Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Victor
The Koshkin estate is on the north side of the city.
It takes up half a block and has been in the family since Nikita’s father brought the organization to the city thirty years ago.
I’ve been here only once before, in a professional context, a dinner ending in a handshake that meant nothing more than deciding then and there that I would never trust Nikita Koshkin.
Now, here I am because he has the two people who matter most to me in this world.
David has wrapped my wound tightly enough to allow me to function, which is all I require right now. He had wanted me to go to the hospital, have the bullet pulled out, and have the wound tended to. I’d refused.
My men are positioned around the perimeter — more than I’d expected had answered the call to arms. These men are loyal to the Pakhan and would follow my orders to the grave. I told them to hold until I give the signal.
I go in the front door, with David and several others at my back. I want Nikita to see me coming. I want him to understand that I will come for my girls, no matter where they are. I want him to understand before a single word is spoken that there is nowhere on this earth that he’ll be safe from me.
The men inside react faster than I would like.
Two in the entryway, both armed, both moving the moment the door opens.
I take the first one out before he has finished pulling his weapon.
A throwing knife straight through his throat, my aim true, he goes down in seconds, sputtering as blood spurts from the wound.
David handles the second one. Two shots fired.
Signaling the men waiting at the perimeter that the siege was underway.
We move through the house, dispatching guards as we come across them.
I know the base layout from my visit, and David had pulled the schematics in the car on the way here.
Twelve rooms spread across two floors, security concentrated on the front and east side, which left the west corridor as the easiest access point for the rest of our men.
Yuri’s voice comes through my earpiece, crystal clear. “East side down. Two men. Stepan is moving to the second floor.”
“The girl?” I ask.
“Working on it,” he says. “She’s on the second floor. We’re almost there.”
I keep moving, listening as I clear rooms, careful as I turn corners.
The west corridor opens into the main reception area, which is where I find Nikita.
He has two men with him, a phone to his ear, that he lowers the moment he sees me.
A series of emotions plays across his face as he stares down the barrel of my gun — shock, evaluation, and combined with the composure of a man who has spent sixty years as the most powerful man in the room.
“She said you’d come,” he said, looking at the men behind me. “It seems I underestimated her. Again.”
“Where is she?”
David’s voice sounds in my ear, “We have Evie. She’s safe.”
Good, I think. Giving no external indication of the situation change.
“You have no right to be in this house,” he says instead of answering my question, “and you're bleeding on my floor.”
“Where is she?” I ask again, this time it comes out as a hiss, a veiled threat.
“Yarina or Evie?” It isn’t genuinely a question; it’s a taunt. “You have no claim —”
I raise the barrel a mere few centimeters and fire a round into the wall behind him. The bullet hisses past his cheek by millimeters.
“That’s the only warning you’re going to get,” I say. “Give them to me.”
“How dare you,” he protests. “You are violating every agreement that—”
“They are under my protection.”
“Your board will turn against you for this.” He counters. “They are Koshkin, the both of them. My property. Pavel will—”
“Pavel will do nothing.” I growl. “He is as good as dead, and now so are you.”
I fire the second shot into the floor at his feet, and the house comes alive. My men come through every entrance simultaneously – flooding the house with movement. They know exactly what to do.
The two men flanking Nikita step back, making the conscious decision to save their own skin over protecting their employer. Nikita looks around the room as it fills with people calculating his odds.
Then looks at me and makes the wrong decision.
He moves fast for a sixty-one-year-old man — I will give him that —he lunges for me, getting one hand on my wounded shoulder before I fully register that he’s moving, and the pain that produces is momentarily blinding.
Instinct drives me forward, grabbing him by the collar with both hands and shoving him against the nearest wall with a force that rattles the framed photographs on either side of him.
The impact forces the air from his lungs.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” I seethe, “where is my wife?”
I put my arm across his airway and apply just enough pressure to make it hard for him to breathe as he mutters, “Your wife?”
“Listen to me carefully, old man. The board,” I say, “watched me take a bullet moments after revealing a traitor this morning and stay standing.
They are not going to save you, “Yarina is my concern. Now you are going to tell me where she is, or I am going to take this house apart room by room until I find her, and I promise you I will leave nothing behind for you to rebuild with.”
He considers me for a long moment. Calculating just how serious I am.
“Eastern corridor,” he finally says. “Third door on the left.”
I release him, and he slumps against the wall, then straightens with the lost dignity of a man attempting to regain his composure. I stare at him for a long moment, deciding if I should kill him now or later, instinct screaming at me to find her first and deal with him later.
“You will answer for what you did to that child,” I tell him. My feet are already moving toward the hallway.
I move fast, my shoulder making its complaints in earnest now, and I push through the door without hesitation.
Relief moving through me when she is there — on the floor, her back against the wall, her knees pulled up tight against her chest, a cut above her eye, and dried blood at the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes find mine the moment I come through the door. I cross the room in three steps, and when she reaches for me, I pull her up and kiss her without a moment of hesitation.
It’s not gentle, not with the careful restraint of a man who has managed his emotions for weeks.
No, this kiss holds everything I should have done the last time I had the opportunity to do it.
She makes a sound against my mouth as her hands burrow into the collar of my jacket, and she kisses me back with everything she has.
Which, as I’ve noted before, is considerable.
Gunfire sounds down the hall, and I pull back just enough to look at her. The cut. The blood. The relief.
“Evie?” she asks.
“David has her,” I tell her. “He’ s bringing her out now.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” I take her face in my hands, and my shoulder protests with the movement. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Nothing serious,” she says. Which I don’t entirely believe. She looks at her hand, then it’s covered in my blood from where she’d rubbed against my shoulder. “Victor, you’re bleeding—”
“I’ll live,” I say. “Right now, we need to move.”
I take her by the hand and pull her behind me. The house is loud now — chaos as my men clear the rest of the house, meeting only mild resistance. I keep her close, hand in mine, moving toward the west corridor. We are almost to the reception room when a man comes out of the doorway to our left.
I let her go, putting my body between her and the threat. He’s large, armed, and has that expression that says he sees a target. But he hasn’t registered her presence yet, his eyes locked on mine. A gunshot echoes through the small space, and he goes down.
Confused, I turn to look at Alex, she’s standing with the gun in her hands — my gun, I realize – she looks at the man on the floor. Then at me.
“You really are my perfect match,” I tell her, smiling as the color climbs her face. “My wife.”
“Can we please have this conversation when we are not standing in a hallway full of death?”
“We can,” I say, taking the gun from her and grabbing her hand once more. We keep moving.
When we reach the reception room, Nikita is gone, an issue to be handled at a later date. We head for the front door, which still stands open. Down the steps, David is waiting with Evie beside him.
Alex makes a sound I have never heard from her before, the raw, pained sound of a mother reunited with her child.
She rushes down the steps as Evie climbs up them, and they meet in the middle.
I watch it happen at the top of the steps, my heart lighter than it has been since that night at the Onyx when this all began.
I take one step. And then my body gives, the pain, and exhaustion overriding my will to stay upright. And then there is nothing.