12. Mikhail
MIKHAIL
Darkness falls faster than I want it to—but the rain clouds are contributing to it.
The drive out to Ranon’s place is mostly dead space. By the time we turn off the main road, the sky’s gone fully black and the strip of gravel leading to the safehouse looks less like a driveway and more like a rut made by something that dragged itself out here to die.
“Kill the headlights,” I tell Sergey.
We coast the last fifty meters. Sergey’s knuckles are white on the wheel, lips set in a flat line. Veronica sits up stiff in the back seat, body straight as a ruler, eyes focused straight ahead.
I keep my hand on the Glock wedged between the seat and the door. The rain’s started up again—nothing heavy, just enough to flatten the weeds.
Ranon’s safehouse looks like a failed experiment in prefab housing. One story, no trim, the windows boarded from the inside with rough chipboard. There’s no car parked outside, but I can see a hairline of light under the front door.
“Stay here,” I say.
I open the door and pause for half a second before I get out of the car and do a slow loop around the building, watching for anything out of place.
Nothing wrong with the perimeter. Around back, cigarette smoke finds me before anything else does.
The rear deck is small and mossy and the boards are soft underfoot.
A glass ashtray on the railing with one butt still going.
Ranon is in a plastic chair just beyond it, almost invisible until the cigarette brightens and shows me his mouth.
He sees me before I see him. “Misha,” he says. Voice gravel, teeth yellow and even.
“Didn’t think you still smoked,” I say.
He huffs. “Only when I expect to die.”
“You expecting company?”
He shrugs, ashes into the dark. “You’re the one who texted me from an unknown number. That’s enough trouble to get anybody killed.” He stands, slow, creaking, and looks me over from boots to scalp. “You look like hell,” he says.
“You got space?”
He grins, which makes his beard split in two. “Hope she’s worth it.”
I didn’t say anything about a girl. Makes me wonder what he knows—maybe I don’t want to think about it.
We go in through the side door, and the inside is exactly what I expected: walls stained the color of coffee, insulation peeking from seams, the floor is plywood that matches the sheets nailed over the windows.
Nice to see a theme in the decor. Every surface is cluttered, but nothing is valuable. Even the lamps are garage-sale rejects.
Around the side of the house, the BMW’s doors slam. Sergey doesn’t like waiting. He brings Veronica into the house behind me. She doesn’t flinch at the smell—mold and cigarettes, with a top note of spent coffee grounds, but she looks nervous.
Ranon locks the door behind us. He’s a heavy man, but his movements are careful, his hands as steady as a surgeon’s. There’s a Tolya tattoo on his forearm, faded and spread with age. A true believer, once. Maybe still.
“You hungry?” he asks nobody in particular.
Sergey says, “Starving.”
He grunts, disappears into the galley kitchen, and comes back with a loaf of rye, a packet of deli meat, and some mustard. He drops it on the table. “Knock yourselves out.”
Sergey snorts, but starts making sandwiches. Something in our stomachs will help.
Veronica is surprisingly still. She’s been in some of the worst locations she’s probably ever seen in her life, but this one is the bottom of the barrel. My instinct is to take her somewhere better—somewhere clean.
Somewhere with white sheets, good food, and a soft mattress so we can fuck her properly…
The single bare bulb over the table hums with a bad ballast. In this light, everyone looks older and hungrier.
Ranon’s beard is silver except for the nicotine stains around his mouth.
Sergey’s tattooed knuckles are red and scabbing.
Veronica’s face is bruised, and there’s a scrape on her thigh, but the set of her mouth says she’s not here for anyone’s sympathy.
I wander the house, checking sightlines and counting seconds between headlights on the main road. There’s nobody coming. For now, anyway.
Back in the main room, Ranon has traded his cigarette for a glass of brown liquor. He drinks with two hands, elbows on the table. “How long you staying?” he asks.
“Just tonight,” I say. “We’ll leave before dawn.”
He nods, like he was hoping I’d say that.
Sergey sprawls in a chair, feet up on a milk crate and shoves the sandwich into his mouth. He eats like a man who hasn’t tasted food in a week. Every few bites, he glances at Veronica, like he’s making sure she doesn’t disappear if he blinks too long.
The girl is silent. She’s not scared, but she’s not relaxed, either. She sits on a half-broken chair with her hands folded in her lap, knees together, back perfectly straight. The only thing that moves is her eyes. There’s a sandwich on the table for her, but she doesn’t make a move toward it.
Does she ever eat?
At some point, Sergey asks about the route north, and Ranon gives a lazy answer—“take the old timber road, avoid the weigh station”—but there’s a hesitation in the way he says it. I see the flicker in Sergey’s face; he notices it, too.
He looks at me then, just for a second. I know what he’s thinking: Are we safe? Is he setting us up? Should we trust him?
I stare back and shake my head once, the barest movement.
Ranon fills the silence. “You want beds? There’s only two good cots. You can take the floor.”
“I’ll take the floor,” I say. “Let her have the cot.”
He grins again. “Gentleman.”
Sergey laughs, but it’s a hollow sound. “You’re not fooling anyone, Misha.”
Ranon shrugs, swallows his drink, and starts clearing the table. When he’s in the kitchen, Sergey leans in and lowers his voice.
“You see the way he’s acting?” he whispers.
I nod.
“He’s nervous. More than usual. You think he called it in?”
“Not yet,” I say. “But he’s thinking about it.”
Sergey glances at the window. “We should move now.”
“Too risky. They’ll be watching the roads. We wait for dark, then go.”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t argue.
Veronica stands and pads over to the window. She doesn’t touch the curtain, just looks through the crack between the plywood boards.
She turns away from the window and says, quietly, “He’s going to betray us.”
Sergey looks at me, waiting for the order. “Not yet,” I say. “Let him think he’s in control.”
She nods and doesn’t say anything else. Thankfully she finally eats the sandwich.
We settle in for the night. I set up by the front door, Sergey by the back, Veronica in the cot in the corner where she can see us both. Ranon disappears into the bathroom for a long time. When he returns, he’s humming a song under his breath, something old and sad.
For a few minutes, the safehouse feels like what it’s supposed to be—a place to breathe.
But I watch Ranon watch us, and I know the air is running out.
It happens just after three AM.
We’re in the living room, Sergey and I pretending to sleep, when the world outside flares white with headlights.
For half a second I think it could be a drunk driver, a lost hunter, anyone—then the boards over the window go black as something bigger blocks the light.
There’s no time to shout a warning before the gunfire starts.
The first shot rips the glass and timber over the window, and sends a spray of splinters across the room.
Veronica is closest; I see the cut of her cheek just before I dive for her, pinning her to the cot as a second round punches through and takes out the lamp.
The bulb explodes and plunges everything into darkness.
She doesn’t scream, but I clamp my hand over her mouth to keep her quiet.
They won’t stop just because she’s here.
Whoever is outside wants all of us dead.
Sergey overturns the kitchen table, drops behind it, and draws down. I roll off the cot with Veronica still under me and both of us hit the floor hard enough to knock the wind out of her lungs.
“Stay down,” I snarl as I drag her behind the battered dresser that’s been shoved against the wall. Bullets chew through plaster just above our heads. In the chaos, I can see Ranon’s chair is empty and the back door is swinging, banging against the frame in the wind.
Motherfucker.
I have enough time to register the betrayal, my jaw clenches so hard my teeth hurt, before there’s movement at the front of the house.
Two shapes, one tall and one built like a fireplug, hit the entry in tandem.
Sergey empties the clip at chest level and the smaller one goes down, red blooming across his shirt.
The other stumbles but keeps moving—Sergey grabs the legs of the table, pivots, and shoves it forward, pinning the man to the wall. He shoots him point-blank in the head.
The noise eats the air, leaves your ears ringing and your thoughts scattered. I pop up, return fire through the haze at the window, and see a pair of dark forms duck behind the shell of a ruined sedan out front. Veronica is crawling for the kitchen.
I slide after her, trying to get us out of the kill box. More gunfire from the back—someone has circled to the side door. I yell, “Sergey—back entrance!” but he’s already moving, his boots pounding the linoleum as he cuts around the hall.
I get Veronica to the edge of the kitchen counter just as two men in full tactical gear bust through the door. I aim for center mass and squeeze off three rounds—one misses, two hit, both men stagger but do not go down. I hear the click of their safeties flipping from semi to full.
“Stay down!” I shout, and throw myself onto Veronica as the kitchen erupts with a fresh volley. Ceramic shatters, plastic spatters, the fridge jumps on its hinges as rounds chew through it. In the confusion, I hear Sergey scream—a deep, raw sound—and then the thump of bodies hitting the floor.