Chapter 37 Pyotr
Pytor
The SUV bounces over frozen ruts, and every jolt sends a bolt of fire from my biceps to my collarbone.
Daria is in the passenger seat with her seatbelt pulled tightly and her hands clenched on her thighs. Grisha drives with the headlamps off, navigating by the pale wash of moonlight on snow. Nobody speaks. The radio sits in my lap, but Boris’ last transmission still rings in my ears.
They found the bastard.
“Turn here.” I point to a gap in the tree line where two birch trunks lean against each other. A logging track threads between them, barely wide enough for the vehicle.
Grisha swings the wheel immediately. Branches scrape the roof and both side panels as we push through, and the SUV lurches sideways over a frozen drainage ditch before the ground levels out into a narrow clearing.
Boris is waiting beside his vehicle with Eduard and two of Marat’s men. All four are kitted up in vests, sidearms, and rifles slung across their chests. A thermal scope is mounted on Boris’ rifle, pulled from the backup gear in Marat’s truck.
I climb out and cross the clearing to them. The cold cuts through my jacket and settles into the wound on my arm.
“Talk to me,” I order.
Boris points northwest through the trees.
“Lodge is four hundred meters in that direction. Single story, stone foundation, timber walls. One door facing south; two windows on the east side, one on the west. Chimney on the north wall. Eduard’s scout confirmed a single heat signature on the thermal. He’s alone.”
“Weapons?”
“We heard one shot fifteen minutes ago. Sounded like a handgun. Could be a warning shot, or could be him trying to bust a lock on something inside. Either way, he’s armed with at least one pistol.”
“Ammunition?”
Boris shrugs. “He grabbed whatever he could carry when he bolted from the cabin. Based on what we recovered from his men, he’s working with a standard magazine, maybe two. Twenty rounds at most.”
Eduard steps forward. He’s covered in snow from the waist down and breathing hard from the trek.
“Circled the structure from the north. There’s a root cellar entrance on the back side, but the door is rusted shut.
Tried it myself. That thing hasn’t opened in years.
The south-facing door is the only way in or out. ”
“Any movement through the windows?”
“Curtains are drawn on all three. I caught his shadow crossing the east window once, about ten minutes ago. He’s mobile but favoring his right side. Must be where we got him.”
“Options,” I bark at Boris.
Boris ticks them off on his fingers. “One: We wait him out. The temperature is dropping, and that lodge hasn’t been maintained in years.
If the chimney is as damaged as it looks, the heat will bleed out all night.
Cold and blood loss will do our job for us.
” A second finger goes up. “Two: We breach. One door, one hostile. Stack on the entry, flash, and clear. Textbook room-clearing exercise.”
“Option three,” Eduard adds, “we call out. Give him a chance to surrender. Federal warrants are active. If he walks out with his hands up, we hand him to the authorities and let the courts bury him.”
Boris and I look at each other. We both know what Dmitri expects. The instruction was implicit but unmistakable: Bring me a result, not a problem.
“He won’t surrender,” I say. “Bogdan Lebedev has spent his life running from consequences. Prison terrifies him more than a bullet does. He’ll fire through the door the second he hears a voice.”
“We could offer it anyway,” Eduard counters. “On the record, we gave him the option. What he does with it is on him.”
Fair enough. I nod. “Eduard, position your men on the east and west flanks. Nobody fires unless I give the command or they take fire first. Once they’re in place, Boris and I will take the south approach. Grisha holds the tree line with the vehicle in case he gets past us.”
“He won’t get past us,” Grisha mutters from behind me.
“No,” I agree. “He won’t.”
The men break to take their position. Two scouts disappear into the trees. Grisha jogs back to the SUV and backs it to the edge of the clearing, where he has a clean sightline to the lodge through a gap in the birch trees.
That leaves Eduard, Boris, and me standing in ankle-deep snow, four hundred meters from the end of everything, while Daria waits in the car.
Boris checks the magazine on his rifle, racks the charging handle, and looks at my arm. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Functioning.”
He grunts. “I can take the breach. One door, one hostile. I’ve cleared tighter rooms with worse odds.”
“No.”
“Pyotr—”
“I said no.” Whatever he sees in my eyes shuts the argument down before it starts. “He dies looking at me.”
Boris holds my stare for three long seconds before dipping his chin once. “Then we’re on your six. You go through that door, we’re right behind you.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He claps me on my good shoulder and moves toward the tree line with Eduard to radio the team and confirm positions.
I stand alone in the clearing for a moment. The snow is falling harder now, with fat flakes drifting through the birch canopy and settling on my shoulders and the barrel of my pistol.
Six weeks ago, Dmitri handed me a file with Daria’s name on it and told me to find out if she was a threat.
I read it on the train to St. Petersburg and expected to find a liability.
What I found instead was a woman who’d survived things that would have broken most people, and a five-year-old girl who stole my heart.
They changed everything. And the man in that lodge is the reason they almost didn’t survive long enough to change anything.
Lana comes to mind. The eight-year-old girl in Syria who died because I was thirty seconds late pulling her from the rubble.
That failure has lived inside me for eleven years.
It hollowed me out and filled the space with discipline and silence and the conviction that I would never be too late again.
Footsteps approach behind me. I turn, expecting Boris, but it’s Daria. She’s standing at the edge of the tree line in her coat and boots, with her arms wrapped around herself, and her face pale against the dark collar. The car door must have opened while Boris was on comms.
“You should stay in the vehicle,” I tell her.
“I know.” She closes the distance between us in five quick strides and grabs my good arm with both hands. Her fingers dig into the fabric of my jacket hard enough that I feel each one through the lining.
“Daria—”
“I love you.”
The three words land beneath my ribs, in a place I didn’t know still had feeling. Simple and enormous and said without a single tremor, which is how I know she means them. Daria’s voice only shakes when she’s afraid. Right now, she isn’t shaking.
Snow collects in her hair and along the ridge of her shoulders. Her eyes are locked on mine, and she doesn’t blink or qualify or backtrack.
I’ve spent years holding up walls, keeping every woman at arm’s length because closeness meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant someone else could end up like Lana. A decade of telling myself that the safest version of me was the one who didn’t feel anything beyond duty.
And here she is, standing in the snow outside the hunting lodge where I’m going to kill her ex-husband, telling me she loves me.
“I love you, too,” I confess. “Should have said it weeks ago.”
“You said it every other way. The way you put yourself between him and us. All those nights you stayed awake so we could sleep.”
I holster the Makarov, cup her face with my good hand, and kiss her.
The weight of eleven years doesn’t vanish.
It won’t, and I know that. But for the first time, it doesn’t feel like something I’m carrying alone.
She clutches my jacket and pulls me closer, and I let the words finally settle into the space between us.
In this moment, there is nothing else. No lodge.
No snow. No four hundred meters of birch trees between this moment and what comes next.
Walking away isn’t an option. It hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t want it to be.
She kisses me back with her hands fisted in my jacket and her body melting against mine. When we pull apart, she rests her forehead against my chin, and I feel her breath come in uneven bursts against my throat.
“Come back to me,” she whispers.
“I told you before. Always do.”
“This time, mean it as more than a habit.”
I slip my thumb under her chin to tilt it up. “I mean it as everything.”
She holds my gaze for one more second. Then she releases my arm, steps back, and nods. No tears or begging.
I turn toward the lodge.
Boris and Eduard are ready and waiting at the tree line. They watched the exchange without a word. They fall into step beside me when I reach them, and we begin the four-hundred-meter walk through the trees.
The lodge materializes through the snow, low and dark.
A stone foundation crumbling at the corners, timber walls warped and grayed by decades of weather, and a tin chimney leaning at an angle that suggests one strong wind would bring it down.
Thin smoke curls out the top. Its south-facing door is solid oak, old but intact, with iron hinges that have turned orange with rust.
We stop at fifty meters. Grisha’s voice comes through my earpiece, barely above a whisper. “East flank in position. Two shooters, clear sightline on the east windows.”
“West flank set,” Marat’s man adds. “One shooter on the west window.”
Boris keys his mic. “South approach, fifty meters. We’re moving to the door. Hold fire unless you hear my command or take incoming. Confirm.”
“East confirmed.”
“West confirmed.”
I scan the lodge one more time. The curtains haven’t moved. No shadow crosses the windows. But smoke still rises from the chimney, which means he’s conscious enough to feed the fire.
Boris looks at me. “Your call.”
I roll my injured shoulder and feel the wound rub against my shirt. Pain flares from my elbow to my neck, then settles into a dull throb I can work through. Right hand steady, right eye clear. The Makarov holds twelve rounds, and a full backup magazine sits in my vest pocket.
Bogdan Lebedev is behind that door with a pistol and a prayer, and neither one can save him.