Chapter 21
The air slams us the second we step out of the Hummer, iron and hot copper, the smell of blood sharp and bright like a fist to the face.
Bodies lie splayed against pallets and crates, faces turned to concrete.
Most of them have been cleanly shot. A few farther down have had their throats cut so clean the light catches like a blade.
Whoever did this left no mercy as a calling card.
There’s no room in me for hope. Only a narrower, meaner thing: fact-check. The dot on my phone is still where it has been for some time. That means she’s here. That’s both a promise and a threat.
My men split and peel into the dark, quick and silent. I move with purpose—no swagger, just momentum—toward a long hallway, the kind that eats sound. The back door is open; smoke curls out in a thin, patient thread. Gun out, I step into the room.
Fuck me.
She’s there, leaned against the table like she owns the light, cigarette hanging from her mouth, a pistol held like a prop in the other hand.
She looks ridiculous and impossible and bloody perfect.
For a second, everything else—the smoke, the bodies, the hole in my chest—collapses to an honest, stupid little relief that makes my knees forget how to hold me.
"Took you long enough, Marito," she states without surprise, taking a puff from the cigarette like a punctuation. I can’t help the grin. It cracks some of the armor off me because it’s everything stupid and true.
I step forward, hands wide in that careless way men do when they want to sweep someone into themselves. "Your handiwork?" I say, looking at the bodies.
"Wasn’t anybody here to help me."
"I didn't know you smoked."
She flicks ash at me. "Bad habits," she says, "die hard. Especially when you wait for your Uber."
I laugh into the smoke. My throat is a dry place. "You shouldn’t joke," I say. "You—"
"Cut the sermon," she snaps, but it’s a crack in her voice. She’s alive. "How's Nico?"
The grin dies on my face. She looks at me, and for half a second, the cigarette light is a confession. "He’s alive," I fill her in. "But he’s hurt. Bad."
She nods as if she'd expected as much.
I take her in, still not sure if I'm in awe of her or worried. There’s blood on her shirt where she’s pressed it, quick and bright.
"You’re bleeding," it almost sounds like an accusation.
"Nothing new," she shoots back, but the edge is gone, and for a moment she falters.
I see it—a flash of weariness, the way her knees want to fold.
My hands go from inspection to catching without thinking: one on her elbow, one at her waist, the world narrowing to the muscles I can feel tense under my palms.
"Don’t you do that," I say low, the words a snapped wire. "You scared the—God, Oksana, you scared me to death."
She stares at me like I’ve said something riotous and tender at once. Then she plucks a hair from my head.
"Ouch."
She holds it up between thumb and forefinger like a trophy. "Oh look," she says, mouth half-serious. "You’re turning gray."
For a ridiculous, furious second, I consider pulling her over my lap.
Then I see the way the cigarette smoke frames her face, the way the blood darkens the fabric at her hip, the way she is stubborn and furious and alive in a room of dead men, and I decide I’d rather kiss her into silence than try my luck.
I close the distance before my head can argue.
My mouth finds hers the way a man finds dry land, hungry and desperate, like an apology and a promise braided together.
She tastes of smoke and salt and something that makes my chest ache with the wrong sort of joy.
Her body folds into mine for a beat, then she pushes hard into my shoulder like she’s testing that I’m still solid.
"You’re impossible," I tell her, breath thick.
"And you’re slow," she mutters, but her fingers find the back of my neck and tug me closer. I let her, because tonight I will take my small, human victories where I can find them.
My phone buzzes in my palm, unknown string, known weight.
I answer. "Arsenyev."
"You found her," he says. Not a question.
"She’s fine," I tell him, eyes on Oksana as she tips ash into a saucer, gun still loose in her other hand. "She’s alive."
Grigori laughs—low, winter-cold. "There was no doubt in my mind. I had the satellite rearranged and watched the heat sources die one by one."
I stare at the ceiling, biting back a sound. "You what?" The motherfucker knew the whole time. I swear, something inventive, something Catholic.
Oksana snickers, smoke curling like punctuation. "You could have told him, brat," she says, all sweet poison.
"You kidding me? He’s lucky he’s alive. He lost you." On the line, Grigori lets loose a string of curses that sound like broken glass poured into velvet. He says something in Russian that I don’t understand, and it makes Oksana’s mouth curve.
"I like him alive with all his parts," she says, pleased, and I roll my eyes because, of course, that’s the bar tonight.
Oksana leans her hip into the table and raises her voice toward the phone. "Anything new on the Cells in our midst?"
Grigori’s answer is a knife put back on the table without a sheath.
"Nothing. Whoever they are, they know how to hide their tracks.
They ghost their comms, swap IMEIs like shirts.
I peel one layer, and there is another. It is inefficient.
" The last word is more dangerous than his curses.
"But I shut down the Dachal. I'm expecting the survivors to talk soon. "
It takes me only a moment to remember the Dachal, the still-operational training ground used by Voronin's Cells. Whoever was training the Cells knows who they are. This will be valuable information for the Pakhan and, maybe, for us.
I can hear him moving again, doors, keys, the architecture of a life that never sleeps.
"Good, keep us posted," Oksana looks paler than I like.
Before I can insist she hang up and let me take care of her, Grigori says, "And, Conti—"
"I know," I reply, because I need to beat him to it at least once tonight. "If anything happens to her, I’ll wish I were dead."
"Mm." A sound that might be approval if he’d ever admit to the emotion. "Keep her where you can see her."
"I’ll try," I say, glancing at Oksana, the blood at her side, the cigarette's ember painting her mouth like a sin I keep choosing. "She bites."
"That's why she lives," he says, and hangs up.
I pocket the phone. The room exhales. Oksana’s eyes find mine over the smoke.
"Well?" she asks.
"He was watching the whole time," I shake my head.
She grins, feral. "Of course he was."
I step in, take the cigarette from her fingers, take a long drag before I crush it in the saucer, and press my thumb to the edge of her bandage. "You’re getting stitched," I tell her. "Then we go home."
"Marito gets bossy after a rescue," she says, amused.
"Marito gets gray after a rescue," I mutter, and she laughs—low and alive.