22. Maksim
MAKSIM
I drive through the night with blood under my fingernails and a name burning in my throat. Damir Mirov. Every mile I cover brings me closer to finding him, and every hour that passes makes the rage in my chest grow sharper.
The first Karpin runner lives in a flat above a kebab shop in the old district.
I kick in the door at two in the morning and find him in bed with his girlfriend, both of them naked and high on something that makes their pupils look enormous.
The girl screams when she sees me, but the runner tries to reach for a gun on the nightstand.
I grab his wrist and twist until I hear bones crack, then knock him in the face with my free hand. He drops the weapon and falls to his knees, clutching his broken arm against his chest. The girlfriend scrambles for the bathroom and locks herself inside, but I'm not interested in her.
"Where is he?" I ask, my voice calm despite the fury coursing through my veins.
The runner spits blood onto the floor. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I pick up the gun he dropped and press the barrel against his temple. "Damir Mirov. Where is he hiding?"
"I swear to God, I don't know?—"
I pull the trigger. The bullet goes into the wall beside his head, and he collapses completely, sobbing and shaking. The girlfriend is screaming from the bathroom, but the sound is muffled by the door and the ringing in my ears.
"Next one goes in your skull," I tell him. "Start talking."
He gives me three addresses through his tears, but he can't promise me which, if any, is the correct one.
I write them down on the back of my hand with a pen from the nightstand, then drag him to the bathroom door.
I can hear the girlfriend crying on the other side, begging for her life in broken Russian.
"If you call anyone," I tell the runner, "if you warn anyone, I'll come back and finish what I started. Do you understand?"
He nods frantically, blood streaming from his nose where I hit him earlier. I leave him there and walk out into the night. The first address is twenty minutes away, and I've got work to do, so I don't waste any time. The higher the sun gets, the more risk I'm taking.
The building is a squat structure a few miles outside of Damir's known territory. I watch it as the sky begins to lighten and I know immediately this isn't where Mr. Mirov lives. It's too clean for him, but perhaps the resident who occupies this shitty little apartment will know where he is.
The second runner is smarter. He lives in a basement apartment with reinforced doors and cameras covering every angle.
But smart doesn't mean invisible, and I've been doing this longer than he's been alive.
I wait in the shadows across the street until he leaves for his morning run, then follow him through the park.
He's wearing earbuds and checking his phone every few minutes, completely unaware that death is jogging thirty feet behind him. When he stops at a traffic light, I close the distance and put my arm around his throat. He tries to fight, but I drag him into an alley and slam him against a brick wall.
"Damir Mirov," I say, my forearm pressed against his windpipe. "You're going to tell me everything you know."
This one is harder to break. He's been in the life longer, knows the rules about talking.
But everyone has a breaking point, and I find his when I dislocate his shoulder and threaten to do the same to his kneecap.
He gives me two more addresses and a phone number, gasping out the information between sobs.
I let him live because dead men can't deliver messages, but I make sure he understands what happens if he crosses me again. He's still whimpering when I walk away, cradling his ruined arm and promising to disappear forever.
The addresses lead me to a stash house in the industrial district, a squat concrete building wedged between a metal fabrication shop and a storage facility that's been empty for months.
I park two blocks away and walk the perimeter, checking for guards, for cameras, for anything that might complicate what I'm about to do.
The building is solid, built to last, but it's also isolated. No neighbors to call the police, no witnesses to remember my face. Perfect for what I have in mind.
I kick in the back door and find exactly what I expected—crates of product stacked against the walls, scales and cutting tables, cash bundled in rubber bands. This is where Damir's new friends process their poison, where they count their blood money and plan their next move.
I pour gasoline from the emergency can in my trunk across every surface I can reach. The fumes make my eyes water, but the smell reminds me of cleansing, of burning away the rot that's infected our city. When I strike the match, the flame catches fast and spreads faster.
I stand in the doorway and watch it climb the walls, consuming everything the Karpin family built here.
The heat pushes against my face, and for a moment I think about Zoya lying unconscious in that hospital bed with soot in her lungs and burns on her hands.
The fire reflects in the windows of the empty buildings around me, and I feel something cold and satisfied settle in my chest.
The sirens start wailing three blocks away. By the time they arrive, I'm already gone, driving through the empty streets with the taste of smoke in my mouth, but nowhere closer to finding Zoya's traitorous brother.
Back at the estate, I don't go upstairs.
The guest room where Zoya sleeps is a floor above me, and I can feel the distance between us pulling at something I don't want to examine too closely.
I've been awake for thirty-six hours, running on coffee and the kind of rage that keeps you moving when your body wants to quit.
But I can't stop now. Not when Damir is still out there, not when the Karpin family thinks they can use my wife as leverage. Not when the memory of her unconscious face burns behind my eyelids every time I close my eyes.
I set up in the surveillance office instead.
The screens show feeds from every camera we have on the street, and I scan them methodically, looking for faces I recognize.
Rolan's men are out there too, following leads, shaking down contacts, doing the work that needs doing.
But this feels personal in a way that makes me want to handle it myself.
Just as fatigue starts to tug at my eyelids, Rolan calls and the buzz of my phone jolts me awake.
"Status report," he booms, and I'm ready.
"I burned out the Karpin stash house on Prospect Street. Recovered financial records and a burner phone. Damir was at the train depot two hours ago, heading north."
"Any resistance?"
"Two runners who won't be talking to anyone."
There's a pause, and I can hear him thinking. "Good. What about the girl?"
My jaw tightens. "She's recovering." I hate that he calls her “the girl" and not my wife, because that's what she is now. She's not an asset anymore, but my brother still speaks of her like that.
"That's not what I asked."
I stare at the wall of photos, at Damir's face frozen in black and white.
"She's not going anywhere." His interest in her is purely missional.
He needs to know that I still have control of her, and as such, have control of Damir to a certain extent, but it infuriates me that he's reduced her to nothing more than an object.
"See that she doesn't. We need her functional to end this. Mirov won't surface if he thinks there's no point. The longer she's alive, the longer we have pull with him."
The line goes dead. I set the phone down and lean back in the chair, feeling the weight of sleeplessness in my bones.
Functional. As if Zoya is another piece of equipment, another tool in our arsenal.
The thought sits wrong with me, but I push it away.
Dwelling on it will only cause me to hate him, and we can't afford to be divided right now.
The Karpin stash house is in ashes. Two runners are eliminated. Street teams are repositioned. The hunt continues. Everything else—including what's waiting for me in that guest room down the hall—is a distraction I can't afford.
But when I'm alone in the surveillance office, surrounded by photos of dead men and empty apartments, the memory of Zoya's face in that hospital bed burns through me.
The way her skin looked pale against the white sheets, the way the machines beeped and hummed around her bed, the way she whispered my name when she finally opened her eyes.
I've killed men for less than what Damir's friends did to her. I've burned down buildings and ended bloodlines for insults that barely registered. But this is different. This is personal in a way that makes my hands shake when I think about it too long.
They hurt my wife. They nearly killed her. And when I find Damir, I'm going to make him pay for every moment she spent unconscious, every breath she struggled to take, every burn on her hands from the fire he allowed.
The hunt continues. And it won't end until Damir Mirov is dead.