Chapter 17 – Lev
I’m on my way back to Chicago when the memories hit—sharp, relentless, dragging me back to the day I got the lead about Petro. The day that should have been the beginning of the end.
My office three days ago. Rain smearing the windows like tears the city couldn’t shed.
The room reeked of gun oil, coffee gone cold hours ago, and the leather chairs that hadn’t been properly sat in for days.
Drew leaned against the far wall, reading updates off his tablet in that monotone voice he used when the news was shit.
Maxim paced near the window, barking orders into his phone—something about Rafael’s expansion into the docks.
The noise grated against my skull. Everything had been grating lately.
Anya’s worried glances when she thought I wasn’t looking.
The way she’d wake up in the middle of the night, reaching for my side of the bed like she was checking to make sure I was still breathing.
The questions she never asked but that hung in the air between us: When will this end? When can we be normal?
Normal. What a fucking joke. Men like me didn’t get normal. We got stolen moments between wars.
“I’m leaving at dawn.” My voice cut through the chaos, loud enough to get both their attention.
Maxim ended his call mid-sentence, turning to face me. “For where?”
Drew looked up from his tablet, eyebrows raised. They knew that tone. It was the same one I’d used before every suicide mission I’d ever volunteered for.
I cleared my throat and laid it out plain. “Small town past the Chicago border. Kozak’s rumored farm under a dead man’s name. Cash shipments have been tracked there. Maybe I catch Petro, maybe I just get answers from whoever’s left.”
What I didn’t tell them was that I knew it felt wrong. Too easy. Too convenient. But I was desperate, and desperate men make stupid choices.
Drew’s fingers had already started flying over his keyboard. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll have satellite images, property records, everything.”
“No.” I held up a hand. “This one’s mine.”
“Lev—” Maxim started.
“I said no.” The finality in my voice killed whatever argument he’d been about to make. “Petro Kozak is my burden. You two have business to run.”
I should have listened to the voice in my head screaming that it was a trap.
Should have waited for backup, for better intel, for something other than blind rage to guide my decisions.
But all I could think about was Anya’s face when she asked me when it would be safe enough for us to have a real life together.
Soon, I’d told her. Soon.
Turned out “soon” was a luxury men like me couldn’t afford.
***
The edge of a deserted, winding road outside Chicago. Pine wilderness thick on both sides, the kind of place where screams die before they reach civilization. I’d been driving for two hours, following coordinates that led to nothing but empty highway and the growing certainty that I’d been played.
My world spun sideways without warning.
I still don’t know what hit first—the explosion that flipped my car or the realization that I’d walked straight into Petro’s trap like some amateur fresh out of basic training.
One moment, I was cursing myself for being a fool, the next, I was tasting metal and blood, my vision fracturing as the SUV rolled once, twice, three times before slamming into a tree with the kind of sound metal makes when it gives up trying to be strong.
My leg was pinned under twisted steel, chest barely moving under the weight of the collapsed roof. Each breath felt like swallowing glass. Warm liquid—blood, had to be blood—trickled down my temple and into my mouth.
Then voices. Footsteps on gravel. Male, steady, cold.
“He dead?” The accent was thick, Ukrainian, the kind that turned every word into a weapon.
“Look at that wreck. Nothing could survive that.”
A laugh, low and cruel. “Put a bullet in his head to be sure. Boss wants confirmation.”
“Why waste the bullet? He’s gonna burn anyway.”
I held my breath. Played corpse among the metal and fire. If the explosion hadn’t taken me, their bullets would. If they didn’t pull the trigger, the blood loss would finish the job. The math was simple, brutal, final.
This was it. No miracle coming. No last-second rescue. No dramatic return to Anya’s arms.
I was going to die in a ditch forty miles from the woman I loved, and she’d spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to me.
The thought should have brought peace. Should have made letting go easier. Instead, it filled me with a rage so pure it burned hotter than the flames starting to lick at the undercarriage.
I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t done. Had too much left to do, too much left to say.
Had promises to keep.
Darkness took me then, and I let it. Sometimes, surrender is the only strategy left.
But darkness, it turned out, had limits.
I heard a voice first. Familiar. Too familiar. The kind of familiar that belonged to ghosts and fever dreams.
“Lev. Jesus Christ, Lev, can you hear me?”
Trev. Had to be Trev. Which meant I was dead after all, because the living don’t get visited by the brothers they’ve been mourning for twenty-seven years.
Then Drew’s voice, sharp with panic. “He’s not responding. We need to get him out of there before this whole thing goes up.”
Oh. Drew was dead, too. That was unfortunate. He had potential.
Maybe the afterlife was just voices and memory, fragments of the people who’d mattered cobbled together to ease the transition from breathing to not. It wouldn’t be the worst way to go. At least I wouldn’t be alone.
But then I smelled something that didn’t belong in any version of heaven or hell my Catholic upbringing had prepared me for.
Vanilla. Lavender. That subtle sweetness of expensive skin cream.
Anya.
My heart kicked once. Twice. A stuttering rhythm that had no business existing in a dead man’s chest.
She wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t either.
This was real. The living felt this warm, this broken, this desperately, impossibly alive.
The fire inside me—not the flames eating at the wreckage, but the one that had been banked to embers—roared back to life. Weak but awake. Burned but breathing.
I tried to move, tried to speak, tried to do anything that would prove to myself that I was still on the right side of the dirt. My body felt like it belonged to someone else, someone who’d been taken apart and put back together by a blind man with shaking hands.
“Lev.” Anya’s voice again, closer now. Her hand found mine—when had she taken off my glove?—and the contact sent electricity straight to whatever part of my brain still worked. “Can you hear me? Please. Please be okay.”
I wanted to tell her I was fine. Wanted to crack some joke about my legendary inability to die properly. Wanted to pull her against me and prove that we were both still breathing, still fighting, still here.
Instead, I managed to squeeze her fingers. Once. It was pathetic, but it was all I had.
“He’s responding.” Drew’s voice, tight with relief. “We need to move him. Now.”
“Carefully,” Trev added. “His leg’s fucked, and God knows what else.”
They worked around me like a pit crew, voices clipped and professional but edged with the kind of panic that meant they’d thought they were too late. How long had I been out? How long had they been looking?
How the hell had they found me at all?
“The pendant,” Trev muttered, and everything clicked into place.
The tracker. The fucking tracker he’d admitted to in the hospital, the one that had been broadcasting my location since we were kids. I’d forgotten about it in my rage-fueled rush to end Petro once and for all.
Sometimes being a control freak’s twin brother had its advantages.
They lifted me with the efficiency of men who’d done this before, and the pain that shot through my ribs was so sharp, so immediate, that it cleared the last of the fog from my head. I was definitely alive. Dead men didn’t hurt this much.
“Hospital,” I managed to rasp as they loaded me into what felt like the back seat of an SUV. “Not Bratva. Regular hospital.”
“The hell?” Maxim’s voice. When had he gotten here? “You need Kozlov’s people—”
“No.” The word came out stronger than I felt. “If Petro’s people are watching Bratva facilities, I’m dead the moment I walk through the door. Regular hospital. Anonymous.”
“He’s right.” Drew again. “St. Mary’s is twenty minutes south. Clean, quiet, no questions asked if we pay upfront.”
I felt the car lurch into motion, felt Anya’s hand find mine again in the dark. Her fingers were shaking.
“I’m okay,” I lied, because sometimes lies were kinder than the truth.
“You’re not okay.” Her voice was steady, but I could hear the tears underneath. “You’re hurt, and bleeding, and you scared me.”
Scared her. Christ. I’d done the one thing I’d promised never to do—I’d left her alone and afraid, wondering if I was coming back.
“Won’t happen again,” I whispered.
“You’re damn right it won’t.” The steel in her voice made me want to smile, even through the pain. My sunshine, my light, had found her claws. Good. She was going to need them.
Because this wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Petro had played his hand, shown his cards, revealed that he was willing to kill me in the messiest, most personal way possible. But he’d also made a mistake.
He’d let me live.
And now I knew exactly what I was up against.
***
The drive to the hospital passed in fragments.
Anya’s voice, soft and steady, telling me about her day, about Sasha’s replacement, about anything that would keep me anchored to consciousness.
Trev coordinating with Drew about cleanup—the wreckage, the evidence, the story they’d tell anyone who asked questions.
Maxim on the phone with someone, his voice low and deadly. “Find me everything on Ukrainian Cossack burial rites. Traditional execution methods. I want to know how these people think, how they move, what makes them bleed.”
The pieces were falling into place, forming a picture I should have seen earlier. This wasn’t just about vengeance for Taras’s death. This was ritual. Ceremony. A holy war dressed up in Old World traditions and Saint Michael iconography.
Petro wasn’t just trying to kill me. He was trying to purify the world of my existence, to send my soul to whatever hell he thought men like me deserved.
The joke was on him. I’d been living in hell for twenty-seven years. A few more decades wouldn’t make much difference.
But Anya—Anya was light and warmth and everything good in this fucked-up world. And if Petro thought he could touch her, could use her to hurt me, he was about to learn what real monsters looked like when you threatened the only thing they loved.
The SUV pulled into the hospital parking lot, and I felt the shift as we went from hunters on the prowl to civilians seeking help. Drew had already called ahead, arranged for a private room and a doctor who understood that sometimes patients needed discretion more than they needed questions.
“We’re here,” Anya whispered, her lips brushing my temple. “You’re going to be okay.”
I tried to squeeze her hand, but my grip was weakening. The edges of my vision blurred, darkening like someone was slowly closing curtains on the world.
“We both are,” I managed to whisper, though the words felt distant, like they belonged to someone else.
Because now I knew the score. Now I understood the game Petro was playing.
And I was done being reactive, done chasing shadows and jumping at decoy leads.
It was time to go hunting.
But first, I had to heal. Had to get strong enough to—
The thought slipped away as darkness pulled me under. My last sensation was Anya’s hand clutching mine, her voice calling my name from somewhere far away.
Then nothing.