Chapter 38 Daria
Daria
The trio moves through the birch trees like wolves closing on a den.
Pyotr is in front. Boris flanks his right. Eduard covers the left.
They advance in a crouch, weapons up, spacing tight enough to communicate with hand signals but wide enough that a single burst of gunfire can’t take all three.
I know this because Pyotr explained it to me weeks ago when I asked how men like him approach a building they expect to be hostile. He described it the way a mechanic describes an engine. Step by step. No emotion. Just sequence.
Watching it happen is nothing like hearing it described.
I’m holding onto the steering wheel with both hands even though the engine is off.
Grisha told me to keep it running when he left to join the flank team, but I turned the key the second the door closed behind him because the rumble of the engine was louder than my thoughts, and I needed to hear what’s going on.
From the SUV, the three figures shrink with every step.
I lose Eduard first. He blends into the tree line on the left until I can’t separate him from the trunks.
Boris disappears next, his bulk swallowed by the shadows on the right.
Pyotr is the last shape I can track, moving steadily and low through the center, until even he becomes just a dark smudge against the white.
The lodge squats at the far edge of the clearing, barely visible through the snow and the birch canopy. Smoke trails from the chimney. The door is a dark rectangle I can only see because the stone around it is paler. Bogdan is behind that door, and the man I love is walking toward him.
My hands are cramping from the steering wheel.
I force my fingers open one at a time and flex them, but they won’t stop shaking.
Everything in my body is clenched. Jaw, shoulders, muscles along my spine.
Counting the seconds the way Kira counts dinosaurs is the only thing that keeps me from screaming. One. Two. Three. Four.
On five, Pyotr kicks the door.
The oak cracks but doesn’t give. He steps back, adjusts, and drives his boot into the wood a second time.
The frame splinters inward this time, and the door swings wide.
Boris surges forward from the east side.
Eduard comes from the west. All three funnel through the opening in fewer than two seconds.
Then, the shooting starts.
The first shot is a single pop. A handgun, judging by the sound. It comes from inside the lodge.
Two more follow in quick succession. Rifle rounds from Boris.
Then, a short pause, followed by a burst that I can’t separate into individual shots because there are too many echoing off the stone foundation and bouncing through the trees.
Five rounds. Six. I lose count at seven.
Something punches through the west window from inside, making me gasp.
A bullet. It whizzes across the clearing and hits the SUV’s hood with a metallic shriek that sends me diving sideways across the center console with a scream.
Half a breath later, a second round blows through the windshield six inches above the passenger headrest. Glass sprays across the dashboard and the front seats, and I feel a piece slice across the back of my left hand as I throw it over my face.
I’m on the floorboard between the seats with my knees jammed against the gearshift and my cheek pressed against the rubber mat. My ears are ringing. Blood is running down my fingers from the glass cut, warm and fast, dripping onto the mat in a pattern I can’t stop staring at.
A third shot cracks from inside the lodge, followed by a fourth. Then nothing.
The silence is worse than the gunfire.
I count to ten. Nothing. Twenty. Still nothing.
My breathing is so loud inside the cab that I can’t hear anything beyond my pulse, so I force myself to hold my breath.
With my lungs burning and ribs locked, I press one palm against the seat cushion and push myself just high enough to peer through what’s left of the windshield.
Cold pours through the hole in the glass. A shard is embedded in the headrest where my head was three seconds before the round came through. The edges are frosted with condensation, and a hairline crack spiders outward from the point of impact.
If I hadn’t dove when the first bullet hit the hood, that shard would be in the back of my head.
Still, I’m not scared yet. Fear is somewhere behind me, waiting for the adrenaline to burn off so it can land. Right now, every nerve in my body is pointed at one thing: the lodge door.
It is open, with smoke curling from the frame where the wood splintered. Nothing moves inside, and no shadows pass the windows.
A shape appears in the doorway.
Boris. His rifle is down with the barrel pointed at the ground as he steps onto the threshold and turns to say something over his shoulder. A second figure emerges behind him.
Eduard, wearing a dusty vest with his weapon holstered. He’s holding his radio to his ear and speaking into it, but I can’t make out the words from this distance.
Where is Pyotr?
My chest contracts so hard that I nearly choke.
I scramble upright in the driver’s seat, glass biting into my palms, and watch the doorway for a third figure.
Boris remains on the threshold. Eduard has moved to the side of the building.
Neither is rushing, which should tell me something, but the only thing my brain can process right now is that two men went in with Pyotr and two men came out without him.
Boris turns and speaks into the doorway again. Eduard puts a hand on his radio, nods at whatever he hears, and looks toward the SUV. Toward me.
Why is he looking at me?
People look at the widow. That’s the thought that detonates in my head. They look at the person who needs to be told. At the woman in the car, because someone has to walk over there and say the words, and nobody wants to be the one who does it.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no, no.”
I’m reaching for the door handle when a third shape fills the doorframe.
Pyotr.
He steps out of the lodge and into the snow, and I see the blood.
It’s on his hands, his forearms, and the front of his jacket, soaked into the fabric from collar to waist. His face has a smear of it across one cheekbone.
The Makarov hangs at his side in his right hand, still smoking from the barrel.
He’s upright and walking, and it takes a moment to realize the blood covering him isn’t his.
He stops three paces from the door and tilts his face toward the sky. His chest rises once, deep and slow, and then his chin drops, and he looks at the SUV. At me.
I don’t remember opening the car door or crossing the clearing.
One second, I’m sitting behind a shattered windshield with glass in my hair and blood on my knuckles, and the next, I’m running through ankle-deep snow toward the lodge with my lungs screaming and my legs barely holding beneath me.
The snow grabs at my boots. A stumble near the tree line nearly drops me, but I catch a birch trunk and keep going.
Boris steps aside as I barrel past him. Eduard says something I don’t catch. The only thing I see is Pyotr, standing in the snow with Bogdan’s blood on his clothes and his gray eyes locked on mine.
I reach him, and my legs give out as I drop to the snow at his feet.
Pyotr crouches in front of me. His right hand grazes the side of my face, and I feel the tackiness of drying blood against my cheek. He holds me, with his palm against my skin, and waits.
“Is he dead?” I manage between ragged breaths.
“Yes.”
I wait for something to follow the single word.
Guilt, maybe. Grief for the man I married at twenty-three, who danced with me at our wedding and told me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, before the first backhand, cracked ribs, and the night Kira watched him throw me into the bookshelf and screamed until the neighbors called the police.
Instead of guild, a tidal wave of relief washes in that’s so enormous, my body can’t stay upright.
It crashes like a dam breaking, and every muscle I’ve held rigid for six years releases at once. My shoulders fold, my spine curves, and I pitch forward into Pyotr. The sob that comes out of me is so deep that it doesn’t sound human.
I’m not crying because Bogdan is dead. These tears are for Kira and for safety.
The phone will never ring again at 3 a.m. with a blocked number on the screen.
No one will ever use my daughter’s name as a threat, or forge my signature on an account, or show up at my door with a smile on his face and a fist behind his back.
Pyotr wraps his good arm around me and pulls me against him, and I bury my face in his jacket and let six years of carried fear pour out of me. He rests his chin on the top of my head as one hand spreads across my back, wide and steady, holding me together while I come apart.
“I love you,” I choke out between sobs, the words muffled against his chest, broken and wet and ugly. And I don’t care. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
His arm tightens around me. He presses his mouth to my temple and holds it there, and I feel his breath catch once before he steadies it. When he speaks, his voice is low and rough and meant only for me.
“I love you, Daria. It’s over.”
Over. The word doesn’t feel real. It sits in my chest like a stone I don’t know how to set down because I’ve been carrying it so long.
But Pyotr is holding me, and Bogdan is dead, and somewhere in Moscow, my daughter is safe with Rex tucked under her arm and no idea that the world just changed.
Tomorrow, I’ll call her and hear her voice. I’ll tell her the bad man is gone and listen to her chatter about dinosaurs and friendship bracelets until my heart puts itself back together one piece at a time.
But right now, I kneel in the snow outside a hunting lodge in the Finnish borderlands with blood on my hands that isn’t mine and tears freezing on my cheeks, and I let the man who killed my monster hold me until I can stand again.
Boris’ voice carries from somewhere behind us as he radios the team that the target is confirmed. Eduard is walking the perimeter. Grisha is pulling the SUV closer as the engine rumbles over the frozen ground.
The world is moving on. Doing what it does after violence. Cleaning up. Reporting in. Filing away the details that will never appear in any official record.
I don’t move. Neither does Pyotr. The snow soaks through the knees of my pants, and the cold bites into my shins, and none of it matters.
We stay where we are, kneeling in the snow, holding on.