Chapter 21
Volk
SONG: ECHO BY TRAPT
Blood pools across the carpet like a dark tide as I stand three feet from his body, chest heaving, lungs burning from exertion I haven't felt in years.
The room smells like copper and the unique stench of death that never quite washes away.
No matter what anyone does in the future, this room will never be clean again.
My arm throbs where a bullet and several knife wounds cover it, and my knuckles are split and swelling.
I can feel blood dripping from my body in more than one place. None of it matters.
What matters is her. What matters is that there is still one last step to take.
Sofiya stands over what remains of the man who destroyed her.
Blood covers her like war paint, streaking her face, soaking her clothes, dripping from fingers that still clutch the knife she used to end him.
Her breathing is ragged and uneven. Her eyes hold something I've never seen before.
Not triumph. Not peace. Something rawer. Something that looks almost like loss.
She's beautiful. Terrible and beautiful in ways that make my chest ache with feelings I spent decades learning to suppress.
Our eyes meet across the carnage. Ten years collapse into this single moment. Every choice I made, every sin I committed, every night I spent wondering if she survived the desert. All of it led here. To this room. To her standing victorious over the monster who made us both into who we are.
But it's not finished. Not really.
I know what she hasn't said. What she's been carrying since that first night at the club when recognition flickered behind her careful mask. I was on her list. I am still on her list. The fifth name she never speaks aloud but carries like a stone in her chest.
Volk. The wolf who dragged her to slaughter and walked away.
I reach for my gun, the weight feeling familiar in my palm, comfortable in ways that should disturb me but don't. I've held this weapon a thousand times. Ended more lives than I could ever count with its cold efficiency. But I've never held it quite like this. Never with this intention.
Sofiya's eyes track the movement, and her body tenses, instincts overriding exhaustion. She expects betrayal. Expects the wolf to show his teeth now the hunt is over.
Instead, I flip the gun around, offering it to her grip-first. "It's not finished," I say. My voice sounds foreign, hollow in ways that match the emptiness spreading through my chest. "We both know there is one last task. One last name to cross off your list."
She stares at the weapon, then me. Confusion fades and understanding crosses her blood-streaked features.
"Volk."
"I was there that night." I step closer, keeping the gun extended between us like a bridge or a barrier.
"I dragged you into that room. Watched your mother die.
Delivered you to those animals in the desert.
" Each word costs me something I can't name.
Something that might be the last remnants of the man I used to be.
"You can't have peace until everyone responsible is dead. And I'm responsible, Sofiya."
"You saved me." Her voice cracks on the words. "In the desert. Tonight. You've saved me over and over."
"I left you." The truth burns but I force it anyway.
"I left you broken and bleeding and barely alive.
Drove away and spent twenty minutes debating whether to go back.
Twenty minutes, Sofiya. While you dragged yourself through sand and rock toward a rescue that should never have been necessary.
That's not salvation. That's cowardice with a water bottle. "
I can still see her hesitating, so I say the one thing I know will work. The one thing guaranteed to give her the anger she needs to finish this.
“You know, I was the one that cut out your mother’s tongue.”
That does it. She takes the gun from my hand, her fingers brushing mine during the exchange, and I feel the contact like electricity, like the last warmth I'll ever know. She holds the weapon loosely, not aimed, just present. A question waiting to be answered.
"I've imagined this moment." Her voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "Hundreds of times. Thousands. How I would make you pay for leaving me there and walking away. For choosing the Bratva over doing what was right."
"And now?"
"Now, I don't know." Tears cut tracks through the blood on her face. She looks younger when she cries. More like the girl I left dying than the woman she became. “I’m standing here covered in my father's blood and I should want you dead but I don't. I can't."
I close the distance between us. Slow. Deliberate, giving her every opportunity to raise the weapon, to end this the way she’s planned for ten years.
She doesn't move. Just watches me approach with eyes that hold too many emotions for me to catalog.
When I'm close enough to touch, I take her hand, the one holding the gun, and guide it upward until the barrel presses against my chest, directly over my heart.
"Then let me make this easy." The metal is cold through my shirt. Cold like that night when I made the worst decision of my life. "Pull the trigger. Finish what you started. Be free of all of it." I finish speaking as I snap the safety off.
"Daniil."
The name hits me like a physical blow. I haven't heard it spoken aloud in any recent memory. Haven't been that person since before the Bratva claimed me, before I became the wolf that hunts without conscience or mercy.
She presses the gun harder against my chest. Her hand trembles but her eyes stay locked on mine. "Daniil Vasiliev. Born in Moscow. Orphaned at twelve. Recruited by the Bratva at fifteen. You were a person once. Before they made you into this."
"That person died a long time ago." I try not to show my shock that she’s managed to learn more about me than anyone else ever has. Too bad it doesn’t matter. It won’t help either of us now.
"Did he?" Her free hand comes up, touching the X tattooed below my eye, tracing it with fingertips still sticky with her father's blood. "Or did he just hide? Bury himself so deep that even you forgot he existed?"
I don't have an answer. I don’t know if one exists.
"I love you." The confession tears out of her like something that's been caged too long. "I hate that I do. Hate that after everything, after all the pain and the planning and the person I became to survive, I still love the man who could have saved me and chose not to."
"Sofiya—"
"Let me finish." She takes a shuddering breath. "I love you. And I don't know how to reconcile that with what you did. With what we've both done and all the blood on our hands that will never wash clean."
"You don't have to reconcile anything." I cover her hand with mine, the one pressing the gun to my chest. "You just have to act. Right here. Right now. Daniil Vasiliev needs to die tonight with all the other monsters."
"That's not a fair.”
"Nothing about this has been fair." I lean forward, pressing my forehead to hers.
I feel her breath warm on my face, her pulse hammering where our bodies almost touch.
"I love you too. Have since the moment I saw you walk into that club and realized the girl I left for dead became something magnificent.
Something I didn't deserve to look at, much less want. "
"Then why are you asking me to kill you?"
"Because you need to finish this. You’ve more than earned this .
" I pull back far enough to meet her eyes.
"Not because I'm offering or because it's easy, but because you've spent ten years with someone else writing your story.
Your first real choice in life was when you decided you would survive.
This has to be on your terms. No one else's. "
She stares at me for what feels like hours. The gun trembles against my chest. Her finger rests on the trigger, not pressing but present. Ready.
“And because I love you enough to want you to have everything you ever wanted. To see you have your revenge and go live a happy, peaceful life. Never having to experience, or see, or feel this nastiness ever again.”
I see the war playing out behind her eyes. The future versus the past. The woman she wants to be versus the weapon she became. The love she has for me versus hate.
"Daniil." She says the name like a prayer, like a curse, something she's afraid will break if she holds it too tightly. "I need you to know something."
"Tell me."
"Whatever happens next." Her voice steadies, hardening into something that sounds almost like resolve. "Whatever I decide. You gave me back something I thought was lost forever."
"What?"
"Choice." She steps back, creating distance between us that feels like a canyon opening in the earth.
"The ability to choose who I want to be and not what they made me.
Not what revenge demanded. Just me. Choosing.
" The gun stays aimed at my chest, her finger curling around the trigger. "And I’ve chosen," she whispers.
Then she pulls the trigger.