Chapter 31
SEVASTIAN
Idrive toward a name a dying man gave me, and every mile of it I’m braced for the chance that he sent me wrong.
That’s the thing eating me as the convoy tears north through the dark, three vehicles of my best men and enough hardware to start a small war.
A traitor’s last words are worth exactly nothing on their own.
Vadim hated me at the end, chose the hate over the truth, and a man like that might spend his final breath handing me an empty building forty minutes in the wrong direction while she bleeds out somewhere I’ll never think to look.
I have no way to know. I’m betting her life and my child’s on the word of the man who sold them both, because it’s the only word I have.
Standing still was never an option my body would accept.
Roma drives like the road owes him Cynthia.
Nobody speaks. In the second truck, somewhere behind us, Kir is checking a vest that was already checked.
Then my phone goes off in the cupholder, and I nearly drive off the road.
It’s a text. An unknown number, a burner or a stranger’s phone, no name. Three words.
Calder Salt Works.
I read it twice. The breath goes out of me in a way no gunfire ever managed.
Because that is the name. The exact name Vadim coughed up with his eyes already going dark, the property I’m forty minutes from, and it has just arrived on my phone from a number I don’t know, in the desert, at night, sent by someone who knows where I need to be.
It’s her. It has to be her. No one else on this earth would send me three flat words like a thrown knife, no plea, no please, no help, just the address, the one piece of information that turns me from a man chasing a maybe into a man who knows.
She didn’t beg me to come. She told me where to aim.
Even now, even there, she’s the sharpest person in any room she’s in.
And the message under the message guts me even as it lifts me.
She’s alive. She was alive minutes ago, alive enough to get her hands on a phone, alive enough to think, to plan, to send me the only thing that matters.
My terror doesn’t leave. It just changes shape, from the formless dread of chasing a dead man’s lie into something with edges, a target, a direction, a place with her name written on the inside of it.
I call the lead car. “It’s confirmed. Calder Salt Works.
She’s inside and she’s alive.” My voice nearly breaks, a thing it never does.
I let it, because every man in this convoy needs to understand that the rules just changed, that we are no longer maybe raiding a maybe. “Full speed. We take it apart.”
Through the glass behind me, three sets of headlights change pitch at once, the convoy leaning forward like one animal.
The Calder Salt Works is a dead industrial sprawl out on the white crust of a dry lake, a place that processed salt until it didn’t, all bleached concrete and rusted steel under a sky with too many stars.
I know it the way I know every property my enemy owns.
What I don’t expect is what my forward men report as we close.
Too many vehicles for a dead factory, heavy guns on the doors, the kind of security that only ever travels with one man. Gleb Morozov is inside it.
This is no safe house, no holding pen Morozov forgot about.
He’s here. The old man came up out of Los Angeles himself, out of the city he almost never leaves, and there is exactly one prize worth drawing him into the open like that.
Me, reduced to a thing he can finally break.
He didn’t take my woman to ransom her. He took her to own the one lever that moves me, her and the child both.
He wanted to be standing here in person when he used it.
He came to collect me. He just doesn’t know yet that I’m coming through his front door instead.
We hit it before dawn, from three sides, hard.
We come to kill, and we do. The first charge takes the east doors off their frame.
Salt dust comes down like plaster. The air goes white, then orange.
Sound stops being sound and becomes pressure with opinions.
The night turns to muzzle flash, concussion, men shouting in two languages.
I go in at the front of my own assault, because there is no version of this where I wait outside and let other men walk toward her first.
We move room by room through the cold concrete guts of the place, clearing, breaching, the noise enormous, and I am looking, through all of it, past every man I put down, for one face, for blond hair, for her.
I find her in a corridor full of smoke.
And she is not cowering. That is the image I will carry to my grave, the one that undoes me right there in the middle of a firefight.
My pregnant woman, barefoot, bloody, filthy, upright, a dead man’s gun shaking in her two hands, walking toward the gunfire instead of away from it. She got herself out.
She got out of her cell, out of whatever they did to her, and instead of hiding to be found she armed herself, came looking for the war, as if she knew I’d be in it.
I have spent a decade believing I have to protect the people I love because they cannot protect themselves.
She is walking proof I was wrong about her from the first night in the sand.
The relief nearly takes my legs. For one half second the whole murderous machine of me stops, because she’s alive, whole, ten steps away, and I am going to reach her.
That’s the half second the worst moment of my life uses to arrive.
He comes out of the smoke behind her, fast, gets an arm across her throat, a pistol to her temple, before I can close the distance, before I can shout, before anything.
Timur. Of course it’s Timur, the man I shot in the desert and failed to finish, the hand that has reached for her at every turn.
He drags her back against him, puts the barrel hard to the side of her head, grins at me over her shoulder through the smoke, that ruined pretty face, because he knows. He knows exactly what he’s done.
He’s made the shape.
The exact shape. The one that has haunted my sleep for ten years.
Someone I love in the line, an enemy behind them, a shot that cannot be taken because the person you’d die for is in the way.
The last time I stood here, a gun in my hand, someone I loved in the path of it, I fired and my brother went down.
My bullet. My hand. The worst second of my life, and Timur has just rebuilt it around me, in a burning salt works, the woman I love with our child inside her standing exactly where Kostya stood.
Ten years of nightmares were rehearsal. The body knows this picture by heart.
The body wants to do what it did last time, which is everything wrong.
“Drop them,” Timur calls, sing-song, delighted. Up close his vanity has survived everything, the scar kept neat, the hair in order in a burning building. A man who grooms for his own apocalypse. “Drop the guns, all of you, or I paint the wall with her. You know I’ll do it. You know what we do.”
And here is where the man I have always been would freeze.
Where the memory takes my hands and turns them to stone, where I see Kostya falling, where I cannot, I cannot make myself put a bullet anywhere near someone I love, because the last time I did that it ended the only family I had.
Freezing is the safe thing. Freezing is what the wound has trained into me for ten years.
If I freeze, maybe we negotiate, maybe there’s another way, maybe I don’t have to be the man holding the gun when she dies.
But I look at her face. She isn’t begging.
Her eyes find mine over his arm, steady, furious, alive, saying the thing she would say out loud if she could, which is do it, you idiot, I trust your hands, take the shot.
And I understand, in the space between two heartbeats, that the freeze is the thing that kills her.
That the safe choice, the no-risk choice, the one where I don’t have to be the one who fired, hands her to him.
That loving her is not a reason to keep my hands still.
It is the only reason on earth to make them steady.
So I do what I have not been able to do since I was a younger man with my brother’s blood on me.
I trust my hands.
I raise the gun. I do not think about Kostya.
I do not think about the angle or the dark or the smoke or the ten thousand nights this exact picture has jerked me awake.
I think about her. I let everything else go quiet, the way it used to go quiet before the worst day taught me to flinch.
I find the two inches of Timur that aren’t her, and I send the bullet exactly there.
It goes where I send it.
His head snaps back. The pistol drops away from her temple.
He is dead before his vain ruined face finishes its surprise.
He folds away from her, hits the concrete, and she is standing there untouched, swaying, whole, staring at me across the smoke with her hand coming up to where his gun just was.
There’s blood on her feet. Bare feet in a building full of glass, and she walked toward the guns on them.
I fired the gun I could never fire. And this time it saved the thing I love instead of taking it.
There’s no time to feel it. There’s a roar to my left. I turn, and there he is.
Gleb Morozov. The old wolf himself, out from whatever room he’d been running this from, an old pistol in his fist, his men dead or scattering around him.
He looks at me across the wreckage of his stronghold with the face of a man who genuinely cannot believe the upstart has come this far. He knew my father.
He has called me a usurper for years, a boy who climbed over his own blood to take a throne he had no right to, and the worst of it has always been that I half-believed him.
He took Crystal. He took Cynthia. He drew himself out of his city to break me with the two of them, and now his enforcer is dead at my woman’s feet, his house coming down around him.
He raises the old pistol. He’s slow. He’s sixty-one, slow, out of men, but the conviction in his face never wavers, because from where he stands he is still the rightful order and I am still the disease.
“Your father,” he begins.
He doesn’t get the sentence.
I don’t give him the shot. I cross the space between us before he can bring it up. I take it out of his hand. I do the thing I have wanted to do since a man put a gun to her head in the desert and started all of this. I do it myself.
Face to face, close, no crossfire, no proxy, no distance to hide behind, the way these things are meant to be answered in his old world and mine.
I look the man who started this war in the eyes.
I end him, and I end the war in the same motion, because a pakhan who kills the man calling him a usurper, with his own hands, in front of both their organizations, is a pakhan no one will ever again call a usurper.
The legitimacy I’ve bled for my whole life. It was never going to come from my father, or from a clean record, or from the child I didn’t know I’d have. It comes from this. From standing over Gleb Morozov in the ruins of his own stronghold and being the one still breathing.
Then it’s quiet. Not all the way, there’s still fire somewhere, still my men calling clear room to room, still the ringing of the last shots.
But the center of it goes quiet, a small still circle with me at the middle.
I stand there over the body of the man who should have been the most frightening thing in my life, and I wait to feel the thing I’ve always felt standing over my dead.
It doesn’t come. What comes instead is her name in my own head, just her name, the whole of my interior reduced to one word with smoke around it.
I turn, and she’s there. Cynthia. Barefoot in the smoke, filthy, shaking, alive, her hand on her stomach, her eyes on me.
Unhurt. Both of them unhurt, the two lives I was certain down to my bones that I would destroy the way I destroy everything I love, standing in front of me undestroyed, because for once in my life I did not freeze and I did not lose them.
The curse I have carried since the worst second of my life, the bone-certainty that loving a thing is a death sentence I sign for it, doesn’t break with a sound.
It just isn’t there anymore. I look at her standing in the wreckage with our child inside her and I understand, all at once, that the thing I believed about myself for ten years was a lie I told to keep from having to risk this.
I can love something and not kill it. I just proved it, with the gun I swore I’d never pick up again.
I go to her across the bodies and the smoke. I don’t say anything. There aren’t words yet, in either of my languages, for what just happened in me. I just put my hands on her face, careful, like she’s the only real thing left in a burning world.
“You’re late,” she rasps, smoke in her voice, her hands fisted in my shirt hard enough to tear it.
“Traffic,” I say. Her laugh breaks in the middle. I hold the breaking. She lets me, and we stand there in the ruin of Gleb Morozov’s stronghold, both of us alive, the war over, neither of us destroyed.
For the first time since I was a boy with a future, I’m holding something I love, and I’m not afraid it’s already dying in my hands.