Chapter Eight
~ Vadim ~
Yuri drove like a surgeon. No wasted movement, every angle premeditated, every decision final. The car was an armored town car, top of the line. Most men who bought this package never had occasion to test it, but I wasn’t most men.
I tested everything.
Iren was in the seat beside me, knees pulled up, hands busy constructing some kind of checklist from memory and nerves.
“The savings jar goes first, obviously, then the hoodie. The good one. Not the other one with the bleach stain, but the gray one with the thumbholes. Do not let Lin throw out the gray one. I will literally—”
He looked at me, waiting for a reaction.
I gave him half a smile. “You’ll what?”
He considered. “I’ll withhold sex, that’s what. I have a right to keep my things. Even if they’re not all…” He trailed off, making a vague gesture at my suit, at the car, at the universe in general. “Fancy.”
He was in full running commentary mode. It was either bravado or a defensive tic; I hadn’t decided yet.
He wore a pair of joggers, a tee shirt with a band logo that read like a medical disorder, and a windbreaker he’d gotten from the lost and found at the club.
His hair was up, but already coming loose. He’d painted his nails a glossy black at some point today, maybe in a display of rebellion, maybe as a nervous stalling mechanism.
“Does your friend always drive like this?” Iren asked, as Yuri threaded the car through a red light without a brake.
“He’s not my friend,” I said. “He’s my lieutenant.”
“Oh, sorry. Is there a rank system? Like, do I call you ‘captain’ now?”
I snorted. “Only in bed.”
He grinned, but the corners of his mouth quivered with the effort of holding it. The closer we got to his apartment, the more he talked. It was like watching a man standing on a sinking raft, naming every item he planned to rescue before the water took it all.
“Are you even listening?” he demanded.
I was. I just didn’t care about the hoodie. It would not survive the week. “I will buy you ten hoodies,” I said. “Any color.”
“You can’t buy attachment,” he said. “That’s not how it works.”
I let that hang. It was a good line. He’d probably practiced it, or maybe it was genuine, but I liked the effect either way.
The car rounded the final corner. Iren’s building was a squat, six-story box with graffiti on every level and a fire escape that had not been up to code since the last Republican president. The entrance was empty except for a courier service bike chained to a pole.
Yuri slowed to a crawl. “One minute,” he said, just for me.
I scanned the block. No pedestrians. No cars idling. No sign of the Tuesday regular in the sedan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Amateurs waited close. Professionals waited three cars down and left no footprint.
Iren was halfway through a rant about Lin’s taste in “statement furniture” when the first shot hit the car.
It was a clean metallic snap, sharp as a judge’s gavel. The passenger window, three inches from Iren’s face, bloomed a spiderweb of cracks but didn’t shatter. The bullet left a perfect dimple in the glass, an inch to the left of the sticker he’d applied himself “Dance Like You’re Already Dead”.
The second shot came a heartbeat later, hitting the same pane at chest height. The glass held, but a circle of white powder—laminate and lead—dusted Iren’s lap.
He went still, every muscle in his body coiling tight as a sprung trap. He didn’t duck. He didn’t scream. He just froze, eyes wide, lips parted around a word he never got to say.
The third shot hit the door, dead center. I heard it punch through the exterior, heard the slug flatten itself against the inner hull with a sound like a spoon hitting a tin can.
I had my arm across his chest before the echoes finished. “Down,” I snapped.
He obeyed, instantly. There was no more argument, no more running commentary. His hands clawed at the seatbelt, but it was already unbuckled. I pushed him down, my palm flat on his back, pinning him to the floor.
Yuri put the car in reverse, one hand on the wheel, the other already reaching for the glovebox. He’d mapped the entire street in his head before we left the mansion.
I trusted him to handle it.
My focus was on the building. The first shot came from the second floor, the window with the cracked air conditioner. I tracked the trajectory, the rhythm of the firing. Too slow for a drive-by, too measured for a warning. Someone wanted Iren dead, and someone wanted me to watch.
My blood did not spike. It settled, cold and structural, into the base of my skull. I felt the rage like a beam poured into concrete. I tamped it down for now. I would use it later.
Iren was hyperventilating. He had pressed himself flat to the floor, hands over his head, eyes locked on the carpet. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“Don’t move,” I said.
He didn’t.
I scanned the line of windows. There was a flutter of movement in the stairwell. A person-shaped blur, then nothing. I memorized the angle.
Yuri reversed down the block, fast but not reckless. As we cleared the sight line of the second floor, a fourth shot ricocheted off the curb and whined into the empty street. By then, I had Iren crouched low, both of us hidden from view.
I looked at him. His hands shook, his breathing shallow, but he was not crying. Not yet. He met my gaze, and for a split second, there was something like apology in his eyes. Like he’d invited this mess with his running mouth and wanted to make it right.
He tried a joke. “I am not dressed for this,” he said, voice paper-thin.
I almost smiled. “Nobody ever is.”
I scanned the building again, looking for a tell. There was no movement now. Whoever it was had done their job and melted away. Professionals. I catalogued the detail: no wild shots, no panic. Every bullet aimed to kill. All of them on Iren’s side.
Not mine.
I gripped the back of his neck. “Get us out of here, Yuri.”
Yuri floored it, the tires spitting gravel as we left the block.
For thirty seconds, nobody said a word.
Iren stared at his lap, still dusted with glass powder. He was white to the lips, pulse hammering in his neck. I watched the side of his face, the raw fear there, and catalogued that, too.
“Is it Parsons?” I asked, low.
He shook his head. “He’s a creep, but this—this is different. He doesn’t even own a gun.”
I grunted. “You sure?”
“He once called a cop because his neighbor was using fireworks on a Sunday. He’s—he’s not this.”
“Then who?”
Iren looked at me, and there was an edge of anger to it now. “I don’t know. My enemies list is shockingly short for someone who works in a strip club.”
I put my arm around him. Not for comfort, but to keep him still, to check for wounds. He leaned in, just a fraction, and let the weight of my arm settle him.
I looked at Yuri in the mirror. “Go home. Nobody stops. Nobody gets out. Lock the gate when we’re inside.”
Yuri nodded. He was already three steps ahead.
Iren started to shake, then got it under control. “My stuff—”
“Replaceable,” I said.
“But—”
“You are not.”
He went quiet.
We drove the rest of the way in silence, the engine humming beneath us, the bullet pocks in the door a visible ledger of what mattered and what didn’t.
I pressed my hand to his shoulder. He was still trembling, but less now. I catalogued the fear, the damage, the new thing I had to protect.
The rage never left. It just found its address.
We were half a block clear of the ambush before the next shot found us. It came from a new angle—higher, with the gravity that only distance can add. The sound was glass breaking, a very specific kind of shatter: not like a tumbler hitting tile, but like a skull being split with a hammer.
The rear window atomized, the fragments catching sunlight and raining down over the seat in a perfect arc. The bullet went through where Iren’s head had been two seconds before, punched a thumb-sized crater into the back of the front passenger headrest, and vanished into the padding.
There was a moment of total silence in the car, like the world had taken a breath to see if we’d notice.
Iren was frozen, his face sprayed with a fine mist of safety glass, each fleck sparkling against his hair and the slope of his cheek.
His eyes were wide, not with shock, but with the precise awareness that comes from seeing your own death fly past in real time.
I looked at the hole in the headrest. It was clean, punched all the way to the metal core. The car was rated for small arms fire, up to a point. This round was not small. The glass had slowed it, but not stopped it.
“High velocity,” I said to Yuri. “Probably a rifle. Where?”
“Two buildings north,” Yuri said, never looking up from the wheel. “Rooftop. No time for another shot at this distance. The block ahead is clear.”
Iren’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. He reached up, slow, and touched the side of his face, coming away with a bead of blood from a cut just below his left eye.
He looked at the blood like it was a betrayal.
I turned him toward me, fingers pressing hard into his jaw. “Let me see.”
He let me. He would have let me do anything at that moment. His hands were shaking so bad he couldn’t lower them.
I took out a handkerchief, folded it, and pressed it to the cut. I held it there, and I held his gaze, and I waited for the adrenaline to process itself into words.
He got there, eventually.
“So this is…normal for you?” he said.
“No,” I said. “This is new.”
He stared at the ruined headrest. “Should I be honored?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
He laughed, but it was a dry, scraped sound. “Too late.”
Yuri hit the next turn at speed, the chassis leaning, but not complaining. “Tail?” I asked.
“Clear, but the shooter was not alone. There was a spotter. Car waiting on the cross street.”
I nodded. “Did you get a plate?”
He did. Of course he did. “Already sent to Lin.”