CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When we flew out the door, a man stepped out of the middle SUV, and it wasn’t Tarasovich.
“Petrov?” someone blurted, drawing me from the spinning loop of betrayal my mind had fallen into.
There, standing tall in a fitted pinstripe suit, was Vasily Petrov. For a second, my brain superimposed a younger, more feminine version of the lithe, light-haired man with striking ice-blue orbs atop him. A blink later, and Natasia’s memory vanished, leaving a clear view of her father, who was smiling at me.
“Looks like we’re right on time, lisichka. Climb in.” Petrov’s gaze landed on Paride and narrowed. “Except you. You can stay here to greet your friends.”
I paused, halfway in the backseat with Payton and Aleks on either side of me. “What?”
If I’d been expecting Paride to make some big fuss or deny Petrov’s implication, I would have been sorely disappointed.
Paride backed up two steps, raising his hands in the air. “Fair enough.”
The floor fell out beneath me, and my brain refused to deal with any other complications at this point because all I could do was gaze dumbly at their stare down.
“I should kill you,” Petrov stated as if it were a matter of fact.
That spurred me out of my daze. “What? No! You can’t—”
“I’m CIA, Callie. The jig is up,” Paride cut me off. “Your friend obviously knew that.”
All this time, we’d suspected something was wrong with his ability to shuttle us between countries while flying under the radar, but the revelations still punched like a blow out of left field.
Come on, brain!
“But he—”
“Kept you ahead of the CIA by one step, and one step only?” Petrov spit on the pavement. “You and your team are welcome to come, Callie, but the musor can stay.”
Paride sighed. “Get in the car, Callie. I’ll land on my feet.”
I blinked at him. He’d risked his life to save Bryce, or had that all been a carefully constructed ploy? Another booming echo reverberated through the abandoned building.
Paride glanced in the direction of the noise, his fists clenching. “Go on. Go!”
The halves of my brain refused to connect, so Aleks hoisted me from the ground and plopped me in the car. Payton joined us, the doors shut, and the vehicle pulled away.
Fear sparked as I turned in the seat. “The others!”
“They are in the other two vehicles, luv,” Payton soothed, his hand cradling mine.
“Except for Paride,” I murmured, staring at the Italian watching our vehicles leave before some commotion from the building drew his attention. In a blink, he’d taken off on foot in the opposite direction—away from the warehouse.
Did that mean the CIA had backed off, and he was staying far from sight of the locals, or was he running from his own colleagues?
My head pounded.
“Whatever happens, he was right,” Payton consoled. “He owned all the resources. Mr. Coppola will be fine, luv.”
That was true, and I eased my death grip, finally taking a breath to glance around the interior. The SUVs looked normal on the outside, but they’d been custom built. Instead of the typical cargo and two rows of seating, the layout resembled a limousine. I was surprised to realize how many of the faces I recognized.
“Lisichka, in your last email, you said your father was with you.” Petrov’s careful statement had my lungs constricting in on themselves once more.
“He won’t be joining us,” I intoned, staring at the floorboard.
The racetrack in my mind looped endlessly—I had a sister out there working with Tarasovich, my dad had sabotaged my efforts to fight against the people actively threatening my team, and… Paride was CIA and therefore the… bad guy?
“Why not, little fox?” a familiar voice asked.
I glanced up, racking my brain for his name. There’d been a couple of Petrov’s men who I primarily worked with—his inner circle, it seemed. A pair of the four sat in the back with us and the other two were up front in the driver’s and passenger’s seats.
Petrov cleared his throat. “I’m sure you don’t need the introductions. You remember Leonidas, yes?”
I froze. “Wait, Leonidas?”
A dimple popped out on Leo’s cheek. “Yes, my full name, I’m afraid. Leonidas Balaskas. Don’t worry, little fox, you can still call me Leo,” he teased with a wink.
Placing a soothing hand on Aleks’s arm to prevent him from reaching across the compact cabin and strangling the man, I replied, “But… But that name is…”
“Greek?” His smile stretched wider. “Yes, funnily enough, I was aware.”
“Don’t bait her, Leonidas,” Petrov chided. “She just discovered that someone she trusted was deceiving her.”
My head turned in his direction, feeling like I made the motion through water, thick with darkness. “But I didn’t trust my sister.”
Petrov’s eyebrows rose. “You have a sister?”
“It was news to me too.”
“And she betrayed you recently?”
A laugh escaped, but it was broken and hollow. “Yes, I would say she did.”
When I didn’t explain further, Petrov shifted his attention to Payton. That was fine by me. I wanted nothing more than to bury my head in the sand.
“She learned of her sister about five minutes ago, but only because we revealed she’s the hacker working with Tarasovich.”
Leo winced. “My boss might not like that.”
Petrov was sitting right beside him, so the statement confused my fragile grasp on reality. “Your boss?”
“Yeah, you see he’s—”
“Someone willing to help, for the moment,” Petrov inserted with a measuring glare at Leo. “I shall handle him.”
“I’m just calling it like it is. He’s not known as Ares for nothing. Anyone associated with Tarasovich, no matter how tenuous the link, will fall prey to his retribution. He—”
“Will deal with me as I said,” Petrov repeated, his eyes turning glacial before thawing as they returned to me. “Don’t worry, Callie. I’ll ensure that Leo’s boss understands the situation. As long as you do nothing to piss off the god of wrath directly, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“And if we do?” Payton prodded carefully.
Petrov hesitated for a moment. “I attended a birthday party for his only daughter this past December. Some very stupid or grossly uninformed people tried to cause her harm. It ended in a massacre with Ares ankle deep in the blood of a dozen men.”
Aleks, who’d been keeping a close eye on the car’s occupants, diverted his sole focus to Leo for a moment.
Leo shrugged, spreading his arms wide. “There’s something about only daughters that drive fathers crazy, am I right?”
Was that what happened with my dad? I hadn’t even been able to address him as my dad to his face. Maybe the distance was mutual. Perhaps he really considered himself the dad of a single daughter, and I was nothing more than a stranger when it boiled down to making the hard choice between the pair of us.
Petrov must have been watching the play of emotions as they crossed my features. “So you discovered you have a sister, and now your father is absent.”
How simple he made it sound.
“He betrayed you?” Petrov guessed, observing my silence.
“Yeah,” I croaked.
Payton’s hand shifted to rub my arm. “Luv, are you certain? It’s still less than stellar, but perhaps he needed a moment, noticed the authorities closing in, and ran.”
“The second he recognized a certain identifier buried within the hacker’s malware, a trick he’d taught me, he knew it had to be her. He must have shown her the same techniques. That’s how she stayed ahead of us and anticipated our reactions. My dad practically shared our playbook. I have to assume she knows everything he shared with me.”
Payton scratched his chin. “Ah, that makes sense. Go on.”
“Another trick that was Callum’s specialty was hiding and camouflaging exits, which was why I couldn’t safely disconnect ALPHA from the computers and I destroyed all the data.”
“ALPHA?” Leo muttered.
“Automated Linking Program for Hacker Authorization. We keep losing all control when my s-sister hits, and ALPHA was supposed to be the key, but my dad protected her and made us lose the sole lead we had.” My voice rose until I was all but shouting by the end.
“This might be a stupid question, but did you just try unplugging it?” Joe, another individual from Petrov’s crew—or at least I had assumed before but wasn’t so certain about now—quipped.
“Unplugging it without properly going through the steps enacted the sleeper protocol, a dead man’s switch, if you will. It was supposed to be a failsafe in case the hack—my sister—gained control. I could unplug it, and then she wouldn’t be able to pick our new battle strategy apart at her leisure, or if we were ambushed and had to move, we’d just disconnect and fry everything while keeping our secrets.”
“Your father knew this and purposely sabotaged that plan.”
I nodded at Leo’s question.
“He stopped you from tracking your sister—and Tarasovich—destroyed your ALPHA thingy, and now you’re back to square one.” Leo tilted his head. “What a bitch.”
“Well, not all is lost, lisichka. We have Leo’s boss on our side, giving his full backing, and his resources rival my own.”
Leo snorted. “Please. Until Callie basically handed you Russia on a gilded platter when she took out Ivanov, you were little more than a middleman.”
“The key word in your statement being ‘were,’” Petrov reminded him with a dangerous glint. “Keep that in mind, young Leonidas. I contacted Ares, not for assistance, but as a courtesy because my sources informed me about what nearly occurred to his daughter at Tarasovich’s hand.”
I blinked, and neurons crackled in the recesses of my mind. “His daughter? The only person to escape Tarasovich was… Are you saying that this guy’s daughter is the firefighter who nearly died along with an agent from one of Delta’s secret sister agencies?”
“Yes, the same.”
“And she just happens to have this super powerful dad?”
Petrov smiled. “Is it that surprising, lisichka?You have several powerful people in your pocket as well.”
“Hm.”
Leo reclined in his seat. The interior of the car was dim, but my eyes lingered on the dark tint of his skin, the telltale hues of golden olive.
“Ares is another Greek name, even if it’s a moniker,” I began.
Leo switched his focus to me. “It is.”
“Your Russian is flawless,” I complimented him.
“Much better than my English, though I’ve gotten a lot of practice in that department lately.”
“You had me convinced you were Petrov’s flunky.”
“I resent that, little fox,” Joe interrupted.
I ignored him. Leo did too. “It was a suitable cover when we began mixing with so many government types in the quest to see Ivanov brought to his knees.”
“Lisichka,” Petrov murmured, “I know you have a curious, analytical mind, and you make connections faster than a spring snow crashing down a mountain, but I implore you, curb that curiosity when you meet Leo’s boss.”
My spine snapped straight. “We’re going to meet him?”
“He’s in the vehicle behind us,” Petrov informed me by way of an answer.
Our team members were in that car. Were they okay?
I turned in that direction, but Petrov shifted to block my view out the rear window. “Promise me, little fox,” he pleaded in Russian.
Leo sat there, as unimposing and innocent as he always seemed, despite his substantial frame. Just who was he mixed up with, and who had we gotten in bed with by jumping in Petrov’s car?
“Okay,” I acquiesced on a whisper of a breath.
I was afraid to know the answer.
The car slowed, pulling me from my exhausted sleep. I’d passed out leaning against Aleks’s shoulder, but he must have shifted my head to his lap at some point because the world was sideways as my eyes dragged open, groggy from being disturbed.
Then I recalled everything that had happened in such a brief time span, and I wondered if the splitting headache should be credited to the heaping pile of manure life kept shoveling on.
“Where are we?” I murmured, embarrassed I’d lost consciousness in front of such dangerous acquaintances.
“My own, personal saklya,” Petrov answered. “You fell asleep before we left the city limits, so we figured you needed a moment to recover.”
I glanced out the window, taking in the foreign terrain with pale dust dotted with scatterings of dry brush and white sage. A sharp, oxbow-shaped bay lay not far off, nested with buildings and homes built into the sloping hill on stepped levels.
“Wait, I know this place. That’s Balaklava Bay. How long was I asleep for?” I asked because we were in a different country entirely. Heck, depending on what way they’d taken, we’d left Russia, somehow passed through Ukrainian borders—twice—before entering Crimea, and I slumbered through it all. Balaklava Bay sat on the southernmost tip of Crimea, kissing the Black Sea. It had to be more than a twenty-hour drive from our starting point.
“About eight hours. We traveled by jet for the lion’s leg of the journey. You didn’t wake once,” Payton intoned, and I caught the concerned furrow of his eyebrows.
“What? There’s no way I slept through—” The sight of Bryce drew me up short. Only Aleks and Payton rode in this SUV before, so the new addition lent credence to the possibility of me somehow snoozing through both the boarding and deboarding of an international flight.
Leo was still here, and he laughed. “Yeah, now you can see why we decided on needing time to recoup. I’d also like to add that you were within five feet of the god of wrath, and you didn’t sense his presence, which says a lot about your danger meter. How’d you survive your childhood, little fox?”
“By sleeping when I could,” I retorted.
He brought his hands up in a sign of surrender. “Hey, don’t bite my head off because you missed the onboard breakfast service.”
Aleks nudged me. “I save you crepes, medvezhonok. Don’t listen to stupid Greek man.”
“I resent that,” Leo said, but he was smiling.
As I devoured the crepes filled with decadent chocolate hazelnut spread, I noted the tall gates we were approaching, leading to a long driveway with poor visibility because it’d been carved through the hilly terrain to snake through the miniature valleys. A person couldn’t see farther than the next bend in the road.
What had to be the tallest trees amidst the barren vegetation lined either side, with their roots twisting out through the sharp ledges.
“So you settled your home base in Crimea?” I asked.
Petrov nodded and glanced around, as if attempting to appreciate his home from my perspective. “It seemed smart. I was close enough to control Russia but outside her borders in case any Ivanov loyalists sought revenge. Plus, I find the history of the Crimean wars, particularly the one here in Balaklava, to be intriguing.”
“The Battle of the Light Brigade?” Bryce guessed.
“Yes, of course. All of those British cavalry knew their horses would do nothing against the Russian weaponry sitting pretty behind their fortified shelters, but they fought on anyway because those were their marching orders.” Petrov eyed Bryce with an assessing gaze. “You’re well read for an American.”
“I had private tutors in every subject,” was Bryce’s reply.
“Hm. Not as many people are aware of this, but the British gained control for a short time. They lost two thirds of their people to the slaughter, so they had to retreat almost immediately, but it’s difficult to find that amount of loyalty and valor these days.” After a moment of introspection, he turned in Leo’s direction. “Of course, Crimea also had the added bonus of being closer to what was a very promising ally in young Leo’s boss.”
I briefly scanned the car at the mention of this Greek boss again. “You guys have been building this man up quite a bit. I’d hate to be disappointed when I finally meet the real thing, and he doesn’t live up to this reputation you’ve boasted about.”
Leo laughed. “Oh, that’s funny. My boss not living up to his reputation? Have you so quickly forgotten the story Petrov told about the birthday event where people broke in to bring Ares’s daughter harm? The massacre?”
How could I forget that? “I remember…”
“He confronted those men with nothing more than their own weapons. To be fair, one wielded a katana, so that might have helped with the bloodbath, and the only thing stronger than my boss’s versatility with handling weapons is his ability to hold grudges.”
Goosebumps dotted my arms. I’d been asleep near the man and hadn’t noticed a thing. Perhaps Leo was right. Maybe that was why I ended up in such sticky situations so often. Being raised by criminals had broken my danger sensor.
“Keep that in mind when you meet him,” Leo finished, turning as the supposed saklya came into view.
Most people thought of dwellings built into the hillside using local materials—mud, rock, trees—and while the structure up ahead certainly boasted the sun-bleached sandstone and boulders sourced from the nearby Crimean Mountains, it hadn’t been done out of poverty driven necessity.
“That’s not a saklya. That’s a mansion fit for a president,” I murmured, but Petrov heard me and laughed.
“I did take some inspiration from the Genoese fortress overlooking Balaklava Bay. Callie and team, welcome to Saklya Petrov.”