Anya Chapter #2
It hits the wall, and I’m still kneeling over a wastebasket with bile on my chin and seven years of grief curdling into something that feels a lot like murder.
Was he just signing whatever Vadim put in front of him? Rubber-stamping documents he never read? Following orders from a man who raised him to believe obedience was survival?
Does it matter?
No. It doesn’t fucking matter.
The shower stops.
Silence crashes through the room.
He’s coming. Thirty seconds. Maybe less. I have less than a minute before that door opens and he sees me kneeling over a wastebasket.
Move.
“Anya? Who was it?”
I force myself upright. The room tilts, and I grab the nightstand, and my fingers close around cold metal. The USB drive.
Take it.
His Makarov sits beside it. I stare at the gun. I think about waiting for the door to open. I think about how easy it would be to aim at his chest and pull the trigger and watch him fall.
I leave it. I don’t trust my hands to aim true, and I don’t trust myself not to hesitate.
“Stay right there, I’m coming!” I force out of me.
Wallet. Cash. Passports. I grab everything.
His jacket hangs over the chair. Black wool. The jacket that saved us both when we jumped into the Black Sea, and the cold tried to drag us down.
I pull it over my shoulders, and my skin crawls because it smells like him, the warmth of a man who held me in the shower three minutes ago and told me I was the only thing that mattered.
Liar. Fucking liar.
I zip it up anyway. I pull on jeans.
“Anya, I found a massage oil.”
“Coming!”
I turn the door handle.
Click.
I’m moving before the latch releases.
Hallway. Dim and narrow and smelling like old cigarettes. A guard stands at the end, one of Luka’s men. He’s watching the corridor with his arms crossed, bored but alert.
He sees me and straightens.
“Mrs. Volkova?”
I don’t stop. I channel every ounce of icy entitlement I’ve watched Roman deploy for the last weeks. I walk straight toward the guard. Shoulders back. Chin up. The ice queen.
“Get out of my way.” Russian. Clipped.
His eyes flick to my throat. To the bruises ringing from two days ago when Dmitri tried to strangle me on the yacht deck. The purple has gone yellow at the edges, but it’s still vivid, still ugly, still the kind of mark that makes men flinch.
“Ma’am, I can’t let you—”
“The boss is vomiting blood in the bathroom.” I step into his space, invade the way Roman does when men stand between him and what he wants.
“His wound opened. He needs antibiotics and clean gauze, and if I have to explain to him why his wife is standing here arguing with you instead of getting medicine, I promise you he will make what happened to Pavel look merciful.”
The guard’s face goes pale. He was on the extraction boat. He saw what Roman did to Pavel.
“Do you need an escort?”
“I need you to stay here and make sure no one disturbs him. He’s in pain. He’s angry. And if you wake him before I get back—” I let the threat hang, watch it land. “Use your imagination.”
He steps aside.
I hit the stairwell door. I don’t run until the steel clicks shut behind me.
Then I sprint.
Down three flights. My breath tears at my lungs, and the USB digs into my hip with every step, a weight of evidence, a burden of betrayal that I’m taking with me whether it destroys us both or not.
Ground floor. Side exit. Morning light that blinds.
Luka’s emergency documents are in Roman’s jacket pocket. I find them while I’m scanning for a taxi—three passports, three nationalities, my photograph in all of them with names I’ve never heard. Maria Konstantinova. Anna Bergmann. Yelena Markovic.
Thank you, Luka. Thank you for being paranoid.
A taxi idles at the curb, dropping off a tourist in a sun hat. I don’t wait for her to finish. I wrench the back door open while she’s still half-out, throw myself inside.
“Airport.” The word comes out ragged. “Double the fare if you go now.”
“Hey!” The tourist stumbles backward. “What the hell—”
“Go.”
The driver sees the cash in my fist and the expression on my face. He hits the gas.
We peel away from the curb just as the hotel doors explode open.
Roman.
Barefoot. Towel around his hips. Chest heaving with the effort of running on a wound that’s barely begun to heal.
Two of Luka’s men are chasing him, shouting, trying to grab his arms, but he shoves through them and staggers into the street, and his eyes find the taxi with the precision of a sniper scope.
He knows exactly where I am.
His eyes lock onto mine through the rear window.
He looks destroyed.
He reaches out. His mouth forms a word I can’t hear through glass and distance and the growing space between us.
Anya.
He shrinks in the rear window, his arm dropping. He stands alone in the street in nothing but a towel while blood seeps fresh through the gauze on his ribs, and his men finally catch up to him and try to drag him back inside.
A part of me wants to tell the driver to stop. A part of me wants to go back and let him explain, let him give me an answer that makes this make sense.
The rest of me knows there isn’t one.
Left side down. Facing the window.
I turn away.
“Drive,” I whisper. “Just fucking drive.”
* * *
The passport gets me through check-in.
Yelena Markovic. Serbian national.
I clutch the USB through security with my fingers wrapped so tight around it that my knuckles ache, and the guards wave me through without a second glance.
They don’t see the half a billion worth of stolen research pressed against my palm. They don’t see the signature burned into my memory. They don’t see the woman wearing her mother’s killer’s jacket because she needed the warmth and hates herself for needing it.
Gate B7. Brussels. One-way.
I have to get to Mishka before Vadim does. Before Roman does. Before anyone else can use my fourteen-year-old brother as leverage in a war I never wanted to fight.
I buckle into my window seat and stare at the runway while my phone sits heavy in my pocket, screen broken, the intake form saved to my camera roll because I couldn’t bring myself to delete it even though looking at it makes me want to vomit all over again.
My mother’s face in that photograph. Roman’s signature at the bottom.
He loves. I know that now. But his love has teeth. And seven years ago, he sank them into my mother.
The plane lifts. Turkey falls away beneath the wings. The Black Sea shrinks to a dark smear against the coast, and somewhere down there is a yacht at the bottom of the ocean and a man standing in a towel in an alley and a marriage that lasted weeks before the truth burned it to ash.
I close my eyes and see her face. Not the hollow photograph on the intake form—the real face. The one who sang lullabies before everything fell apart. The one that used to smell like lavender and kitchen warmth instead of hospital antiseptic and desperation.
She’s dead because he signed a piece of paper.
I’m alive because he signed another.
And somewhere between those two signatures, I let myself fall for a man who was never going to be anything but the weapon that made me.
The plane climbs higher into clouds that look soft from a distance but turn to nothing when you pass through them.