Chapter 16
Ksenia
My bag was packed.
Three changes of clothes. Toiletries. The charger. The blue dress, folded carefully, because I could not leave it behind. I had stared at the contents for ten minutes after zipping it shut, wondering whether I had packed for a few days or for something longer.
I felt sick with worry.
The phone buzzed on the nightstand. The wobbly nightstand. It slid two inches to the left before I grabbed it.
Daniil’s name.
“Little One.”
His voice came through clear and steady, and behind it I could hear a different acoustics—a larger room, hard surfaces, the ambient noise of people moving through a space that was not ours.
“Are you at Orlov Marine?”
“Yes, baby. I’m standing behind your father’s desk.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight and the phone pressed against my ear and I could hear him breathing and behind him, distantly, I could hear Anton.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
The question came before anything else. Before the building, before the captains, before the politics of what this meant for the alliance and the war and the forty-eight-hour deadline. Before all of it. Are you hurt.
“No. Neither of us. Arkady has a bruise on his hand — he went through a door and the door lost, but it put up a fight. Anton is untouched.”
“Roman?”
“Standing in the loading bay. His lip is swollen. He refused medical attention and a chair. He’s directing the returning staff with his arms crossed.”
I heard Anton’s voice in the background — not the words, just the cadence. My brother giving orders in the building my father had built. The sound of it moved through me and I pressed my hand flat against the mattress and I breathed.
“The men who took it?” I said.
“Gone. Six. They left when they saw our numbers. Two were detained by Arkady’s team for questioning. The rest fled through the service entrance.”
“You fought them out.”
“We walked in and they left. The numbers were sufficient. The message was sufficient. Your father’s captains are arriving now—Sokolov captains too. We’re holding the meeting here, at the building, so everyone sees the alliance standing in the place Viktor tried to take.”
“Good.” I pressed my hand harder against the mattress. “That’s good.”
“Ksyusha.”
“Yes.”
“I promised I’d call from the desk.”
“You did.”
“I’m calling from the desk.”
My eyes burned. I blinked. I looked at the window where the November light came through grey and thin and ordinary, and I let the relief do what it needed to do.
“Are you eating?” I asked.
“I had coffee.”
“Coffee is not food, Daniil.”
“Coffee is a beverage. I concede the point.”
He was quiet for a moment. Was he hurt? No. He wouldn’t keep it from me.
“I’ll eat something,” he said.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Before the meeting.”
“Before the meeting.”
“Good.” I swallowed. “I love you.”
The words carried more today. I felt the weight of how much I could lose.
“I love you. Have a safe journey.”
“You’ll see me soon.”
I felt the future stretch out in front of me, dark and uncertain.
Ilya took Route 17.
We weren’t alone. Boris followed two car lengths behind.
I could see his windshield in the side mirror—steady, professional, the same distance maintained since we left Dover Street.
The streets of Brooklyn had given way to the highways of New Jersey, then the highways had given way to industrial roads—flat, gray, lined with warehouses and fenced lots and the occasional body shop with a hand-painted sign.
Teterboro was close. Ten minutes, maybe.
The kind of roads where nobody walked and every building looked like it had been built to be forgotten.
I was thinking about my old life.
Things had been certain before I married Daniil.
I’d been the daughter of a Pakhan, sure, but my life had been simple for the most part.
Restoring buildings, drawing up plans. I had a home.
Stability. Now, I felt like my life was twirling in the centre of a vortex.
I was meant to be moving in, taking my things to my marital home.
My drafting table was due to arrive on Friday. Would I be there to receive it?
I was thinking about this when the truck hit us.
The impact came from the left. A dark vehicle—a pickup, maybe, something heavy and high-shouldered—came through the intersection we were passing and struck the SUV behind the driver’s door.
The sound was enormous. Metal folding. Glass fracturing.
The seat belt locked across my chest and my ribs compressed and my head snapped sideways and my teeth clicked together hard enough to taste copper.
The SUV spun. Not a full rotation—a quarter turn, maybe less, the rear swinging out until we faced the opposite direction, the front tire jumping the curb and the vehicle tilting and then stopping, lodged against a concrete barrier with the engine making a sound that was not an engine sound.
A grinding. A clicking. Something broken inside the machinery that would not turn over again.
Ilya’s head was forward. His hands on the wheel. He lifted his face and I saw blood at his hairline—a cut, not deep, but bright against his skin.
“Ilya—”
The first shots came through the rear window.
The glass did not shatter. It starred—a web of fractures radiating from a hole the size of a fist, and then a second hole, and then the window collapsed inward and the sound changed.
The shots were loud. Louder than I expected.
A flat, percussive report that filled the interior of the SUV and left a ringing in my ears.
Ilya dropped. Not hit—ducking, pulling himself below the steering column, reaching for something beneath the seat. I could not see his hands. I could see the dashboard. The cracked screen of the navigation display showing our position on a grey road between two grey buildings. The clock: 11:53.
Boris’s voice. From behind—from the other vehicle.
I could not hear the words. Shouting. The kind of shouting that carried information I could not assemble into language because my ears were ringing and my chest ached where the belt had locked and the world outside the windows was smoke and noise and the particular confusion of a thing that was happening too fast.
My phone was in my bag. I reached for it, but it slid, the bag fell to the floor and the phone with it and the phone slid beneath the seat, beneath the metal rail, into the space between the seat and the door where my fingers could not reach.
“Stay down.” Boris. He had come from somewhere. He was at the rear door—my door—pulling it open. The air came in cold and sharp and carried the smell of gasoline and burned rubber. He pushed my head down, his hand flat on my skull, pressing me below the window line.
The other guard—the second man from Boris’s vehicle—was at the rear of the SUV. He had the door open on the driver’s side and he was firing. The muzzle flash was bright in the gray morning. I could see his arm, his shoulder.
Ilya was speaking into his phone. His voice was fast, clipped, Russian. Coordinates. Our location. The words I could parse: ambush, Teterboro, two vehicles, armed. He was calling for help. He was calling for help while blood ran down his forehead and into his collar.
The gunfire paused. Three seconds. Four.
I pressed my face against the seat and breathed the leather and the gasoline and I thought: Daniil.
I thought his name. I could not reach him.
The phone was under the seat. I could not tell him.
I could not tell him I was here, on a grey road in New Jersey, and the world had broken open.
The other guard fell.
He went backward—not slowly, not in stages.
One second he was at the rear of the SUV, firing.
The next he was on the ground beside the open door, his arm at an angle that arms do not make, his face turned toward me through the gap, and I could see that his eyes were open and his mouth was open and he was not moving.
I screamed. The sound came out before I knew it was there—a raw, ugly noise. I barely recognized myself in it.
Boris grabbed me.
He pulled me across the seat—my door was open, his hand was on my arm, and he hauled me out of the SUV with a strength that had nothing gentle in it. My hip struck the door frame. My knee hit the running board. I stumbled and the cold air hit my face and the asphalt was under my shoes.
“Across the road,” Boris said. His voice was level. Frighteningly level. He pointed—past the SUV, past the barrier, across the two lanes of empty road to a building on the other side. A warehouse. A loading entrance—a wide metal door, half-open, the interior dark.
“That’s a business,” I said. “There are people—”
“Exactly. There are people. Go. Get inside. Get to the front. Witnesses. You need witnesses.” He put his hand on my back and pushed me toward the barrier. “Go.”
I looked at his sleeve. The left sleeve. Dark. Wet. The fabric clinging to his forearm.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing. Go. Now.”
“You’re staying.”
“I’m staying. I need you to go. If I come with you, they follow you. If I stay, they come to me. You get inside. You get to people. You call your husband.”
The gunfire started again. From the intersection—closer now. The sound bounced off the warehouses and came at me from every direction.
I ran.
The road was thirty feet across. I ran it in shoes that were not made for running, my coat flapping open, my bag with Misha gone—left in the SUV, on the floor, the little ear still poking through the zipper.
I did not go back. I did not look back. I ran across the asphalt and my knees ached from the collision and my hand—my right hand, I did not know when—was bleeding.
A cut across the palm. The seat frame. I had grabbed something when Boris pulled me out.