Chapter 36 Daria
Daria
I’ve counted every knot in the kitchen table twice.
There are fourteen. Some are small, tight, and barely visible beneath the grain. Others are wide and warped, the kind that catch a fingernail if you drag it across the surface. I trace them, because tracing them gives my hands something to do besides shake.
Pyotr sits across from me with a mug of black coffee that he hasn’t touched. His left arm hangs in the sling Boris fashioned before he headed into the woods, and a thin line of dried blood runs along the inside of his wrist, where the bandage doesn’t quite cover.
He hasn’t complained about the pain or about being sidelined while Boris and Eduard track Bogdan through the snow. Instead, he just sits there with his phone on the table and his eyes on me.
“Eat something,” he prompts.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since we got here.” I shoot him a look, and he holds up his good hand in surrender. “Fine.”
Grisha is on the porch. Every few minutes, I hear the creak of his boots on the wooden planks as he paces a circuit outside the front door. Beyond that, nothing. The forest is silent.
Bogdan is out there somewhere, on foot, wounded, and without a coat or supplies or a single person left to call.
Tony confirmed the warrants hit the border system two hours ago, and his photo is flagged at every crossing between here and Finland.
Yevgeny has disowned him. The accounts are frozen.
Every hired man from the cabin is either dead or has taken for questioning.
I know he has nothing, but my stomach still won’t unclench.
“What if he finds a house?” I ask. “A farmhouse or a cottage. Somewhere with a phone and a car. He’ll hurt anyone inside to get what he wants.”
“Tony ran the area before we left the city. The nearest occupied structure is a logging station eleven kilometers east, and Marat has a man posted on the access road. His snowmobile died in a ravine.”
“He could have—”
“Daria.” Pyotr’s voice isn’t harsh, but it stops me. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. Boris has been doing it even longer. A wounded man on foot in subzero temperatures has limited options, and we’ve closed off all of them. The only question left is how long it takes Eduard to reach him.”
I dig my thumbnail into one of the knots on the table until the wood bites back. “I know you’re right. But I’ve believed it was over before. Every time I moved to a new city, I told myself it was done. He always found a way back.”
Pyotr reaches across the table with his good hand and covers mine. His fingers are almost scorching against my freezing skin. I haven’t been able to get warm since the firefight, despite the woodstove throwing heat from the corner.
“He’s bleeding in the snow with nine men closing in. This is a dead-end for him.”
I turn my hand over beneath his and link our fingers. He moves his thumb across my knuckle in a slow rhythm that I suspect is as much for him as it is for me.
“What does it feel like?” I ask. “When it’s over, and the person you’re hunting can’t get away?”
He tilts his head, considering this. “During, you stay focused. You don’t let yourself believe it, because belief makes you sloppy. The feeling comes later, once the adrenaline burns off and the quiet sets in, and you realize you don’t have to check behind you anymore.”
“I don’t remember what that’s like. Not checking.”
“You will.”
The radio squawks on the table, and Grisha’s voice comes through. “Perimeter clear. No contacts.”
Pyotr keys the mic with his thumb. “Copy.”
He sets the radio down and pushes his untouched coffee toward me. “Drink mine. It’s still warm.”
I take a sip because arguing requires energy I don’t have. The coffee is bitter and too strong the way he makes it, and the heat spreads through my chest like a small mercy.
“Tell me about tomorrow,” I prompt.
He tilts his head again. “What about it?”
“After this is done. Walk me through what happens.”
“Boris handles the scene. Tony files the documentation with the federal liaison. We drive back to the city.”
“That’s logistics. I’m asking what happens to us.”
He drops his eyes to the table and swallows hard. “What do you want to happen?”
“I want to go get my daughter.” My voice catches on the last word, and I hate that Bogdan still has enough power to cause that, even now. “Get to Moscow, walk through the compound gates, pick up Kira, and hold her until she squirms away. Then bring her home.”
“Then that’s what we do.”
I want to argue how simple he makes it sound.
Six years of violence and a lifetime of aftermath, reduced to five syllables.
But there’s no arrogance behind the words.
Pyotr doesn’t deal with false comfort; he states facts, and if he says that’s what we do, he means he’ll make it happen or die trying.
Given that he took a bullet just hours ago and is still sitting upright at this table, I believe him more than I’ve ever believed anyone.
The front door opens, and cold rolls in from the porch. Grisha steps inside long enough to pour a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter. He nods at Pyotr, glances at me, and pauses.
“Anything from Boris?” he asks.
“Twenty-two minutes ago. The blood trail disappeared at the ravine.”
Grisha takes a long swallow and sets the mug on the counter. “I served with Eduard outside Aleppo. If there’s a trail, he’ll follow it to hell and back. The man once tracked a supply convoy through a sandstorm using nothing but tire ruts and instinct.”
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Pyotr says.
Grisha looks at me again. “Ms. Lebedev—”
“Kozlov,” I correct him. I stopped being Mrs. Lebedev the day I signed divorce papers in a courthouse bathroom with shaking hands and a bruise under my sleeve. “But you can just call me Daria.”
A dip of his chin. “Daria. We’re going to get this done. You have my word.” Then he picks up his mug, takes it back outside, and pulls the door shut behind him.
The minutes drag on. I count them by the ticking of Pyotr’s watch, a faint mechanical pulse I can hear in the quiet between radio check-ins.
Finally, Pyotr stands to refill the kettle.
He moves carefully, favoring his left side, and I watch the muscles along his jaw work when he reaches for the handle with his injured arm out of habit, then corrects to his right.
Neither wince nor complaint leaves him. Just the adjustment and the forward motion, the same way he absorbs every pain I’ve seen him face. Quietly and without ceremony.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Yes.”
One word, honest and unadorned. I think what I love most about this man is that he never softens the truth, for himself or for me.
The radio barks again, and this time, it’s Boris.
“Base, tracking team. We’ve located fresh prints heading northwest toward an abandoned hunting lodge that was covered by trees on the sat images. Grid four-seven-niner. Blood volume heavier than the last stretch. He’s losing steam.”
Pyotr grabs the radio before Boris finishes the last syllable. “Distance to the lodge?”
“A few hundred meters from our current position, which I’ll send you. Eduard’s scout has a visual on the structure. No movement outside. Smoke from the chimney. He made it inside.”
“Hold where you are. Nobody approaches until I give the word.”
“Copy. Holding. Boris out.”
The kitchen goes quiet.
I’m on my feet, though I don’t remember standing. Both hands are squeezing the back of the chair so hard that my knuckles have gone white, and my pulse is hammering in my temples, the hollow behind my ears, and the soft dip at the base of my throat.
Pyotr sets down the radio and turns to me.
“He’s done,” I whisper.
“Not yet, but he will be soon. Boris will confirm the layout and check for secondary exits while we head there. Once he’s satisfied there’s no way out, we move. An hour, maybe less.”
All of the bruises I lied about in emergency rooms, custody threats that kept me awake for months, and midnight calls that turned my phone into a weapon aimed at my sanity are funneling toward this single endpoint.
Something gives way inside me. Not a collapse or the numb shutdown I used to mistake for calm.
This is more like the moment a held breath finally releases, when lungs expand and ribs open, and the body remembers what it was built to do.
The thing wound tightly behind my sternum since the first time Bogdan closed his fist doesn’t disappear.
I’d be foolish to expect that. But I feel the fibers loosen just enough to let something else push through.
Not relief. That belongs for later. To the phone call with Kira and the drive to Moscow, and the moment I walk through those gates and see my daughter sprinting toward me with Rex tucked under one arm and a gap-toothed grin splitting her face.
This is something smaller, like the first green bud pushing through frozen ground to signal spring is on the way.
Hope.
Pyotr stalks across the kitchen and wraps his good arm around me, and I press my face into his chest and breathe. His heartbeat thuds against my cheek, steady as every promise he’s kept since the night he sat on my kitchen floor and taught me what safe hands felt like.
“We’re almost there,” he mumbles into my hair.
I close my eyes. Out in the forest, the world is getting smaller around Bogdan the way it got smaller around me for years, except nobody is coming to save him.
The difference is that someone came for me.
Tomorrow, I’ll call my daughter and tell her the bad man is gone.
I can hold on a little longer. I’ve held on this long.