps and arches into my palm.
“Get on the table,” I tell her.