Razvan
Did I just hear that right?
My son..?! What?
I go completely mute.
She’s standing there and her words are still in the air between us and I’m standing in the center of the room with every coherent thought I’ve ever had evacuating my skull at the same time. A son. She has a son. She ran from my bed five years ago with my drive and my phone and apparently also my—
What the actual fuck?
She’s watching me. I’m not moving and I’m not speaking and the room is so quiet I can hear the clock on the mantle ticking and I cannot make my body do a single useful thing.
“He’s four?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s stripped of the “Wrath,” stripped of the polish, stripped of everything but a raw, hollowed-out shock.
She hesitates. I can see the gears turning, calculating if the truth is still her best weapon. Her jaw works, and then she repeats, “He’ll be five next month.”
I finally do the math. It takes half a second and hits me like a physical blow to the throat.
I turn to the window. I have to. If I keep looking at her, I’m going to lose my mind.
I stare at the manicured grounds, but all I see is that rainy night in Moscow.
The night I sent the guards away. The night I went down to that cell, lifted her trembling body into my arms, and carried her up the stairs to my bed.
I thought I was breaking her. I thought I was winning.
Instead, I was creating the very thing that would eventually bring me to my knees.
I have a son. I have a son who is somewhere, right now, with dangerous men. I have a son who is being used as a pawn, and I’ve spent the last ten minutes taunting his mother while his life hangs by a thread.
The guilt is a sharp cold blade, but I shove it down. I don’t have time for guilt. I have time for war.
I pull my phone out. My fingers are steady, though my heart is trying to kick its way out of my chest. I pull up Mike’s contact. FIND THE BOY. NOW. I send it before she can see the screen. I pocket the phone, wipe the shock from my face like it’s dirt, and turn around.
“Here is what happens.” I cross my arms and look at her directly, leaning into the cold, familiar armor of my own authority. “You want the boy back. I’ll get him back. But nothing in my world comes without a price and yours is this.” I let it sit for one cold second. “You’ll marry me.”
The silence is enormous.
“What?” The word punches out of her. “What did you just—”
“Marriage. You. Me. That’s the price.”
“He’s your son!” Her voice cracks on it. “You know he’s your son and you’re standing there telling me you’ll hold that over my head? You won’t just save him because he’s—”
“I don’t know anything.” I keep my voice bored, deliberate.
“I have the word of a woman who stole from me, ran from my bed in the middle of the night, and kept her mouth shut for five years. Forgive me if my first instinct isn’t to trust her.
” I tilt my head, slow and cruel. “And while we’re on it, let’s discuss the sheer audacity of that.
Five years. You had my son for five years and said nothing.
Raised him alone and not once, not once did you think I had the right to know. ”
“You were going to kill me!”
“And yet,” I say, spreading my hands to gesture at the opulence of the room, “here you stand. Breathing. Asking me for favors.”
She stares at me, her face a battlefield of fury and desperation. Her hands are white-knuckled fists at her sides.
“Why marriage?” Her voice drops, turning hard and cold. “You and I both know it’s not for love.”
I laugh. It comes out genuine. “Love.” I say the word like something I’ve found on the bottom of my shoe. “Love has never been in my vocabulary and even if it was, do you honestly think I would waste it on a woman like you?”
I walk toward her, closing the distance until I’m inches from her face.
I want her to feel the heat of my anger.
“You ran. Five years ago, you were meant to die in my compound, and you escaped instead. That debt doesn’t evaporate because time passed.
So you’ll marry me. You’ll live under my roof.
You’ll sleep in my bed for the rest of your life. ”
I lean down, looming over her. “Every morning, you’ll wake up next to the man you hate more than anything alive. The man who killed your father. That’s your punishment, Lena. That’s my revenge. I find it poetic.”
Her jaw is shaking. “You realize that gives me even better access to killing you.”
“If you ever actually dare.” I pull back, adjusting my cuff with bored precision.
“I’ll respect you for it. Right before you die.
And right before your son dies beside you, because nothing in my world ends cleanly.
” I hold her gaze, letting the threat settle in her marrow.
“So if you’re willing to gamble the boy’s life on your pride, be my guest.”
“You’re a monster,” she whispers.
“Yes,” I agree. It’s the only honest thing I’ve said all night.
My phone vibrates. Mike. One line. Warehouse. Khimki district. Sending coordinates.
There he is. I pocket the phone and look at her.
“Be a good girl and wait here.” I’m already moving toward the door. “I’m going to get our son.”
Mike meets me in the armory with Lyosha already suited up and Dmitri checking ammunition with the focused efficiency he applies to everything that isn’t women. I’m pulling on the tactical vest when Mike steps close and keeps his voice low. “Stay here. Let us bring him in. You don’t need to—”
“No.”
“Razvan—”
“No.” I check the chamber on my Glock and holster it. “Whoever took my son doesn’t survive this night. I’m going.”
The silence behind me has weight.
I turn around. All three of them are looking at me then Lyosha says, slowly, like he’s trying the words out, “Your son.”
“Yes.”
“Her boy.” Dmitri sets down the magazine. “Is your—”
“Yes.”
Mike says nothing. Then something crosses his face that he pulls back before it fully forms. “The night you sent us all away,” he says.
“We came back and you were tearing the compound apart and we thought you’d failed to kill her.
You’ve been looking for her ever since. Obsessively.
Five years.” He pauses. “Is this why you never talked about it?”
“We’re leaving in three minutes.” I turn back to the vest. “Questions later.”
Nobody moves for exactly two seconds. Then they move.
The warehouse sits in the Khimki district, squat and grey, surrounded by industrial nothing that people choose specifically because nobody comes looking in industrial nothing.
We come in from three sides, twelve men, coordinated, signals and movement and the silence of people who have done this enough that it lives in their muscles.
I take the east entry with Mike.
The door goes in on the second hit then everything happens fast. Six men inside, armed, and they respond quickly.
The first thirty seconds are loud and brutal and close, the kind of fighting that happens in tight spaces where there’s no room for anything except commitment.
I take the first man by the weapon arm and break it at the elbow, use him as cover for three seconds while the room reconfigures.
Mike is on my left, methodical. Lyosha to the right and I can tell where he is by the sounds alone.
A bullet catches my left shoulder.
Hot. Fast. I register it, file it, keep moving. I put the man with the broken arm down. Cross the room. The next one brings his weapon up and I get inside his reach and drive my elbow into his throat and he drops.
The warehouse goes quiet.
I scan, moving through the space, past crates and wreckage, and Mike is clearing the far corner and Lyosha is somewhere to my right, I know by the sounds, then I see the door at the back, padlocked, and I don’t bother with the lock.
It comes off its hinges on the kick and I’m through it and there’s a small room on the other side and in the corner of it, sitting on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest and his arms wrapped tight around them, is a small boy.
Dark hair. Still. My eyes looking back at me from a small face.
My god.
I crouch down. My shoulder is bleeding into my sleeve, and for the first time in my adult life, my hands are shaking. I don’t know where to put them.
“Hey,” I say quietly. “Are you hurt?”
He stares at me. His mouth falls open. His eyes go enormous and round and he scrambles to his feet and takes one step toward me with his small chin tipped up and he points directly at my face and shouts, “Superman!”
I blink.
“You’re Superman!” He’s bouncing on his toes now, all the terror of thirty seconds ago apparently evaporated by this conclusion, pointing at me with absolute conviction.
“You came! I knew someone would come, Mama always says someone comes and you came and you’re so big, are you actually Superman, do you have the cape, where is the cape—”
“I—” I look at Mike over my shoulder. Mike is pressing his fist to his mouth. “I don’t have a cape.”
He looks disappointed for exactly one second before nodding seriously. “That’s okay. I won’t tell. You can still be him without the cape.”
I have no idea what to do with this child. I reach out toward him, slowly, and he steps forward without hesitation and puts his small hand in mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Something happens in my chest that I am not going to examine in this warehouse.
“We need to move,” Mike says, from the door.
I stand, Theo’s hand still in mine, and I turn for the door and that’s when the sound comes from the main room.
Not one of mine. Someone who stayed down and got up again and the shot that comes through the doorway goes wide but it goes through the space between me and Theo and I spin, putting my body between the door and the boy, weapon coming up.
Two small arms wrap around my leg from behind.
I look down.
Theo has his arms around my leg and his small body is pressed to the back of my knee and his face is turned outward toward the door, toward the threat, and his little arms are spread as wide as they go and he screams at the top of his lungs, “I won’t let them hurt you!”
The shooter goes down. Mike. Doorway. Clean.
The warehouse goes quiet again.
I reach down. I put my hand on the back of Theo’s head, this small dark head that has never been in my hands before tonight, and he’s still shaking slightly, still pressed against my leg, still holding on, and the thing that cracks open in my chest in that moment is not something I can close again.
I don’t try.
“I’ve got you,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. “It’s done. I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t let go of my leg.
I don’t make him.