Chapter 21
Ihave the sniper pinned against the brick wall of the alley with my left forearm crushing his windpipe while my right fist pistons into his face. When his cheekbone gives way under my knuckles with a wet crunch that feels like punching through a bag of wet gravel, I don’t stop.
I haul him back up by his tactical vest and hit him again because I’m not done, not even close to done, not when every time I blink I see that violin exploding three inches from my skull while Anya was coming on my fingers.
Rain is pouring down on us now, icy and relentless, washing the blood from his ruined face onto my white shirt and turning the expensive cotton into a translucent red-stained second skin that clings to my chest with every heaving breath.
I can smell blood and the particular stench of a man who’s pissed himself in terror, and none of it makes me want to stop.
I hit him again, and something in his orbital socket collapses with a sound I feel all the way up my arm.
The sick thing, the thing that proves I’m exactly what my father was, is that I’m hard—from this, from the power of deciding whether he keeps breathing or stops, from the way his body jerks with every impact and the sounds he makes that aren’t quite human anymore.
“Boss!” Luka’s hands clamp onto my biceps from behind, fingers digging in, and he yanks me backward so hard his boot splashes through a puddle as he wedges his body between me and the ruin of the man against the wall.
“Roman Viktorovich, khvatit! He’s drowning in his own blood—you want answers, or you want a corpse? ”
My chest is heaving so hard my ribs ache, and my vision has tunneled down to nothing but the sniper’s destroyed face.
My hands are still curled into fists at my sides with the leather of my gloves creaking from how tight I’m clenching.
I want to shove past Luka and keep going, want to hit him until there’s nothing left to hit, until my knuckles are ground down to bone, until the image of that bullet shattering wood inches from my wife’s face stops playing on loop behind my eyes.
“Roman.” Luka’s voice cuts through the roar of blood in my ears, sharp and commanding in a way he rarely uses with me. “Look at me. Focus. Intel first, then you can kill him.”
The words filter through slowly, finding purchase in the part of my brain that still functions on strategy instead of pure animal rage.
I force my hands to unclench, force my breathing to slow, force myself to take a step back and assess the scene like the Bratva heir I’m supposed to be instead of the feral thing I actually am.
The sniper is slumped against the brick with his head lolling to one side and blood streaming from his nose and mouth, and the orbital socket I caved in somewhere around the fifth hit.
The rain is washing pink rivers down the brick and into the gutter, swirling toward drainage grates cut into Soviet concrete while I crouch down in front of him with my soles pressing into wet asphalt.
I grab his jaw, bone fragments shifting under the pressure because I broke it earlier and didn’t even notice, and I force eye contact through all the blood and swelling. “Who hired you?”
He spits in my face—warm and thick, sliding down my cheek and dripping onto my already-ruined shirt—and something in my brain clicks. I reach for the pliers in my inner jacket pocket, the same kleshchi that Anya watched me use on Petrov.
The sniper sees the metal gleaming in the streetlight and starts babbling immediately, his words tumbling over each other in his desperation. “Wait, I’ll talk, please, I’ll tell you everything, radi Boga—”
“Too late.”
I grab his left hand and pin it against the brick wall, spreading his fingers wide against the rough surface. I position the pliers around his thumbnail while Luka says something about Anya being in the car fifty meters away, about her hearing if I do this.
“Good,” I say, and I pull.
The nail comes free with a wet, tearing sound, and the scream that rips out of the sniper echoes off the brick walls and bounces between buildings, raw and animal and satisfying in a way I don’t examine too closely. I’m already reaching for the next finger when Luka grabs my wrist.
“She’s coming. She heard the scream. She’s getting out of the car.”
I hear the footsteps before I see her—heels on wet pavement, getting closer with every click. I don’t move because some sick part of me wants her to see, wants her to know exactly what she chose when she chose me.
And then she’s there, standing at the mouth of the alley in that emerald silk gown that cost more than most people make in a month, her hair falling out of its arrangement and plastering to her face in the rain, her bare arms covered in goosebumps from the cold.
She looks like something from a fever dream—all that green silk against the grey brick and dirty concrete, all that beauty standing ten feet from a man with a missing fingernail and a face like raw meat.
Her eyes move slowly across the scene, tracking from the sniper slumped against the wall with blood streaming down his chin, to Luka standing off to the side with his hand still wrapped around my wrist, to the pliers in my grip with metal gleaming wet in the streetlight, to the fingernail floating in the puddle at my knees, and finally to my face.
“Is he the one who shot at us?” she asks, and her voice is steady in a way that makes something in my chest crack open.
“Yes.”
“Did you get what you needed?”
“Not yet.”
She nods once, a single sharp motion, and then she turns and walks back toward the car with her heels clicking on wet pavement and her ruined dress dragging through puddles.
“Finish it,” Luka says quietly. “Fast. Before she changes her mind.”
I turn back to the sniper and grab his jaw again, forcing eye contact through the blood and rain. “Names. Now. Or I take the rest of them.”
He talks—wire transfers routed through Cyprus, encrypted instructions delivered via dead drop, confirmation codes that Luka is already cross-referencing on his phone while I crouch in the rain with blood drying on my hands and my wife waiting in a car fifty meters away.
By the time we’re done, I have enough to implicate three captains, one Interpol mole, and confirmation that the hit came from exactly where I expected.
“It’s Vadim’s signature,” Luka says finally, looking up from his screen. “The shell company matches three other Pakhan operations. Confirmed.”
My uncle tried to kill me at the Bolshoi in front of hundreds of witnesses, where everyone could see the heir apparent die during Tchaikovsky.
“Safe house on Rublyovskoye,” I tell Luka as I rise to my feet, rain streaming down my face. “Medical treatment, new identity, five thousand euros. Poland by Friday.”
“You’re letting him live.”
“Dead men don’t spread the word that Vadim underpays.”
I’m walking toward the car, leaving Luka to handle it, when the thought hits me so hard I actually stumble on the wet pavement.
If I die, she becomes Yuri’s. If the heir dies before producing an heir, his assets are redistributed according to our laws: his assets, his wife, and his property.
The image comes without warning, and I can’t stop it, can’t block it out, can’t do anything but stand there in the rain while it plays out behind my eyes like a horror movie I’m forced to watch on loop.
I see Yuri’s hands on her skin—taking, hurting, using because he can and because she’s his now and because fighting back gets Mishka killed.
I see him bending her over my desk, and his fingers are fisting in that black braid and yanking her head back while she stares at nothing with eyes that have gone completely dead.
I see him breaking her—not because he wants her, not because he finds her beautiful or brilliant or any of the things that make me obsessed, but because he knows I did.
I see him using my name while he hurts her, making sure she knows that I failed her, that I’m dead and rotting somewhere while she pays the price for my weakness, that everything I promised about keeping her safe was just another lie from another Volkov man who couldn’t deliver.
I see him turning the light in her eyes into that dead, hollow stare.
The image shatters something in my skull, and I slam my fist into the car door so hard the metal dents inward with a grinding screech.
Pain shoots up my arm, but it’s not enough, not nearly enough to drown out the pictures, so I hit it again and again until blood wells fresh across the knuckles I already split open on the sniper’s face.
“Roman.” Luka’s voice comes from behind me. “What—”
“Yuri.” It’s the only thing I can say. “Tonight.”
“You’re covered in blood, and you just got shot at—you walk in there alone, you die.”
“Then I die killing him first.”
“And Anya?”
I stop with my bloody fist still pressed against the dented metal, chest heaving, and I can see her through the tinted window, sitting in the backseat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned away from me, still and quiet in that ruined green dress.
“Blyad.” The curse scrapes out of me, and I hate that Luka is right, hate that I can’t just end this now, hate that strategy has to come before the violent satisfaction of watching Yuri choke on his own blood.
I get in the car, and the door closes behind me. The smell hits immediately—leather seats and expensive cologne and underneath all of it, the metallic copper stench of blood that’s soaked into my clothes and my skin and my hair, overwhelming in the enclosed warmth of the Audi.
Anya turns to look at me and flinches—just a fraction, just her nostrils flaring and her pupils dilating and her whole body going tense for a split second before she forces herself to relax.