ANYA - Volkovskaya Estate, 0623 #2
“I know.” Her thumb strokes across my knuckles once. “And you’ll remember him. That’s what separates you from the ones who don’t deserve to rule.”
* * *
The study doors open, and Vadim’s desk sits in the center of the room, holding a ledger bound in black leather.
I grab the ledger while Roman covers the door, my fingers working to photograph pages as fast as I can turn them.
Names scroll across my phone screen.
Polina Tarasova.
Three captains Roman thought were neutral.
Networks stretching far beyond Vadim into connections that span continents and will take years to unravel.
“Killing him doesn’t end this,” Roman says from the doorway.
“Then we burn what we can and rebuild from what’s left.” I plant thermite charges around the study, setting timers with hands that stay steady because handling volatile materials is something I’ve done before. “Thirty minutes until this room becomes a crematorium for evidence.”
Galina watches me work, her rosary beads clicking softly against her palm while she murmurs prayers for the dead we’ve left behind and the dead we’re about to create.
The estate intercom crackles to life, and Vadim’s voice pours through the speakers.
“Come to the dining hall, nephew. I’ve been waiting twenty years for this conversation. Let’s not delay any longer.”
Roman’s jaw goes tight as he suppresses the urge to shoot the speaker broadcasting his uncle’s voice.
“Together,” I tell him, moving to stand beside him in the doorway. “We go in together, Roman, that’s the deal we made.”
His hand finds my face, palm cupping my jaw, thumb stroking once across my cheekbone with tenderness.
“Ya lyublyu tebya,” he says quietly, and the words settle into my chest beside all the other things I’m carrying tonight. “Whatever happens in that room, Anya, know that I love you more than the throne, more than the empire, more than every breath left in this body.”
“I know.” I turn my head to press a kiss against his palm, feeling the calluses from weapons and violin strings and all the violent, beautiful things those hands have done. “Now let’s go kill your uncle so you can tell me again when we’re not standing in a room full of thermite charges.”
Galina makes a sound that might be a laugh, quickly smothered, and falls into step behind us as we move toward the dining hall.
* * *
The dining hall doors are carved mahogany depicting wolves at hunt, the detail in the teeth and eyes excessive in ways that feel appropriate given the man waiting on the other side, and I force myself to breathe evenly while Roman reaches for the handles.
He pushes them open without hesitation.
The room stretches before us in crystal chandeliers and silk wallpaper and a table that could seat forty. Vadim sits at the head in the chair that belongs to the Pakhan, wearing a navy suit tailored to perfection with silver hair immaculate.
Eight soldiers surround him with weapons trained on the doorway.
He’s smiling.
“There’s my boy.” The warmth in his voice sounds genuine, and that makes it infinitely more obscene, more horrifying, more wrong. “You survived the river, the factory, all of it. The Volkov blood truly does run strong.”
Roman raises his Makarov with hands that shake from damage and fever and rage barely contained. His uncle studies the tremor.
“And you brought her.” Vadim’s attention shifts to me. “The little chemist playing at queenship. Tell me, doctorushka, do you really believe the Bratva will bow to a woman who was property ten weeks ago?”
“I think they’ll bow or they’ll bleed. Same choice I’m offering you.”
He laughs, and the sound fills the dining hall with the absurdity of my threat.
“You’ve reached my dining room, and you think you’ve won?
” He rises from the Pakhan’s chair. “Polina Tarasova has already taken the Odessa ports. Three of my captains are positioning to carve up whatever remains of Roman’s claim.
The empire is already fracturing, nephew, and you’re too busy bleeding to hold it together. ”
“We’ll handle them after we handle you,” Roman says.
“Such conviction from a man who can barely hold his weapon.” Vadim moves around the table toward us. “But since this is our last conversation, let me give you a gift, nephew. A truth I’ve been saving for exactly this moment.”
He pauses, savoring the silence, letting it stretch until I can hear Roman’s breathing grow ragged beside me.
“I killed your mother personally.” His smile widens, feeding on Roman’s stillness. “Put my knife in Irina’s throat while she begged me to spare her little wolf cub, while she offered me everything she had—money, information, her body, her loyalty—if I would just let you live.”
The silence that follows is absolute.
Roman shatters beside me.
“She died on Easter Sunday,” Vadim continues. “Bled out on the altar while the choir sang hymns about resurrection. Do you know what her last words were, Romochka?”
Roman’s gun arm is shaking so badly now, his whole body vibrating with grief and rage that has nowhere to go except straight through his uncle’s skull.
“She said, ‘Please tell Roman his mama loves him,’ and then she was gone.” Vadim’s smile stretches into something grotesque.
“And I walked out of that church and came to find you hiding in the crypt, and I pulled you into my arms, and I said, ‘It’s over, malchik, you’re safe now,’ and you believed me because what else could you do?
You were twelve and terrified and covered in your family’s blood, and I was the only one left to hold you. ”
Roman fires.
The shot goes wide, nerve damage and shaking hands, and twenty years of trauma fracturing his aim at the worst possible moment, the bullet punching into the wallpaper six inches from Vadim’s head.
Vadim draws faster and fires twice.
The first bullet catches Roman’s Kevlar and drives the air from his lungs in a sound that makes me want to scream.
The second punches through his already-destroyed shoulder, and he goes down hard, Makarov clattering across marble while blood spreads beneath him in a widening pool that grows fast.
I’m already firing.
My first shot hits Vadim center mass, and the Kevlar stops it, but he staggers backward with air driven from his lungs.
His soldiers open up, and the world becomes chaos—automatic fire and crystal exploding, and the chandelier shattering into a thousand expensive pieces while I dive behind an overturned chair and return fire with everything I have.
Luka bursts through the service doors with his team, taking down three of Vadim’s soldiers in rapid succession while Galina appears behind him with a pistol in her ancient hands.
I track Vadim through the smoke as he reloads behind a fallen column, his attention fixed on me.
He’s going to shoot me.
Roman sees it too.
From the floor, bleeding out, barely conscious, he launches himself forward, and he tackles me sideways as Vadim fires.
The bullet passes through the space my head occupied half a second ago.
Roman lands on top of me, covering my body with his broken one, blood from his shoulder soaking through my tactical vest while his weight presses me into the marble and his arms cage me against the floor.
“Moya,” he snarls against my ear. “Mine, Anya, ty moya, I won’t let him touch you, I won’t let anyone touch you, ya ubyiu ego, ya ubyiu vsekh—”
I will kill him, I will kill everyone.
I roll us, putting myself on top.
“Nyet,” he growls, trying to reverse our positions, but his arms won’t cooperate, and his shoulder is screaming, and I pin him down with my weight while I bring up my Glock.
Vadim’s reloading.
Looks up.
Sees me aiming with Roman’s hand closing over mine on the weapon, his damaged fingers barely able to maintain pressure but refusing to let me face this alone.
“Vmeste,” he breathes from beneath me. “Together, solnyshko. We end him together.”
Vadim’s smile stretches with amusement, which I find personally offensive, given the circumstances, the blood on the marble, the bodies scattered across his dining hall.
“Doctorushka, you don’t have the stomach to—”
I pull the trigger.
Roman’s hand absorbs the recoil with mine.
The bullet tears through Vadim’s throat, and arterial spray paints the Louis XIV wallpaper in a shade of red that will never match the original décor.
He goes down choking on his own blood.
Hands scrabbling at the wound that has opened his neck.
I slide off Roman, press a quick kiss to his forehead that tastes of sweat and gunpowder and victory, and walk toward the man who murdered his mother and kept her son as a trophy and built an empire on the bodies of girls young enough to be his grandchildren.
His soldiers are all dead.
Luka’s team secures the perimeter, calling out clear after clear while Galina moves through the carnage with her rosary clicking against her palm.
But I’m not looking at anything except Vadim drowning in his own blood on the marble floor where he’s eaten thousands of meals paid for with suffering.
I crouch beside him.
He’s trying to speak, bubbles forming in the red ruin of his throat.
“You called me doctorushka.” My voice comes out calm. “Little doctor. You thought my expertise made me harmless.”
I press the Glock’s barrel against his forehead, feeling the metal indent his skin, watching his eyes widen with the understanding that this is how he dies.
I lean closer until I’m the only thing he can see, until his world narrows to my face and my voice and the gun pressed against his skull. “I am not harmless.”
I empty the magazine.
Chest. Chest. Face. Chest. Chest.
Keep pulling the trigger after the slide locks back, clicking, clicking, clicking, rage and grief and every emotion I’ve buried since November converting to bullets that reshape him into something barely recognizable as human.