Chapter 2 Roman
ROMAN
One Year Later
Fyodor rides across from me, my sovetnik and the closest thing I have to a second father, hat in his lap, back straight like he’s in a pew and not the back of my SUV.
Marcus drives, silent and sure. We took the two-lane through the trees to avoid cameras and the late commuter mess.
I want a short night, a short conversation, and a shipment of guns that should have been in my warehouse two days ago.
“Belfour says the port is the problem,” Fyodor reports. “Random inspections. New inspector. Crate pulled, then pushed back to the stack.”
“If a crate is mine, it does not sit in a stack. I pay good money to make sure that doesn’t happen.” The glass shows me my face in a pale strip—the kind of reflection that makes a man look like memory. “What else does he say?”
“That he did what he could. That he wants to explain it to you in person.”
William Belfour has been on my payroll five years. He started as a pair of hands who could keep a schedule and keep his mouth shut. Now he signs receiving slips and talks to foremen. Useful, but not irreplaceable. No one is.
I look out at the tree trunks rushing past, straight and close, like bars. Belfour asked for a face-to-face. He will get one. He will bring a reason. I will decide if it is a lie. This is the way of things in my business.
Fyodor inclines his head, the respectful nod of a man who taught you how to stand and still lets you stand on your own. “You do not like him.”
“I don’t have to like him to employ him.”
He smiles a little. He was there for all the years when that answer was different. He changes the subject. “Other matter. The Korsakov boys tried to sniff around the river. We turned them away.”
“Good. They can sniff a different river.”
We roll past a bridge that no one has bothered to light. The water under it takes the moon and makes it a mirror.
Fyodor clears his throat. “Roman, they could be useful.”
“No.”
He presses his hat brim once as if to hold back a thought and lets it go. I know he’s aggravated by my answer, but I don’t employ hoodlums. I keep a certain amount of class in my operations. It’s the only way to keep the government off our backs.
Fyodor isn’t a quitter. “The oldest one is a crack shot—”
The windshield pops. A white star appears left of center, small as a coin, bright as a fuse.
One shot could be a drunk hunter.
Marcus doesn’t flinch. He speeds up. “Windshield,” he says, quiet, to mark the moment. He looks past the beam of the headlights into the trees. Nothing to see.
My window takes a hit and sings. The new laminate earns its price. No hole. Just a sheet of spiderweb that throws the dashboard glow back at me.
“Left side,” Fyodor says. He already has his jacket open, his old-man hands faster than most boys. His eyes are clear. The lines around them hold a history I owe him for.
“Hold steady,” I tell Marcus. “No brake. If you kill the speed, you kill us.”
“Yes, sir.” He threads us through a bend. The trailing motorcycle stays back, hunting for angles that don’t exist on this road.
Another impact, higher, then one on the passenger side. Whoever is out there has patience. A man who wants to scare you shoots too much, too fast. This one is taking his time.
“Far tree line,” Marcus says. “No muzzle flash.”
My gaze goes to the shoulder. Ditch, brush, then trunks. No guardrail. Plenty of roots.
The glass in this SUV is new. I replaced every panel in the fleet last quarter after a rooftop lesson I did not ask for. Laminated fronts. Composite side panes. My other trucks too. It was a line item that made my accountant frown and helped me sleep.
“Two percent off the gas. Not more.” I reach under my seat for the case. The Desert Eagle has the weight I like. I check the chamber and magazine even though I checked them in the garage. Fyodor glances at the gun and gives me the smallest lift of his chin and his pistol. Ready.
“You want the shoulder?” he asks.
“Not yet. It’s—”
The world lifts.
It’s a clean, wrong sensation—like stepping for a stair and finding air. Then the slam. Metal screaming, plastic popping. The flash. Light where the road should be. Treetops where the horizon should sit. We tilt and spin. The belt yanks me across the ribs. Glass sparkles in the air.
We roll. The nose whacks into a tree, sending us spinning faster. The third hit is a slide—a rush of brush and dirt and bark under our side. We hit another tree and stop with a long, sick groan. My window is now the roof. The dashboard ticks and settles like a stove cooling.
“Answer me,” I say. My voice is calm. It always is after the world tries to take it from me.
“Here,” Marcus says. Cough. “Belt jammed. Legs okay.”
“Present,” Fyodor answers. He inhales slow, like a doctor checking the dark. “Shoulder angry. Nothing broken. Shit. My arm might be broken. Head ringing.”
“Do not move.”
He starts to anyway. “Are you—”
I stop him. “No.”
He knows why before I say it. He still wants to argue. “If they planted a mine—”
“Then they want bodies,” I say. “They want to see them, they want to make sure we’re dead. Doors will be their targets. We are loud if we open anything.” I close one eye and leave the other slitted, the way a man plays dead without surrendering. “Play dead. Both of you.”
Marcus understands and makes himself heavy in the harness. Fyodor goes limp, slowing his breaths. He angles his pistol up and away from me and Marcus, ready for whatever comes next. He mutters something that could be a prayer.
Waiting is a job. I taste copper and sweat. My lip is raw—must’ve banged into my teeth somehow. Adrenaline keeps the worst of it at bay, but my head is ringing too. Hardly my first concussion. It won’t be my last.
I’m going to get this piece of shit.
The forest moves around us—leaf, twig, wind. The engine gives up its heat. I smell burned earth and our own coolant. Someone built this trap for me. They know the weight of my car and where I am likely to put it. Sap smells sharp where a branch snapped.
“Hear anything?” I whisper.
“Leaves,” Fyodor murmurs. “My heart.”
Marcus is quiet for a count of ten. “Motorcycle,” he says finally. “Coming in.”
I hear it too, the thin snarl, then the cut to silence. A man could park on the shoulder, kill the light, and approach through the ditch. He would want to look into the cabin. He would want to see that he took me down.
If he’s a hitter, he needs to prove the kill. If he’s not, this is personal and he’ll wanna know he got me. Either way, he’s coming to me.
His last mistake.
I tilt my head so my line of sight covers the broken rectangle above us—the blown window that looks like a skylight. The tree line is a dark page. The stars are a handful of salt. Time stretches thin enough to see through.
A footstep in leaves. Fabric whispers against bark. A twig snaps underfoot. Whoever it is, he learned to move quiet but didn’t practice much in the woods. A city boy.
A head rises in the window.
For a fraction, the face is only a shape with my gun aimed at it.
He leans down to look closer, and the light catches his face.
The years fall away and a day in a hospital returns.
Tiny fingers, a mouth that searched my knuckle like it could drink from it.
That memory is as fast and useless as a flashbulb. I let it go.
Vitaly.
He looks older and younger at once—cheeks a little hollow, eyes too bright, not enough sleep, not enough peace, too much cocaine.
He holds his pistol proud and high, the way he held his first knife at twelve when he wanted me to see it.
He thinks this will make him a man. He thinks this will make me small.
He learned from me how to move. He refused to learn when to stop.
He scans our faces. He doesn’t see mine until the angle shifts and the stars do their bad trick of lighting what should stay dark. I feel the hesitation rise in me because I am not a monster. He’s my son.
His muzzle dips. He chooses a target. Me, of course. It has always been me.
I shoot first.
Thunder in the cabin. The tempered glass above me shatters and showers us. Vitaly whips sideways. My round takes bark from a tree trunk where his head was a breath ago. He’s quick. He always was quick. He rolls out of sight the way a boy drops from a wall when his father opens the back door.
A shot answers, wild and high. Another hits the undercarriage with a dumb clang. Then nothing. The woods breathe like they’re relieved to be left alone again.
No one in the trees moves to flank. No second engine starts. I count to three, to five, to fifteen, the old script of staying alive. The motorcycle coughs awake, closer than I like, then climbs the road in a rising whine and disappears.
“Coast is clear,” I say.
Marcus lets out a long breath and then laughs once, sharp and tired. “I hate that phrase. Every time we say it, I don’t believe it.”
“Believe the silence,” I tell him.
Fyodor opens his eyes. He looks at the broken window and then at me. “You hesitated.” It isn’t a rebuke.
“I did. Then he raised his gun.”
“You shot first.”
“I’m his father. Not his shield.” I set the safety with my thumb and keep the pistol low. My hands are steady again. “If I had been slower, you wouldn’t be asking me questions.”
He nods once. It’s the nod he used to give me when I was sixteen and lying about something small—approval for the honesty, warning for the lie in the first place. He listens to the road the way I do. It stays empty. The trees go on being trees instead of places for my son to hide.
“Think he’ll climb a tree to get a better shot?”
I huff a laugh at that. “Vitaly? No chance.” A useless memory keeps returning. Vitaly at six, standing under the old apple tree in our yard, small fists on his hips, looking up like the trunk has insulted him.
He’s afraid of climbing. Not of height. Branches talk back when you put weight on them. He hates that.
I show him how to do it. Hands flat, not grabbing with fingers.
Three points on the tree at all times. Keep your chest close.
Test the next hold with more patience than pride.
He nods, bored. He wants a ladder. He wants certainty under his feet that comes from someone else’s work. I make him try anyway.
Halfway up he freezes. His breath goes thin and fast. He won’t look at the trunk like I tell him.
He looks down at me and the ground opens under his eyes.
His nails bite my wrist when I reach. I press him to the bark and tell him to breathe into my shoulder.
Sap gets on his shirt. He cries because the shirt is ruined.
“I will buy you a new shirt—”
“I like this one!”
My father stands on the path and says let him drop or he will never learn. Bridgette laughs and says he was born for rooftops, not trees.
I carry him down. He learns two wrong lessons. I will always take his weight. He never has to take mine.
The next week he wants apples again. He brings a stick and a boy from the neighboring plot.
He orders the boy up the tree. He stays on the ground and smacks branches until fruit falls.
When the boy hesitates, he calls him a chicken.
The boy slips, and Vitaly steps back so he won’t be under him.
The boy breaks his arm, while my son eats an apple and laughs.
I try again. He goes up three moves and stalls. He doesn’t listen to me, only to his pulse. Another disastrous lesson in panic and fear.
Tonight, he is the same boy, only this time trying to instill panic and fear in others.
People say sons are their fathers’ echoes. For years, I listened for myself in him but mostly heard other voices. My father’s contempt. Bridgette’s mocking laughter. The part of me that should live in his hands never took root.
He fears things that bend instead of breaking. Anything that has its own will is a threat to his mind. He would make slaves of everyone, if he had his way. That is why he breaks what he cannot stand on. If he can’t use something or break it, he’d rather burn it down.
The other two are twitchy about being shot at, so I add, “He will not climb a tree to get a better vantage point on me now. He would rather run away and try again another day. We’re clear.”
“What if he had help?” Fyodor asks.
“He wouldn’t do that. He wants to kill me himself.”