Chapter 7 - Yakov
I spot him as I’m leaving the supermarket.
Denis—one of my father’s men—he’s usually on patrol at the family estate.
If I needed proof the old man’s standards are slipping, sending someone I know this well is it.
Or maybe he wants to be seen. Wants me to know he’s coming for us himself.
Fits his style, the evil fuck. He’s on the other side of the street, not looking my way, doing a decent imitation of a man checking his phone.
Does he honestly think I’m not going to spot him in under three seconds?
The question is, where the fuck is goon two?
They only ever work in pairs, so that’s the one I need to be worried about
I don’t react. The weight of my Glock in my waistband is a familiar comfort.
I’d have it out and one in him before he’s got his safety off.
I walk back to the car at a leisurely pace, put the bags in the trunk, get in, and pull out of the lot—not toward the house.
I make my way toward the stretch a few blocks over, past the tire shop that’s been empty forever by the state of it, to the packing structure nobody’s used in years, if the graffiti’s anything to go by.
I picked this route for exactly this reason. No cameras. No witnesses.
Denis is either feeling pretty damn confident today, or he’s fucking stupid, because he’s following me.
I park on the lower level and get out slowly, pretending I’m stretching my legs and going to check under the hood of the car.
Like I’ve not noticed him pulling in a few rows over. He doesn’t wait long.
“Yakov.” He shouts my name like he’s chastising a puppy.
He always has been a bit too big for his boots, thinking his history with my father gets him a pass to talk to us without due respect.
Today, Denis is going to learn a pretty important lesson.
I look at him; he’s carrying a blade, not a gun.
Normally that’d be a pretty smart choice; it’s quiet, no gunshots to explain, even out here.
“You should’ve stayed out of your father’s business, boy. Would’ve been easier for everyone.”
He comes at me fast and low. Honestly, he’s too old for this shit, though these guys will never admit it.
I let him get close before I break his wrist and a quick, clean twist and take the blade of him.
It’s a mistake he should’ve unlearned years ago, but he always has been cocksure, which suits me.
He recovers surprisingly quickly, catching me with his working fist under the ribs.
For a few seconds it’s the noise of fists impacting flesh, and the taste of copper.
He’s good; the crafty fuck got a couple of good punches in, but I’m better.
I get the blade back into my hand and put it through him, as his hand goes to grab around the hilt in response.
He goes down against the concrete, eyes wide, the life slipping out of him fast.
I crouch down anyway. I need to know. “Where’s your friend?”
He laughs a wet bubble. “Gone for the bitch.” His eyes are glazing over, but I see him struggling to hold on so he can see my reaction. “You won’t make it.”
I lean into his ear and whisper, “We’ll see about that, you miserable fuck,” as I give the blade one final twist into his gut, sending him on his way.
I’m back in the car within seconds, tires screeching out of the garage, calling Raya on the handsfree.
“Get your things, malysh,” I tell her calmly, though calm is the last thing I’m feeling right now. “Be at the door in five minutes. We need to move.”
“Yakov?”
“Five minutes, Raya.”
She hears what I’m not saying, because my girl is sharp in a way that makes everything both easier and significantly more complicated.
When I pull up, she’s already at the door with her bag, and that’s when I spot the second one stepping off the sidewalk at the end of the road, ready to meet us head-on. Blyat.
“Get down!” I bark at Raya; she drops, and I lean over to push her as far into the footwell as I can.
“Good girl, good girl.” I stroke the top of her hair, trying to reassure her as I speed up.
If he wants to stand in the middle of the road, that’s his problem.
He unloads a couple of shots at us. The windshield spiderwebs into a sheet of white, and something hot punches through my shoulder hard enough that my vision goes gray at the edges.
Fuck. I’ve not got time for this; I’m not stopping the car, and he doesn’t move.
The hood catches him at the knees, bringing him up and over, one hand scrabbling against the cracked glass inches from my face.
I slam the brakes to get him off, but he goes nowhere; he’s disoriented, but he’s still got his gun in one hand while he grips onto the wiper with the other.
“Raya, close your eyes and put your head down. Now.”
I don’t wait to see if she listens. I stick the Glock through the gap in the windshield and finish him, then lean over and reach out with my good arm, grab a fistful of his jacket, and shove him off the hood onto the asphalt.
“Okay, you can look now.”
“Oh my god,” Raya says from her crouched position. “Oh my god, oh my god, are you okay? Are you hit? Are we being followed? What the hell just happened?”
“We’re clear. Sit up.”
“Are you sure? How are you sure?”
“Because I’m looking.” I am looking. The mirror, the road, back to the mirror. Scanning the whole three hundred and sixty degrees. “Sit up, Raya. I need to see you.”
She climbs back into her seat. Her hair is everywhere, and her eyes are like saucers; she’s breathing like she’s been running. I pat down her body, checking that she’s in one piece and she’s whole; the relief of that is something I don’t have words for.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” I ask her.
“No. You?”
“Fine. I don’t know how the old bastard did it, but he found us. I’ve got another house; it won’t take long to get there, okay?”
She nods. I keep us moving for another twenty minutes, taking turns I don’t need to take, making sure we haven’t got a tail.
The adrenaline does its job until it doesn’t.
Twenty minutes in, the high starts to ebb, and the pain catches up.
My shoulder is bad. I knew it on some distant, I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit level, but the wall I’ve built against the pain is crumbling fast. I adjust my grip on the wheel, but my right hand doesn’t respond the way I want it to.
I move my left hand to compensate, trying to keep my face neutral while I drive.
Raya’s already been through enough; she doesn’t need this.
I’ll deal with it when I get to the other house.
Raya’s voice breaks the silence we’ve been sitting in for several miles. “Yakov.”
“Mm.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? You’re looking kind of pale.”
“I’m fine.” I manage through gritted teeth. I’m not okay. I feel like shit; the pain is unfuckingbelievable.
“You’re sweating.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, malysh, it’s been a bit of a stressful afternoon.”
She shifts her whole body in her seat to look at me. Ordinarily I’d be delighted by this turn of events, but this is not good; she’s going to notice. I stare straight ahead, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
“Yakov. Oh my god! You’ve been shot! Yakov, your shirt!”
I don’t need to look down to know what she’s seeing; I can feel it sticking to my chest.
“Pull over right now, you absolute fucking moron. Why didn’t you say something? Pull over—”
“Raya—”
“PULL. THE. FUCK. OVER.”
I pull over. Not because she ordered me to—okay, exactly because she ordered me to—I need a moment… or five. Holy shit, it hurts like an absolute bastard.
She’s out of the car before I’ve fully stopped, the passenger door slamming shut as she sprints around to my side, yanking my door open with a force that nearly takes it off its hinges.
Up close, her face is as white as a sheet, her dark pupils dilated from panic, and she’s still utterly mesmerizing.
The cold winter wind is howling through the shattered windshield, dusting her dark auburn hair with tiny glints of glass, but she doesn’t even blink.
I would take this bullet ten times over before I’d let one land anywhere near her.
“Get out,” she says, her voice snapping like a whip. “I’m driving.”
“I can manage—”
“Like fuck you can, and kill us both? Move it, pretty boy.”
“Did you just call me pretty?” I manage a smile—well, probably a grimace—as I try to shift my weight to get myself out of the driver’s seat.
The movement sends a bolt of white-hot agony straight down my spine, and my vision blurs.
My knees buckle instantly. Before I can hit the asphalt, Raya leans down, her arms sliding under my good left side, anchoring her body against mine to pull me up.
“Are you trying to flirt with me while bleeding to death on the side of the road?” she pants, her shoulder pressed against my chest as she bears my weight.
“Can’t a man flirt with his wife?” I give her a weak wink, my breath rattling in my throat. She can’t be mad. I’m dying.
“Get in the back of this car before I kill you myself, husband of mine.” She cocks her head to one side, daring me to disagree, while she holds open the rear passenger door.
I duck, sliding backward onto the edge of the leather seat, my boots dangling out of the open door as I lean heavily against the headrest. The interior of the car smells like iron, burned rubber, and the faint vanilla of her perfume.
“Help me get the shirt off,” I tell her, my voice dropping an octave as the sweat begins to bead on my forehead. “The leather jacket first. Left sleeve. Carefully.”
She rolls her eyes but doesn’t comment, her hands moving with an efficiency that surprises me.
She grabs the cuff of my left sleeve, gently easing it off my good arm.
But when she reaches the right shoulder, she freezes.
The fabric of my T-shirt is saturated, glued to my skin by a thick, darkening pool of crimson.