Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
NIKOLAI
The keys are heavy, cold, and notched with age.
They sit in my palm like a lead weight, an archaic piece of metal that predates the digital world I was raised to rule. Katya hands them over without a word of encouragement. She doesn't have any to give.
The Lada Niva is a block of faded green steel, squat and ugly, parked in the shadows of the facility’s rear garage.
It is an artifact of Soviet-era engineering—a vehicle that predates GPS tracking, digital fuel injection, and every electronic signature that makes modern cars so easy to pluck from a satellite feed.
It smells of gasoline, old tobacco, and the pervasive dampness of the Russian winter.
It is perfect.
“No cellular connectivity,” Katya says, her breath hitching in the frigid air. “No satellite uplink. No computer systems to ping. If they find you in this, it will be through human observation, not a server in Chicago.”
I wrap my fingers around the keys. The metal is worn smooth by decades of hands that were likely as desperate as mine are now.
“The route avoids the primary highways,” she continues, her eyes scanning the dark corridor behind us.
“Stay on the secondary roads. Refuel only at independent stations—the corporate chains have camera networks linked to the central databases. If you hit a toll, turn around. You are invisible as long as you stay in the dirt.”
“Understood.”
She looks at me then, her gaze sharpening as it travels over my shorn hair and the oversized sweater I’m wearing.
She is reassessing me. The Petrenko heir she expected—the one with the silk shirts and the arrogant sneer—is a ghost. The man standing in front of her is a scavenger, a traitor, and a survivor.
I don't wait for her to finish her evaluation. I turn to the task of moving Alexei.
Getting him into the vehicle is a brutal reminder of how much of him I’ve already taken.
He insists on walking, of course. The machine doesn't accept assistance.
The weapon doesn't acknowledge that its firing pin is bent.
He makes it four steps from the facility door before his knees buckle, his breath coming out in a sharp, hissed intake through his teeth.
I catch him before he can hit the deck. My arm slides around his waist, my shoulder taking the brunt of his dead weight.
He is burning with a fever that hasn't fully broken, his heat radiating through the thick wool of our shared sweaters. We’ve done this dance before, in the Tower’s corridors and the loading dock, but the positions were reversed.
Then, he was the one holding me together. Now, I am the brace.
“Lean on me,” I growl.
He doesn't argue. That is the most terrifying thing about this morning. He just sags into me, his head dropping toward my shoulder, his fingers fumbling for purchase on my arm.
I guide him to the passenger side. The Niva sits high, designed for mountain tracks and mud.
I have to physically hoist him, my muscles—atrophied and screaming from three weeks of the chair—straining until I see spots.
I guide his legs into the footwell, careful of the way the movement pulls at the raw, stitched meat of his side.
I see the muscles in his jaw jump, a frantic, rhythmic tic as he fights the urge to groan.
“Easy,” I whisper. “Take it slow.”
“I am... functional,” he rasps.
“You’re a liar,” I say, slamming the door. “You’re capable of tearing those sutures and painting this vinyl red. Sit down and breathe.”
I circle to the driver's side and slide behind the wheel.
The seat is adjusted for someone with a much longer reach, and I have to fumble with a rusted manual lever to bring it forward.
The steering wheel is enormous, a thin plastic ring that feels like it belongs to a tractor.
The dashboard is a collection of analog dials and toggle switches, simple and honest.
The engine turns over on the third try—a guttural, complaining roar that fills the small cabin with the scent of unburnt fuel. I put it in gear, the gearbox grinding as I find first, and pull out of the facility's hidden garage.
I am driving.
The realization is a physical shock. I am behind the wheel, navigating a world I’ve only ever seen through the tinted windows of a chauffeured Mercedes.
No security detail. No driver. No father’s hand on my shoulder.
Just the road, the vibrating steering wheel, and the man beside me who is fighting to stay awake.
The first hour is an exercise in stress.
The Niva handles like a tank—heavy, unresponsive, requiring a constant, muscular correction to maintain a straight line.
The roads are narrow veins of cracked asphalt, frost heaves threatening to jar the suspension with every kilometer.
The vibration is constant, a low-frequency hum that rattles my teeth and makes the pain in my own body pulse.
Alexei tries to sleep, but his internal alarm is too well-tuned. His head falls forward, then jerks up, his eyes snapping to the mirrors before he even realizes he was out. The medication Katya gave him is a heavy veil, but seventeen years of conditioning is a steel cage. He cannot let go.
I keep my eyes on the road. I check the mirrors every thirty seconds, scanning the horizon for the telltale flash of a light bar or the high-performance silhouette of an interceptor.
I maintain a speed that is fast enough to put distance between us and the facility, but slow enough to blend in with the occasional rusted truck we pass.
I am the operative now. The logistics of our survival rest on my hands.
Two hours in, the silence in the car feels too heavy, too much like the room I left. I pull out the burner phone Katya provided. It’s a cheap, plastic piece of junk. One bar of signal. I open a news site, the connection slow, the text loading in jagged fragments.
The world I knew is on fire.
PETRENKO EMPIRE IN FREEFALL.
SWISS AUTHORITIES EXPAND ASSET FREEZE.
BARANOV ORGANIZATION SUSPECTED IN WAVE OF TARGETED KILLINGS.
MOSCOW UNDERWORLD AT WAR: THREE DEAD IN RESTAURANT SHOOTING.
I scroll through the headlines, my eyes stinging.
The codes I gave Alexei were the matches that lit the fuse.
The Petrenko financial network is hemorrhaging—frozen accounts, seized properties, exposed shell companies.
My father’s empire is being dismantled in real-time, and the Baranovs are moving in like vultures to strip the carcass.
But the vacuum is causing chaos. Other organizations are smelling the blood. Allies are turning. The Moscow I grew up in is being rewritten in gunfire and restaurant floorboards.
I should feel the weight of it. Guilt. Satisfaction. Something.
I feel only a deep, hollow exhaustion. I am a ghost watching a world I no longer belong to burn to the ground.
I turn off the phone and shove it back into the duffel.
Three hours in, the rhythmic throb of the engine is the only sound until Alexei’s breathing hitches. It’s a sharp, wet sound. He’s leaning his head against the glass, his face gray.
“We need to stop,” I say.
“Negative. Maintain... distance.”
“Your bandages need changing, and you’re starting to sweat through the wool.
Katya said every four hours.” I don’t wait for him to argue.
I pull the Lada off the road, bouncing over a ditch and into a copse of bare, skeletal birches.
The trees are packed tight enough to hide the vehicle from the air.
I kill the engine. The silence that follows is deafening.
I retrieve the medical kit and circle the car. When I open his door, he’s already fumbling for the zipper of his sweater, his movements clumsy and uncoordinated.
“I can manage,” he mutters. “Standard... field procedure.”
“No.” I swat his hands away. “You’re going to sit there and let me do it. This is not a negotiation.”
“I am not an invalid, Nikolai.”
“You’re a man who got shot in the side and then spent an hour having a machine-gun tongue-bath in a warehouse. You’re too stubborn to be an invalid.” I pull the black wool up, exposing the damage.
The gauze is dark, saturated with a mix of blood and the clear, yellowish fluid of the infection. The heat coming off the wound is alarming. Getting into the high seat of the Lada has clearly stressed the sutures. I see a small tear at the edge of the line, a bead of fresh red welling up.
I work methodically. I use the antiseptic wipes, the chemical sting filling the car. I dab at the wound, my hands steady. I use the same clinical, detached tone he used on me, narrating the damage to keep my own heart rate down.
“The incision site is inflamed. There is minor dehiscence at the superior edge. The drainage is purulent.”
He is watching me. His pale eyes are focused on my hands as they move across his skin.
“You learned well,” he says, his voice a low vibration.
“I had a good teacher. And I had three weeks of watching you map my own body like a crime scene. Some of it stuck.” I press a fresh pad of gauze against the wound, applying pressure. I feel him flinch, his breath catching in his throat.
“The student becomes the instructor,” he murmurs.
“Something like that.” I secure the tape, wrapping it around his torso to provide more support. My hand lingers on the curve of his ribs, feeling the heat of his skin through the wool. “You’re mine now, Alexei. That means I take care of the equipment. Not negotiable.”
His eyes meet mine. There is a shift in them—recognition, a stripping away of the operative.
“Understood,” he says.
We sit there in the open door of the Lada, the cold Russian wind biting at us, but I don't move to close it. The silence of the woods is a sanctuary.
Then, the sound.
It’s a high-pitched, persistent whine. It’s too steady to be the wind, too mechanical to be a bird. It’s coming from the gray void of the sky.
I lean out, looking up through the birch branches.