Chapter 23 - Zara
Everything hurts like a fucking bitch.
I don’t know where the blast came from; one moment my eyes were on my husband, my heart warming to just the sight of him and what he’d done for me, and the next—
The blast split apart the ground in front of the car like a fist through a wall. The dust makes everything blurry, but I know for a fact I’m not in the car anymore.
I am on the hard ground, my knees scraped, and something in my chest sends sharp spikes of pain with each shuddery inhale.
I don’t know how I got there. My hands are bloodied and smarting as they’re scrubbed raw against the pavement, dust in my mouth, ears ringing.
“Zara, Zara!”
I turn to my left, listening to Mikhail’s voice call for me. He limps towards me, anxiously checking my arms, body, feet, everything. “You’re hurt? Is it painful? Where—”
“Mikhail,” I call his name tearfully, raising a scraped hand to his cheek and wincing at the touch. “I’m okay, it’s just a little hurt. I’m fine. Where are—”
My face darts to the car standing only a few meters from the inflamed crash, the door on my father's side open, not torn from its hinges.
“Where are Mom and Dad? Are they still—”
“There’s no one in the car, or around us. We’re all alone on this road,” Mikhail tells me roughly, chest rising and falling harshly.
I scan the street in every direction—the narrow pavement, the curve of the road ahead. Nothing. No figure moving away from the car. Just the street, complete and breathtaking indifference to the fact that my parents have just disappeared into thin air.
I tear myself from Mikhail’s grasp and try to stand, wheezing as pain shrieks from both my knees. Forcing myself to walk towards the car and ignoring Mikhail’s calls, and I scream as the car bursts into fire.
“Mom, Dad!” My scream tears from my throat as Mikhail’s arms wrap around my stomach, pulling me further away from the scene. The voice leaving my throat belongs to an eight-year-old who has just been left again and cannot make it make sense.
“They aren’t in the fucking car, Zara! No one was! I checked it before I came to you,” Mikhail pants in my ear, trying to calm my flailing limbs.
“That can’t fucking be! Are you fucking insane?! They were right there and—and—”
Something slaps my mouth shut, and I spit it out into my hand. It’s a little paper; I nearly throw it away before the words catch my eye.
‘The Khans were never yours to find. You were warned to stop digging. You didn't listen.’
“They were waiting,” Mikhail shouts into his comms, but his voice is as distant as it can be. “The blast has to be a fucking signal. Someone communicated our route and our timing.”
‘You're next.’
My sobs turn into hiccups, all the fight draining out of my body. My parents have disappeared into thin air, and the ringing in my ears slowly dissolves into a nothingness.
You're next.
A distant screech pierces through the air and Mikhail turns around, jostling me with him. A black tinted sedan stands only a few meters from us, and the driver’s door opens to reveal him.
Timur Sokolov.
He rushes up to us, handing Mikhail a jacket my husband immediately wraps around my shoulders.
His eyes don’t scan the perimeter, or even drift to the burning car even once like Mikhail’s kept doing. His face is artificially disturbed, managed version it always is.
“Timur? I thought Nikolai had given—” Mikhail starts, confused and tired.
And something in me that has been building since that day he watched me narrowly escape death with Gregor finally snaps.
“You told them where we were going,” I scream, pointing my finger in his irritatingly calm face.
“You told them the route, the timing. You fucking knew we were picking them up today. You knew the terminal, the exit route, everything. You’ve been feeding them information since the car ambush in New York and probably before that, and tonight you handed them my parents on the exact night I f–finally had them. "
He takes it all like he expected me to say all this shit to him, which enrages me even more.
“Mrs. Korovin, I don’t think you know what you’re implying,” he says calmly, raising his palms like he doesn’t want a fight.
But it’s all gone to hell now. Everything’s burnt down, he’s finally won, and still he wants to put on this fucking act?
“I watched you, you fucking bastard,” I yell.
“I have been watching you since Dubai and filing every single thing I saw. That’s what I fucking do for a job.
You always knew how it would end. I could see it in your stupid smug face.
I know you suggested sending someone after me in Greece.
I’ve watched you greenlight revisions that were wrong in ways that only make sense if you already knew what was coming.
And here you are right now, sixty seconds after a fucking blast that only someone inside this operation would’ve known about, and you weren’t even in the fucking loop at all. ”
Mikhail is frozen on spot.
His body behind me is rock hard, gaze stuck on Timur.
He already knows.
He must, and he is letting me say everything he’s doubted out loud.
Bit by bit, I watch Timur's mask fall away. First his furrowed brow flattens, jaw tightening, and mouth curling into a cruel line of indifference. It is the only movement his face has made in the entire conversation, the first give in his composure.
“Where are they?” I demand, walking up to him.
He keeps his stubborn silence.
“Timur,” Mikhail thunders, coming up to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder. “Answer her.”
Timur sighs, like this is all a very big obstacle, and his mouth curls into a cruel smirk.
“Well, you got me,” he admits with faux defeat.
The words are like salt on a burn.
“Sokolov.” Mikhail’s voice is low.
Timur keeps his eyes on me, and in them defiance dances, but something beneath it looks exhausted. The exhaustion of a man who has been managing something enormous for a very long time and has just put it down.
“Why would you do this?” I shout, throat dry. “What the fuck have my parents ever done to you? What has Mikhail done to you? How could you fucking shit where you ate?”
He only stares at me, that cruel smirk on his face.
“My parents were a fucking variable to you? Is that it? Their lives were already in fucking danger. And whatever you told the syndicate, whatever access you gave them tonight, you handed them two people who have been hiding for fifteen years and who were, forty minutes ago, right with me."
His lips part finally.
“Your parents were never going to live quietly. The syndicate was going to find them regardless. I simply—”
“You simply made it easier? You simply made it faster? You timed it for the exact moment they were in the same place as me so that I would watch it happen? Watch me fucking lose them all over again?” I can barely breathe, my throat hurting from how much I’ve been screaming at this indifferent bastard.
“Why? What did you fucking get for it that Mikhail already wasn’t giving you? What was worth this?”
“Survival,” he answers simply. “Which is the only thing that has ever mattered in this world, regardless of what Mikhail has decided to believe since you arrived in it.”
There is an unreadable emotion in his eyes, something I don’t understand but Mikhail does, judging by his quick and loud inhale.
“You fucking—” I swear, advancing at him. Mikhail’s arm quickly holds me back again. I resist, telling him to let go.
Timur quickly moves a hand into his jacket and takes out his pistol. Mikhail shifts me behind him in the blink of an eye, his own gun in his hand. I freeze, the sudden burst of adrenaline crashing my system.
“Timur. Put it down,” Mikhail instructs sharply, a true predator’s warning.
Timur is unbothered by Mikhail’s gun aiming at him, eyes seeing through both me and Mikhail.
They are looking at nothing. Timur raises his gun, putting the barrel in his mouth.
Then time slows down.
“Timur,” Mikhail repeats, but this time, his voice has a confused waver in it, something I have not heard from him before—raw, urgent, cracked slightly at the edges in a way that belongs to a man who has worked beside another for years and is watching him reach the end of himself. “Don’t.”