Chapter Thirty-Two
Arkady
The ring is still warm on Mirabel’s finger when the first shots crack the afternoon apart.
Blyad.
Everything stops. The jazz. The laughter. Diane’s champagne shattering on stone. And then everything starts again—at a speed most of the people in this garden will never understand.
I’m already moving.
“Stefan, with me. Get Leo and the twins.” I don’t raise my voice.
Don’t need to. Stefan reads the command from the way I’m stripping off my jacket and dropping it on the grass, the way my hand goes to my hip where my holster should be, and finds only the waistband of a suit I wore to celebrate something good for once in my miserable fucking life.
“Mirabel.” I turn to her. One second. That’s all I can spare. “Take Debra, Aleks, and Diane inside. Third floor. Lock yourselves in the east bedroom and do not open the door for anyone who isn’t Yanis or me. Da?”
Her face is bloodless, but her eyes are sharp. She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t freeze. Just nods once and grabs her sister’s wrist and pulls Debra toward the house, scooping Aleks from Fanny’s arms on the way.
Yanis catches my arm. “I’m coming with you.”
“Nyet.” I cut him off. “I need you to stay with them.”
“Chert voz’mi, bratan. Let me—”
“No. There’s no time.” I fix him with a look. “I need to know they’re safe.”
“Fine,” He concedes. “You call if you need me.”
“Da. Go.”
He’s gone. The guests are scattering, confusion blooming across faces that don’t belong in this part of my world. The catering staff bolt for the service entrance. Someone is screaming near the south marquee, and Leo’s men are already herding people toward the house.
I cross the lawn at a sprint, heading for my office. The gun safe is recessed behind the bookcase—biometric lock, six-digit override. I press my thumb to the scanner, punch the code, and the door swings open.
My Makarov sits in its cradle. Loaded magazine beside it. I slot the magazine, rack the slide, check the chamber once. Twice. Always twice. Muscle memory.
Next to the Makarov: the Dragunov. My sniper rifle, broken down into three sections. I assemble it in under a minute—barrel, stock, scope—and sling it across my back. Grab two extra magazines for the handgun.
Outside. Now.
The gravel crunches beneath my dress shoes as I round the east wing toward the front gate.
Stefan is already in position behind the stone pillar, weapon drawn, body angled for cover.
Leo flanks him on the right, compact and still, the way he gets when he’s calculating range and trajectory.
Aleksei and Andrei are on either side of the drive—identical stances, identical expressions, the twins communicating in that silent language they’ve shared since birth. All armed. All ready.
Behind us, six of our men have fanned out along the perimeter wall. Trained. Loyal. Ready to die for what we’ve built here.
“Stay put.” I crouch beside Stefan, scanning the tree line beyond the gate. Three black SUVs sit on the road, doors open. Bodies moving between them. “How many does he have?”
“At least eight from what I can see.” Stefan peers around the pillar, eyes tracking movement. “Two behind the lead car. Three near the trees. More in the vehicles—I can see shadows through the glass. Probably more in hiding.”
“Chechens?”
“Some. Mixed crew. A few I recognize from your father’s estate.”
Yobany urod. He’s brought a war party to my engagement.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Today I asked the woman I love to marry me in front of everyone who matters. And now my father is outside my gate with guns, threatening to ruin everything I’ve built.
“Hold positions,” I tell Stefan. “Nobody fires until I give the word or they breach the gate.”
Then his voice. That voice.
“ARKADY!”
It carries across the gravel and the stone and the space between us like a disease.
My father’s baritone—the voice I remember from childhood, the voice that ordered girls into shipping containers.
The voice that told me Mishka’s death was my own fault and that I should be grateful he didn’t put me in the ground beside him.
“Come out here, you little piece of shit!”
I don’t move. Don’t respond. Beside me, Stefan’s breathing is controlled. Measured. We’ve rehearsed this. War-gamed every scenario Gavriil might throw at us. But rehearsal and reality are different animals entirely.
“Give me the girl, and we walk away without bloodshed!”
The girl. He means Debra. His property. His six-year investment in human suffering, reduced to two words.
“Refuse,” he screams, “and I’ll fucking end you!”
I can feel my men watching me. Waiting.
I say nothing.
Ten seconds pass.
Twenty.
The first burst comes from the left SUV—short, automatic, stitching across the stone pillar and kicking chips of masonry into the air. Stefan ducks, fragments peppering his jacket.
“Return fire!” I snap.
The garden erupts.
Leo opens up from the right, controlled three-round bursts that walk toward the lead SUV.
The twins separate, Andrei moving along the wall to flank while Aleksei pins down the shooters near the tree line with covering fire.
Bullets chew into the stone. A window behind me explodes inward, glass raining across the gravel.
I move between pillars, keeping low, the Makarov up and tracking. A figure breaks from behind the second SUV—running, weapon raised—and I put two rounds into his center mass before he makes it three steps. He drops face-first onto the road. Doesn’t move.
Another one, coming from the trees. Leo spots him first; the crack of his rifle is followed immediately by the man spinning sideways, hitting the ground hard.
The noise is total. Muzzle flash in the afternoon light.
The sharp stink of cordite mixing with the absurd leftover scent of canapés from the garden behind us.
Bullets tear through the hedgerow, shredding leaves into confetti.
One of my men—Kolya, stationed at the south wall—takes a round in the shoulder and goes down behind the stonework, cursing in Russian.
Another, Pasha, catches shrapnel in his left arm and keeps firing one-handed, teeth bared.
Andrei has completed his flanking maneuver. He opens up from the far side of the wall, catching two of Gavriil’s men in a crossfire they didn’t anticipate. One drops instantly. The other returns fire for half a second before Andrei puts him down.
The whole thing lasts ninety seconds. Maybe less. Time compresses in firefights—folds in on itself until seconds contain entire lifetimes.
When the shooting stops, the quiet that replaces it is worse.
Five of my father’s men lie in the road.
Unmoving. Blood pooling on tarmac that was repaved two weeks ago for the engagement party.
One of them is young—twenty, twenty-one—and my teeth grind because I know my father recruited him the same way he recruits all his soldiers: promises, money, a sense of belonging.
This kid probably thought he was doing something important. Now he’s leaking into the asphalt.
Dmitri, one of our perimeter men, is dead.
Took a round through the throat in the first volley.
I didn’t see it happen—heard it on the radio, Stefan’s clipped voice: “Dmitri’s down.
Gone.” Three words. That’s all a life is worth in a firefight.
Three words, and then you keep moving, because grief is a luxury you pay for later.
Kolya’s shoulder is shredded, but he’s conscious. Pasha’s arm is bleeding through the makeshift tourniquet he’s already tied with his own belt. Yuri is en route from the house for both of them.
But something is missing.
My father.
I unsling the Dragunov and press my eye to the scope.
There he is. Crouched behind the armored door of his Mercedes, twenty meters past the gate. Silver hair. That granite jaw. The posture of a man who has never once questioned whether he has the right to take whatever he wants from the world—women, children, dignity, life.
His eyes dart between me and his dead men.
“Fall back!” he screams. His remaining bodyguards are already retreating—scrambling into the SUVs, dragging a wounded man between them, leaving their dead on my road like refuse. “FALL BACK!”
I settle the crosshairs on his temple.
One squeeze. Three pounds of pressure on the trigger, and Gavriil Laurov stops being a problem.
Stops being a monster. Stops being my father.
The trafficking ends, the threats end, the shadow that has hung over every good thing I’ve tried to build disappears in a red mist on the leather interior of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.
My finger rests on the trigger guard. Not the trigger. The guard.
Stefan is watching me. I can feel it—that attention he gives when he knows I’m calculating something irreversible. He knows what I’m seeing through the scope. Knows what I’m weighing.
“This is not over, Arkady!” My father’s voice tears through the distance as he straightens behind his car door.
His eyes scan the property—the gate, the pillars, the wall—looking for me.
Looking for the son he made and broke and couldn’t quite destroy.
Despite his best efforts. “You will regret what you have done to me, boy!”
Boy.
Always boy. Never son. Always boy. The word used by a man who could never accept that his children grew up and grew teeth.
The crosshairs sit steady on his skull. My breathing is slow. Controlled. I could make this shot in my sleep. Have made harder ones in worse conditions.
I don’t pull the trigger.
I watch him climb into his car. Watch the door slam. Watch the Mercedes lurch forward, tires screeching on the road, the remaining SUVs falling in behind it. I track the convoy through the scope until it rounds the bend in the lane and the taillights disappear.
Gone.
Stefan appears beside me. Doesn’t say a word. He knows what just happened. Knows I had the shot and let it go. His silence isn’t judgment. It’s patience. The patience of a man who has stood beside me for a decade and understands that some decisions are too heavy for commentary.
I lower the rifle.
Five dead on their side. Dmitri dead on ours. Kolya and Pasha wounded but breathing. And my engagement party is now a crime scene decorated with champagne flutes and bullet casings.
I stare at the empty road where my father’s car was. At the bodies of men who were alive fifteen minutes ago. At the blood drying in the late afternoon sun, darkening from red to something uglier.
I should feel something. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction that we held the line. Or rage that he came here—here, to my home, to the garden where I just asked a woman to spend her life with me—and tried to take what’s mine by force.
But all I feel is the weight of a trigger I didn’t pull. And the certainty—cold, clean, inevitable—that my father is right about one thing.
This is not over.
I turn back toward the house. Mirabel is on the third floor with Debra, Aleks, and Diane.
Safe. Locked in. Waiting for me to come tell her it’s over.
Because that’s what she expects, what she deserves.
A man who walks through the door after the shooting stops and says it’s handled and holds her while she shakes.
But I stand in the driveway with blood on my shoes and cordite under my nails and the ghost of my father’s skull in my scope, and I can’t make my legs carry me inside.
Not yet.
Dmitri is twenty-six. Was twenty-six. Married last spring. His wife, Anya, is pregnant. He took the perimeter shift today as a favor to Pasha, who wanted to watch the party from the garden.
I’m going to have to call Anya.
I’m going to have to tell her that her husband died at an engagement party because my father wanted his sex slave back.
The Dragunov is heavy across my shoulders. I unsling it, and lean it against the wall. The Makarov goes back into its holster.
I look at my hands. Steady. No tremor. That’s the part nobody tells you about killing. It doesn’t make your hands shake. It makes them still. The shaking comes later, in the dark, when the adrenaline drains and the faces come back.
“Clean this up,” I tell Stefan, gesturing at the road. “Bodies, casings, everything. I don’t want Mirabel seeing any of this.”
“Already on it.” He’s got his phone to his ear, coordinating with the cleanup crew we keep on retainer for exactly these situations.
Because this is my life. Cleanup crews. Body removal.
The sanitization of violence so the woman I love can walk across the driveway tomorrow without stepping in another man’s blood.
“And Stefan.”
He looks up.
“Dmitri’s wife. I’ll make the call myself.”
Stefan nods. Something passes across his face. Respect, maybe. Or sorrow. With Stefan, they look the same.
I walk toward the house. Each step costs something I don’t have a name for. The champagne is still on the tables. The jazz trio’s instruments sit abandoned on the stage. A woman’s shoe lies on the grass near the fountain, lost in the scramble.
Fifteen minutes ago, this garden held laughter. Now it holds the echo of automatic weapons and the silence that comes after men die.
I stop at the front door. Straighten my shirt. Check my hands for blood. There’s a streak across my right knuckles, somebody else’s, already drying brown. I wipe it on my trousers.
Then I go inside to find my fiancée.