Chapter 24
MILO
For the next few days, she slept fitfully off and on throughout the day as the last of the drugs left her system, living on nothing but coffee and Tylenol and whatever she could suck through a straw.
But tonight, I finally got her to eat at dinner.
Just some stew that came out of a can and a slice of bread and butter, but it was something and hearty enough to help her body heal.
She finally fell into a deep sleep around ten, with a little help from me added into her drink to make sure she stayed that way for awhile.
I sat in the chair beside the bed and watched her breathe. Counted the inhales and exhales. Measured the spaces between. Listened for any irregularity, any hitch or gurgling, any sign that something inside her had broken in a way the doctor couldn't see.
Her breathing was steady. Slow and deep. The kind of sleep that comes after the body has been pushed past its limit and finally collapses into something between peace and exhaustion.
I knew the feeling well, and I wished I could join her.
She'd turned on her side again, away from me, the blanket pulled up to her chin. Even in sleep, she'd angled herself away so her body was protecting itself from me even while unconscious.
I sat there for another hour, trying to ignore the ache in my chest. Making sure she was under. Making sure the sleep was real and not the shallow, fitful kind where a creaking floorboard or a closing door would pull her back to the surface.
Then I slowly stood, shifting my weight off the chair in increments so the frame wouldn't groan.
At the back door, I stopped and looked back at her.
The bruises on her face had darkened. Even in the dim light from the kitchen, I could see the swollen ridge of her cheekbone, the split above her eyebrow held together with butterfly bandages, the shadow along her jaw where my fist had connected hard enough to rattle her teeth.
Her hands were tucked under her chin, fingers curled, like she was holding something invisible against her chest.
My jaw ached. I unclenched it. Clenched it again.
She was safe. The cabin was remote, the locks were solid, and the doctor was twenty minutes away if anything went wrong. I'd left water, food, and a burner phone on the nightstand, right where her hand would find it, just in case she woke up before I got back.
I pulled the door shut behind me and walked to the car in the dark.
The South Dakota night sky was cold and black and enormous, with stars everywhere.
No light pollution. The kind of sky that made you feel like the only person left on the planet.
No sound except the wind whistling through the pines and the crunch of my boots on frozen dirt.
I got in the car.
For most of my life, I'd cleaned up death.
Scrubbed it off floors, dissolved it in drums, burned it in buildings, made it disappear so completely that the people who'd caused it could sleep at night.
I'd never been on the other side of that equation.
Never wanted to be. The men who made the messes were sloppy, emotional, driven by rage or greed or ego.
They were amateurs playing at power and leaving evidence like breadcrumbs for men like me to sweep up before the cops did.
I wasn't going to be sloppy. I wasn't going to be emotional.
I was going to be the cleanest mess anyone never found.
The engine coughed, caught, and settled into a rough idle. I pulled out of the clearing and onto the dirt road that led to the highway and the airport.
It was a two and a half hour flight to Austin with a reservation made under my new name and documents that proved I was that person. My guy had come through for me just in time.
Just enough time to plan everything out.
I thought about Dmitri first.
Dmitri Orlov. Thirty-six. Former FSB. Ran surveillance for the Austin cell and reported directly to Konstantin.
He was the one who'd noticed Raven. Who'd sat in that restaurant night after night and counted her pauses and catalogued her silences and decided that a blind woman sitting at a piano was more dangerous than the men with guns.
He was right, probably. But that didn't matter.
Dmitri lived alone in a condo off South Congress.
Second floor. No doorman, no cameras in the stairwell.
I knew because I'd checked the building's security system two years ago after a cleanup on the third floor.
The lock was a Schlage deadbolt that could be picked in under thirty seconds with the right tension wrench.
It was very likely that, much like me, he kept a gun in his nightstand and a knife taped under the kitchen counter, but neither would do him any good if he didn't hear me come in.
And he wouldn't hear me.
Next was Konstantin.
Konstantin Volkov. Fifty-three. Moscow-trained.
Cold, methodical, patient as a glacier. He'd arrived in Austin a couple weeks ago, and he was staying at a rental property in Westlake.
It was a gated community with private security that checked IDs at the entrance and drove a golf cart around the perimeter every ninety minutes.
Two armed men inside the house at all times, working in shifts.
But Konstantin had a weakness. The same weakness every man who thinks he's untouchable eventually develops.
Routine.
Every morning at 5:45 AM, he walked to the back patio, smoked his pipe, and read intelligence reports for exactly forty minutes. Alone. The patio was screened from the neighbors by a stone wall and a row of Italian cypresses.
I knew this because I'd watched his house from a rental car for three consecutive mornings before the order came down on Raven, planning ahead for a possibility I'd been hoping wouldn't come. The cleaner in me had already mapped the entries, the exits, the blind spots, and the rotation schedules.
Cleaning up after these men for years had taught me all their secrets. Where they lived, what they drove, which doors they locked and which ones they didn't.
Then Viktor.
I was saving Viktor for last, because Viktor was personal.
Viktor Smirnov. The man who'd sat in that metal chair, ten feet from the woman I loved, and watched me beat her with the detached interest of a man watching a boxing match he had money on.
Who'd smoked his cigarettes and critiqued my technique and told me to finish it the way you'd tell a waiter to bring the check.
Who'd leaned over her body and checked her breathing with the back of his hand and said It's done with something that almost sounded gentle, like he was doing me a fucking favor.
Viktor, who'd given me the order to watch Raven in the first place. Who'd set the whole thing in motion the night she walked through blood he'd left in an alley and I'd argued for her life and he'd granted it like a king granting a stay of execution.
Viktor, who thought he owned me because he paid me.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel.
A few hours was a long time to sit with what I was about to become.
Again.
I reached Austin just after two in the morning.
There was a nondescript Chevy waiting for me with plates that couldn't be traced.
One last favor I'd called in before I disappeared completely.
There was a duffel in the trunk with gloves, bleach, a change of clothes, zip ties, a Glock 19 with the serial number ground off, and a knife I'd owned for eleven years that had never been used on a living person and never thought I'd see again.
Dmitri first.
I parked two blocks from his building. The neighborhood was quiet. The restaurants closed, bars winding down, the sidewalks empty except for a couple walking a dog.
I sat and waited for them to pass, then got out.
Gloves on. Cap low. Dark clothes, dark shoes, nothing reflective. I moved the way I'd always moved through other people's crime scenes. Deliberately, efficiently, like I had every right to be there.
The building's side entrance had a keypad. The code hadn't been changed since the third-floor job. Four digits, and I was inside. The stairwell was concrete and musty. Still no cameras.
Second floor. Third door on the left. I stood outside and listened.
A television was on with the volume low. Some Russian talk show with a lot of shouting. Beneath it, the rhythmic creak of a recliner and the faint click of a laptop keyboard.
He was awake. That made it slightly more complicated and significantly more satisfying, although satisfaction wasn't the point.
Efficiency was the point.
I picked the lock in twenty-two seconds. The deadbolt turned with a soft click that was swallowed by the television noise. I eased the door open three inches and waited. The sound didn't change. He hadn't heard.
The layout was a standard one-bedroom. Kitchen to the right, living room straight ahead, bedroom and bath to the left. From the angle of the door, I could see the blue glow of the television reflecting off the far wall and the back of a recliner.
I stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind me, one inch at a time, until the latch caught with a sound no louder than a breath.
The apartment smelled like reheated food and cigarettes and the faint chemical sweetness of gun oil. Dmitri was a careful man. He maintained his weapons. He watched his surroundings.
But he didn't watch his back.
Not tonight.
I crossed the kitchen in four steps, avoiding the linoleum seam where the flooring buckled slightly—a trip hazard I'd noticed from the doorway.
The living room carpet was thin and didn't creak.
I came around the side of the recliner in a smooth arc, staying out of his peripheral vision and coming up behind him.
He was typing something. His pistol sat on the end table within arm's reach. One hand on the keyboard, one holding a glass of something brown.
I moved.