Chapter 38 - Lev
Lev
The point man goes first. He clears the landing, turns left, and the flashbang detonates two meters from his face before I’ve finished the turn behind him.
The concussive blast swallows everything. I catch the wall with one hand and keep moving before my ears stop ringing, because stopping is how you die, and Frol’s men pour out of the corridor from both sides before the smoke has cleared.
The ambush is clean. I’ll give him that much.
They split our unit in the first ten seconds, cutting the Kozlov soldiers behind me off from the three of us in front.
My radio takes a round in the exchange, shatters against my vest, and goes silent.
I don’t stop to assess it. I drop one of Frol’s men coming from the left, grab cover behind a doorframe, and register Ruslan to my right.
He’s on his feet.
There’s blood running down his left arm from somewhere above the elbow, soaking through his sleeve, but his right hand is steady and he’s already moved to block the stairwell entrance with his body, holding the position so I can push forward. He catches my eye across the corridor.
“Go,” he says.
I go.
The next twenty minutes run together the way they always do when things go wrong and you stop having the luxury of thinking and start running on training alone.
I clear rooms with two Kozlov soldiers whose names I don’t know and who move without hesitation every time I point.
Three more of Frol’s men go down on the second floor.
Another two on the third. Somewhere below us, I can hear the sounds of Boris’s teams breaching the ground level, which means the building is being closed from the bottom up.
I don’t stop to count the cost of any of it.
There’s no time. You move, you clear, you move again, and you don’t look at what you leave behind until it’s over.
One of the Kozlov soldiers takes a graze to the shoulder on the third floor landing and doesn’t stop moving.
The other one covers him without being asked, no instruction needed, and it keeps both of them alive long enough to reach the interior stairs to the fourth floor.
The landing is narrow, turning back on itself before opening into a short corridor with four doors. I come around the corner and find Frol at the end of it.
He’s alone. He lost his radio somewhere in the chaos, or he chose to ditch it, and he’s standing there with blood on his jacket and the look of a man who knew this was coming and decided to meet it on his feet rather than running.
I tell the two Kozlov soldiers to hold the stairs.
Frol watches me make my way toward him. “You really went through with it.”
“I gave you a choice between your life and his war. You picked wrong.”
“Did I?” He looks at me with a sort of tired clarity, like a man who’s been carrying a position he stopped believing in and is finally setting it down.
“You think Dmitri Kozlov is going to let you walk out of this alive? You handed him everything, Lev. He’ll use it, and then he’ll use you, and when you’re done being useful he’ll put you in the ground and tell Polina Kozlov it was her father’s people who did it. ”
“You could have left,” I say. “I gave you the chance.”
“So did he.” He tilts his head toward the ceiling, toward the floor above us where our father is behind a locked door. “He gave me the chance to be the one who brought you back. I didn’t take it.”
He moves first. That’s always been Frol’s problem; he thinks aggression is the same thing as advantage.
He comes fast and hard, and I let him get close enough to feel certain about it before I redirect his momentum and drive him into the wall.
He recovers faster than I expect and catches me across the jaw with an elbow on the way back up. I taste copper and keep moving.
We go at it for longer than it should take, because we grew up learning the same things from the same men and we both know how the other one moves.
He gets his arm around my throat from behind and wrenches, and I drop my weight and throw him forward over my hip.
He hits the railing hard, and I’m on him before he’s finished bouncing, with one forearm across his chest and my weight pinning him against the metal.
We’re both heaving in air and grunting and growling. Like when we were kids grappling, only this time, the stakes are insanely higher.
“It’s over,” I tell him through clenched teeth.
Frol spits blood onto the floor and says, “Traitor.”
“Loyalty to a man who murders women makes you complicit.”
Boris’s men arrive from the stairwell thirty seconds later and take Frol off my hands, beaten but breathing, which is more than he offered Polina.
I watch them lead him down the corridor and don’t feel what I expected to feel.
There’s nothing satisfying about what just happened between us, and I doubt there ever will be, but I don’t have time to think on it.
I turn for the stairs. My father’s office is on the third floor, east end, behind the only door on this property that locks from the inside.
I’ve stood outside it more times than I can count, waiting to be called in, waiting to be assessed and assigned and told what I was worth that week.
I know exactly how long it takes to reach it from the landing, because I counted the steps once when I was twelve and never forgot the number.
The corridor is clear when I reach the third floor. Two of Boris’s men are posted at the far end, and one of them nods when he sees me coming. I don’t knock. I test the handle, find it unlocked, and push the door open.
My father is behind his desk.
He’s in his full suit jacket, which he always wears when he wants a room to feel like a verdict.
The pistol in his hand is aimed at the door, and his face, when he sees me, doesn’t change the way another man’s might.
He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look afraid.
He looks the way he’s always looked at me, like he’s doing the math on whether I’m useful today.
“Lev,” he says.
“Put the gun down,” I tell him.
“You’ve made quite a mess of things.”
“I’ve cleaned up your mess for fourteen years. Call it even.”
Something moves in his face at that. Not remorse. Something closer to acknowledgment, which from Vadim Morozov is the only version of honesty I ever expected to get.
“I built something here,” he insists. “Something that will outlast both of us.”
“You built it on bodies. Including the ones you put there yourself.”
He doesn’t deny it. That’s the thing about my father.
He’s never needed to deny anything because he’s never believed he owed anyone an explanation.
The pistol doesn’t move. He looks at me across the desk like I’m a problem he should have resolved earlier, and for one brief second, I see the version of tonight where he did exactly that, where he got ahead of it before I made it to his gates. It’s not a comfortable thought.
He stands then, slowly, and the gun comes with him. Something in his face has changed. The control I’ve known my entire life is gone, replaced by something that looks borderline unhinged. His eyes are bright with a light that doesn’t belong to a man in control of anything.
“You want to know something?” Something in the tone of his voice raises every hair on the back of my neck. “I knew from the moment you were born that you’d be the one to do this. I should have handled it then.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“The woman,” he continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “The surgeon. She’s pregnant, isn’t she? A child is very useful. Perhaps I could do a better job training them than I did you. All I’d have to do is get my hands on that pretty little Kozlov and—”
“You touch her, and this ends with you dead.”
“Mm.” He considers this like a man weighing a mildly interesting proposal. “The problem, Lev, is that you’ve never been able to stop me from doing anything. Not once. Not when it mattered.”
He raises the gun, but I’m faster.
One shot. He drops behind the desk, and the room goes quiet. I stand in the doorway of the office where I spent my entire childhood being told I would never be enough, and I wait for something to arrive—grief, relief, some sense of hollowness that one expects to follow something this final.
What arrives is silence.
I stay in the doorway for another ten seconds, then turn and walk out. There’s nothing left in that room for me.
A Kozlov soldier is posted in the corridor, and I can hear Boris’s team barging up the stairs. The bastard probably thinks I’ve defected by now. I hold out my hand toward him.
“Radio.”
He unclips it from his vest without question and passes it over. I key the channel Boris has been running all morning.
“It’s Lev. Compound secured. Pakhan down.”
There’s a short pause before Boris’s voice comes back, and for once, it carries something that sounds almost like relief underneath. “Copy that. Confirmed clear on all floors?”
“The fourth floor is still hot. East corridor on two needs someone posted.”
“We’ll take care of it. Get out.”
I hand the radio back to the soldier and head for the stairs.
The ground floor is controlled chaos. Boris’s men move through it with the hard efficiency of cleanup, not combat.
Someone calls my name when I pass the main entrance, and I lift a hand without stopping.
Outside, the morning is bright and cold, and the compound grounds are a grid of Kozlov and Morozov men in various states of surrender, custody, and assistance.
I walk past all of it and don’t look too closely at any of it, because there’s an accounting that comes with this kind of morning, and I’ll have to sit with it eventually, but not yet.
Ruslan is sitting on the steps of the east outbuilding with his arm wrapped in field dressing that someone applied badly. Definitely not Polina’s work. He looks up when I come down the front steps.
“Frol?” he asks.
“Alive. Boris has him.”
He nods once and winces as he adjusts the arm. “Your father?”
I press my lips into a thin line and nod back. “Done.”
He nods again, slower this time, and doesn’t ask me how I am, which is the right call. Right now isn’t the time to unpack all that.
“There’s a vehicle waiting at the east gate,” he tells me. “Boris arranged it.”
“Give me a minute.”
I walk to the gate and look out at the road running northeast. Sometime in the last hour, I stopped wondering whether I was coming back, and the only person I want to tell is three kilometers away.
I don’t wait for the vehicle. I start walking.
The road is straight and flat, and the morning has gone eerily quiet.
My ears are still ringing from the flashbang.
My jaw aches where Frol’s elbow landed. None of it matters as much as the forward position coming into view around the next bend, and the woman waiting there with no way to know if I was coming back.
She told me to come back. She threw my own words at me like a demand, and I held onto those words through every floor of that building.
I’m two hundred meters down the road when I see her.
She’s already running.
I don’t know how long she’s been moving, but she’s running toward me with her coat open and her hair loose and no medical bag, which means she left in a hurry, and that does more damage to me than the entire firefight managed to do.
I catch her when she reaches me, and neither of us lets go.
She doesn’t say anything at first. Neither do I. She has both arms around my neck and her face buried against my shoulder, and I can feel her breathing in short, uneven pulls.
“You’re bleeding,” she observes with a gasp.
“It’s not mine.”
Her eyes are red at the rims, and she reaches up and traces her fingers along my jaw where Frol’s elbow connected, checking the damage. I catch her hand and hold it against my face.
“I’m all right,” I tell her.
“Boris stopped answering about you. The radio went quiet and nobody had eyes on you and I—” She stops, swallows, then tries again. “I thought…Don’t ever do that to me again.”
I can’t stop the smile that spreads across my face. “I’m sorry.”
Something in her face gives way, and she blurts out, “I love you. I didn’t plan to say that standing in the middle of a road. But there it is.”
I pull her back against me and kiss the top of her head, holding her there. “I love you. I’ve loved you since before I had the right to. Since before you knew my name.”
She giggles and shakes her head. “This is going to be a very strange story to tell our child.”
“We’ll leave out some parts.”
She tips her face up, and I kiss her there, still surrounded by chaos and the residuals of war.
As we start walking back together, I know that a year from now, I won’t be able to tell you the exact words she used. But I’ll remember this road. The cold. The quiet. The way she looked at me after she said it, like she was waiting to see what I’d do with it.
Now she knows.