27. Twenty-Seven
We found the road before we found the hangar.
Two cars shot to lace under our headlights, glass everywhere, and men on the pavement lying the way only dead men lie.
I made myself look, because if one of them wore Aleksi's shoes, I needed to know before my heart did.
None of them did. Niko said a word in French I didn't know and crossed himself with the gun already in his hand. Gregori put his foot down.
The tires screeched as Gregori halted the car sideways across the end of the access road. I was out the door before the car was in park.
I shouldn't have been. I'd no weapon and nine fingers and a plan that began and ended with get to Aleksi, which wasn’t a plan, it was a prayer with legs.
But I was out, gravel under my borrowed shoes and the cold farm dark all around, and a single lit hangar sat out across the open ground like the last house at the end of the world.
"Stay behind me," Niko said, coming round the bonnet with the Glock already up.
Gregori got out and went around to the trunk to rustle around in there like he was searching for something.
"That's my man in there," I said.
"And he will be very cross with me if I let you get shot. Behind, Fin."
Behind us, Gregori hauled out the ugliest gun I’d ever seen. It was long with a stock that looked like your standard Russian AK-47, but with a ridiculous flat cap on top and a belt of bullets that fed into it.
“Putain,” Niko gasped, eyes glittering. “Where the fuck did you get a Stalin’s record player? Those things are antiques!”
Gregori grunted as he finished assembling the gun and took up a position crouched behind the engine block. “It’s not the size that counts. It’s how you use it,” he said, and then with the faintest hint of a smirk he added, “but nobody ever complains about it being too big.”
There was a shout in Italian, then the muzzle flash, and then Niko yanked me behind the car.
Gregori opened fire.
I'd heard guns. Six months in a warehouse, a flat shot to pieces around my ears, Aleksi putting three men down in a tailor's.
I'd never heard anything like the record player.
It didn't crack, it tore, a long ripping bellow that ate the whole night and threw the dark orange, and the front of the hangar came apart where the two on the door had been standing.
Corrugated metal screamed. One of them just dropped.
The other dove and didn't come up clean.
“Stay,” Niko barked at me like I was some sort of dog.
Then Niko stepped out from behind the bonnet like he was crossing a ballroom.
I'll say this for the man, and I'll say it till I die: I have never seen anyone make killing look so much like something you'd pay to watch.
He didn't rush. He didn't flinch when a round went past close enough to part his hair.
He raised the Glock and fired down range twice, and forty yards off, a man folded over a fuel drum and stopped being a problem.
"Two down," Niko said to nobody, pleased. Then he shouted. “Aleksi, you son of a bitch! You still alive in there?”
“No thanks to you!” Aleksi shouted back. “EJ is in here with me! K is—” And then he went quiet.
The quiet after was worse than the record player had been.
The windsock ticked on its pole, a fuel drum hissed where a round had opened it. My heart pounded in my ears.
"Aleksi!" I was up on my knees before Niko could put me back down. "Aleksi, ye great bastard, answer me!"
Nothing.
And then the side door opened, and my heart jumped into my throat when I saw Aleksi. He was bloody, beaten, and bruised, but alive. My beautiful, stupid, stubborn Russian was alive. His hands were still tied behind his back.
And then I saw the gun pressed to his head and the monster walking behind him holding it.
Everything stopped.
Niko had the Glock up and steady on the two of them, and I watched him not take the shot.
K had Aleksi a half-step in front of him, tucked in close, the gun hard against the soft place behind his ear where the blood had already dried black.
Niko was the best I'd ever seen, but there was no clean shot, and K knew it. That was the whole fucking point.
"Guns down," K said. "All of them. Or I paint the field with Volkov's right hand, and we are all very sad about it."
"Don't you fucking dare," Aleksi said to me, only to me, his eyes finding mine across the gravel. "Fin. Whatever he says. Don't—"
K cracked the gun against his temple, and he stopped.
I stood, fists clenched. The cold had me all the way now. It was a gift, that cold. It had gotten me through the van and the warehouse and Pavel, and it would get me through this, because somewhere under it a small, clear voice had already decided how this was going to end.
He wanted me afraid. He wanted us all scrambling and shouting and putting our guns in the dirt.
So I gave him a smile instead, the mean wee one, and started walking.
"Aye, all right, big man," I said. "Let's you and me have a wee chat."
"Stay where you are," K said.
I didn't. I kept coming slowly, hands open and empty at my sides so he could see the nine fingers and think me harmless.
Behind me Niko swore low in French and didn't follow, because Niko understood what I was doing even if he hated it.
K's eyes came off the dark and settled on me. Eyes on the prize, mate.
"Ye remember me fine," I said. "Dinnae insult the both of us pretending ye don't. Ye sent a man to steal me back out of Aleksi's flat.
Ye stood over me in that shop with yer wee gold ring and told me I was what ye'd lost, like I was a watch ye'd left in a cab.
" I took another step. He let me have it.
"Ye paid for me twice. The Italians the first time, off Victoria Street, with my da bleeding on the cutting floor and my granddad's tools under yer arm.
Pavel the second. And both times the same man took me off ye. "
I tipped my head toward Aleksi. Toward the gun at his skull.
"That one. The one ye're so pleased to have on a leash now.
He walked into yer shop and put three of yer men on the floor and carried me out the front door past ye, and ye let him, because somewhere in that cold wee heart ye already knew.
Ye were never going to keep me." I stopped when I was close enough to see the sweat at his hairline.
"Ye're no a monster, K. I built ye into one for six months. Took ye to bits now and there's nothing in ye. Yer just a man. And if there’s one thing I know about men, it’s how easy they die. "
K's jaw clenched. "I should’ve killed you like I did the women.”
"No," I said. “Ye shoulda killed me first. Didn’t yer mum ever teach ye? Never leave a vengeful Scotsman alive. It’s bad fer yer health.”
Behind him, the hangar door opened silently, and a small, pale figure crept out.
I’d kept K’s eyes on me the whole way in, and the kid took it for the signal it was. EJ drove his shoulder into the back of K’s knees, all his weight low where his ruined hands didn’t have to do the work. K buckled, and the gun came off Aleksi’s skull as he went down.
Aleksi wrenched his wrists apart. The tie gave like he'd been at it for an hour, and the next thing I knew, he was on top of K and they were wrestling for the gun. A round went off into nothing. Aleksi drew back a fist and punched K once, twice…
The gun came loose in the scrum. I crossed the last of the ground between us, jammed my heel down on K’s wrist, and tore the pistol out of his hand. Nine fingers. Turns out ye only need the one on the trigger.
“Aleksi!” I shouted, and Aleksi paused with his fist drawn back for another punch. “Move, big man!”
Aleksi rolled to the side off of Kastelani.
K had just enough time to see the gun pointed at him, and to see who was behind it before I pulled the trigger.
His head slammed back against the pavement with a hole in it just above the left eye, and a halo of blood spread out over the asphalt. Kastelani didn’t move.
The field went quiet.
Somewhere behind me Niko said something in French, soft, almost reverent, and Gregori said something back in Russian that wasn't, and the two of them started across the open ground toward us.
EJ was on his knees in the gravel where he'd fallen off K's legs, both hands torn to red ribbons round the wrists, staring at the body like he couldn't work out whether he'd done a good thing or an unforgivable one.
“Aleksi,” I whispered to no one and dropped the gun, and went to him.
Aleksi stood and swayed as I slammed into him. “Easy. Easy! Watch the shoulder!” he hissed as I took his face in my hands and started kissing him all over. There was blood and dirt, and sweat everywhere. He looked like something they'd dug up. A bloody revenant.
My revenant.
I held him and kissed him and pressed my forehead to him, willing the tears to stay back. "Ye absolute fucking eejit. Ye didnae text."
"I know."
"Ye never text and then ye didnae text and I thought—" I pulled back to look at him. "I thought ye were gone. I thought I'd come all this way to bury ye in a field."
"I'm here." He pressed his forehead back to mine and closed his eyes. "Fin. I'm here."
"Aye. Ye are." I kissed him then, hard, with teeth, the way he liked it, the way that meant mine, and he made the broken sound into my mouth and kissed me back like I was air.
When we broke apart, he didn't let go. He held my face in both hands and looked at me for a long moment.
"I love you," Aleksi said. "I should've said it before.
In the garage, I thought I'd die without saying it, and that was the thing—" His jaw worked.
"It was the thing that kept me alive, knowing I had to get to you to say that. "
"I ken," I said. "I love ye too, ye great daft Russian bastard. Have done for ages." I huffed a wet laugh. "Took ye getting shot to manage it, but I'll take it."
"Don't push it."
"Bit late." I kissed him again, soft this time. "Bit late for that, Aleksi Laskin."
Niko and Gregori closed on us.
“Glad to see you alive, boss,” Gregori said with a nod, which was as good as a kiss from the big, stoic bastard.
Niko grinned and threw his arms around both of us like he’d been invited. “That was the most fun I’ve had in ages!” he said and twisted to look at EJ, who was still on his knees. “Hello there, mon gars. Come on. Join the party.”
Aleksi kissed my cheek and gave me a strange look before stepping away and going back to offer a hand to the lad. The younger man took it and let Aleksi pull him to his feet. Aleksi gave the lad a firm clap on his shoulder and walked him back to us.
“Nikolai, I want you to meet Evander.”
Niko’s eyebrow shot up. “Oui. We met before. The cleaner, yes?”
“Evander Laskin,” Aleksi said, and the smile went all the way out of Niko.
Something passed between the two of them then, brother to brother, in a language that had nothing to do with French or Russian.
Niko looked at the lad properly for the first time, the way I'd watched him look at a false seam in a four-thousand-dollar bag, reading it for what it was hiding.
Whatever he found, his face didn't give it up.
"Evander Laskin," Niko repeated, and stuck his hand out. "Welcome to the family, mon gars. It is a terrible family. You'll fit right in."
The kid looked at the offered hand like it might bite him. Then he looked at Aleksi, and Aleksi gave him the smallest nod, and EJ took it.
I'd a feeling there was a great deal under it none of them had said out loud, the way there always was with the Laskins.
Every one of them carried a war in three languages they'd rather die than discuss.
I'd get it out of Aleksi later. In bed, probably, when he was cum drunk and stupid and couldn't help himself.
For now, I just put myself back under his arm where I belonged, nine fingers and borrowed shoes and all, and let him take my weight, and watched his ruined family stand in a dead man's field and decide, without a single one of them saying it, to be bigger by one.
"Right," I said, because somebody had to. "Can we go the fuck home now? I'm freezing my balls off and I've a Russian to put to bed."
"Bossy," Aleksi muttered.
"Aye. Get used to it."