Winning a Fearless Heart (Dark Hearts of Stone #4)

Prologue

Shelby

Russia - Two Weeks Ago

The warehouse smells like rust and something else that makes my skin crawl, even before we breach the door.

Nikolai moves with the precision of a man who’s done this a thousand times. His team of Bratva operatives fans out around the perimeter, weapons ready, expressions blank. They’re professionals. Efficient. Cold.

I follow half a step behind, rifle raised, breathing controlled.

I’ve been doing this for a while now—three months of surveillance, intelligence gathering, and tonight: extraction.

If the intel is good, there will be kids inside.

Kids who’ve been trafficked through Dracul’s operation.

After my brothers and I killed the motherfucker, sending his black soul to hell, we thought his pedophile ring would be gone.

We were sorely wrong.

We underestimated these sick men. We never could have fathomed the lengths to which they would go to satisfy their heinous fantasies.

Now these kids need saving.

“Two teams, thirty seconds,” Nikolai whispers into comms. His accent is thick—Russian bleeding through the controlled English. “In and out. We find them, we take them, we disappear.”

“Copy,” I respond, keeping my voice steady. My hands are steady. Everything is steady.

It’s a lie.

But I am very good at lying to myself.

Nikolai nods to his breach team. They move with synchronized precision toward the loading dock. I position myself at the northeast corner, covering their six, scanning the roofline for snipers or lookouts. The night is cold and clear, stars visible above the industrial sprawl. Beautiful. Terrible.

The warehouse door explodes inward.

Gunfire erupts immediately—not expected, which means the intel was compromised, which means they were waiting for us.

A child’s scream cuts through the darkness. A girl, maybe seven, running toward the light, away from danger.

I lunge forward to grab her, but someone is screaming my name, grabbing my arm, pulling me backward. My muscles won’t obey. My eyes won’t focus. All I can see is the small figure and the approaching footsteps and…

The shot. The impact. The child crumpling.

“MOVE!” Nikolai’s voice slams through the comms, through the chaos. Still, I am frozen in place, watching Nikolai’s team return fire, as operatives move through the warehouse with lethal efficiency, and the nightmare repeats itself in a foreign country with the same ending.

Two kids. Dead.

A third child, a boy maybe ten years old, manages to slip past the gunfire and run toward the tree line. I watch him go. That’s the only mercy we’re getting tonight. At least one of them makes it out.

The operation takes forty-two seconds to go from controlled extraction to blood-soaked failure.

My freeze lasts maybe five seconds longer—an eternity in combat—before my body finally responds to the urgent command Nikolai’s been barking. Move. Move. MOVE.

A bullet catches me in the shoulder as I turn, punching through muscle and bone with a searing white-hot pain that barely registers against the static in my skull.

Nikolai surges by my side as if from thin air. He throws an arm around my waist, dragging me toward the extraction point. His second-in-command, bleeding out, worthless, frozen like a child, while kids actually died. What was I thinking? I should have known better than to volunteer for this.

“Stay with me,” Nikolai hisses, half-carrying me now as his team provides covering fire. “We’re going home. Not Boston. Not yet. We’re going to my safe house first.”

My vision grays at the edges. I try to focus on Nikolai’s face— determined, impossibly steady—but all I can see is the moment before the shooting started. The moment I was supposed to be ready. The moment I wasn’t.

The extraction vehicle, a sleek black SUV, is thirty meters away. Twenty. Ten.

We collapse into the back, Nikolai barking orders in rapid Russian. The car lurches forward, tires spinning on gravel.

“Tourniquet,” Nikolai commands, and someone—Alexei, maybe—is cutting away my sleeve, tying off my arm, muttering curses in Russian. The pain crystallizes into something sharp and focused. Almost a relief after the static. I can manage pain. Been doing so for years now.

“Two kids. We lost two,” I manage to whisper, my voice doesn’t sound like my own. “We were supposed to save the kids.”

“I know,” Nikolai says. He’s giving driving directions, but his eyes find mine. His expression is unreadable. “One mistake. One of my men got jumpy. One mistake and we lost them.”

“My fault,” I state. “I should’ve—“

“You froze,” Nikolai says, not unkindly. It’s a statement of fact. “First time that happened?”

It’s not. I don’t answer, which is answer enough for the smart Russian.

Nikolai’s jaw tightens. He’s quiet for a long moment, while the driver navigates the dark roads outside the city with practiced ease. Then, he says, “Three months. That’s what we gave this op. Three months of your life, your time, your focus. And it still went sideways.”

“We got intel on the trafficking routes,” I remind him, grasping for something, anything that doesn’t feel like complete failure. “We identified four major nodes. We have locations, names—“

“We have corpses,” Nikolai interrupts quietly. “We have the blood of two children on our hands. We have you with a bullet wound, and my team rattled because they watched you freeze.”

The words land like physical blows. Every one of them is true, though.

“This has something to do with what happened to you in Syria, doesn’tit?” Nikolai asks.

The question catches me off guard. “That’s not—“

“I don’t need details,” Nikolai continues, his eyes still on the road. “I need to know if this is what happens every time things go bad. If you freeze, people might die.”

“Not every time,” I reply flatly. “But sometimes.”

Nikolai nods slowly, as if this confirms something he’s been suspecting. The safe house comes into view—a nondescript building on the outskirts of the industrial zone. They pull into a garage and the door closes behind them, shutting out the Russian night.

Alexei helps me inside, while Nikolai stays with the vehicle, checking to see if we’ve been followed. The safe house is sparse with a bed, medical supplies, and running water. Enough.

Alexei patches my shoulder with efficient brutality. The bullet went clean through, missing the major arteries but tearing muscle.

I’ll be sore.

I’ll recover.

I’ve been lucky.

Those kids were not.

Nikolai finds me on the bed an hour later, watching the ceiling with the kind of blank stare that comes from emotional exhaustion.

“I’m pulling you from the operation,” Nikolai says, pulling a chair and sitting backward on it, arms folded over the back. “You’re going home to Boston.”

“I can still—“

“No.” Nikolai’s voice is absolute. “You can’t. Not right now. Not like this.”

I want to argue. I’ve been trained to push through. I’ve learned to compartmentalize, to move past trauma, to keep functioning despite the ghosts. But looking at Nikolai’s stern face and steady eyes, I realize that the man in front of me knows exactly what that costs.

“We have another six months of ops planned,” I say instead. “We’re close to finding where Dracul’s boss is hiding. We’re close—“

“Close to what?” Nikolai leans forward. “Close to finding out who ordered your mother’s death? That’s what you came here for. That’s what kept you awake every night for three months.”

He’s right. We came to Moscow because someone higher up the chain gave the order to kill my mother.

Not Dracul acting alone. It was someone with enough power to order a hit on Martha Boyle and keep it buried.

I say quietly. “Before my brothers and I emptied our guns into the motherfucker, Dracul told us he wasn’t the top of the food chain. Then, you found out about the power play happening in the Bratva. After the whole fucking shit your uncle Gregor pulled off.”

Nikolai’s face turns red. Not embarrassment. Pure rage. “Fucking asshole.”

“And you thought you’d find answers we needed in that warehouse.”

He shakes his head. “The intel seemed solid.”

“It was compromised. Someone knew we were coming.”

“Someone with reach.” Nikolai sits back. “I will get to the bottom of this. But you’re in no condition to help me.”

“I came here to solve my mother’s murder,” I grunt.

“Yeah. Instead, you froze, and kids died. That’s not closure, Shelby. That’s penance.”

I hold his gaze for a couple of beats, unwilling to accept the truth in his words. I make a final plea, “Give me until the end of our plan. I need to see this through. For my family For myself.”

“Six months here will get you killed,” Nikolai interrupts. “Or worse, it’ll get my men killed because they’ll be waiting for you to freeze again instead of focusing on the mission.”

It’s harsh but fair. I don’t argue further.

“There’s something broken in you,” Nikolai continues, his Russian accent thickening as he speaks. “Something that happened before you came to Russia. Something that’s making you see ghosts.” He leans forward. “You need to go home and fix it.”

I stare back at him. I’ve got a million different things going through my mind. None of them is nice enough that I can share with an important Syndicate ally such as Nikolai.

I press my lips into a thin line and hold his gaze.

“I’m not talking about bullet wounds,” Nikolai adds, a ghost of a smile crossing his face at my evident frustration.

“I’m talking about whatever you’re running from.

Whatever’s making you willing to throw your life away in a foreign warehouse chasing ghosts instead of going home to your family, your real life. ”

My jaw tightens. I don’t like being read this easily.

“I’ve seen the way you avoid talking about home. The way you go rigid when your brothers mention the Syndicate developments. There’s something there.”

“There’s nothing—“

“Fix it or don’t,” Nikolai says, standing up. “But you’re not staying in Russia. You’re a liability now, and I won’t have you bringing my men down with you.”

I want to protest. I want to promise to redeem myself in some other warehouse, save kids, and stop Dracul’s associates. I want it with a desperation that feels almost pathological.

But Nikolai is right. I froze. People died. And if I stay, more people will die.

“The intel we gathered,” I say quietly. “What you found. It’s critical. The trafficking routes, the operations, the connections to Dracul. But we still need more to get the whole picture.”

“I’ll handle it,” Nikolai says. “That’s my world.

My war. Remember, it was my fucking uncle who sold us to these people.

This is my mess to fix. You have your own war waiting in Boston.

I’ll find more information that will lead to whoever ordered your mother’s killing.

You know I will.” He moves toward the door, then pauses.

“Go home, Shelby Boyle. Fix whatever’s broken.

And then maybe you’ll be human again instead of a ghost walking around in a dead man’s skin. ”

The door closes behind him, leaving me alone with the white ceiling and the burning in my shoulder and the images of two children I couldn’t save overlaid with memories of a woman I couldn’t protect in Syria and all the other ghosts that haunt me in the dark.

I shut my eyes tightly, throwing an arm over my face.

Three months in Russia. Three months of chasing Dracul’s boss. Three months of running from Boston and everything waiting there.

It’s time to go home.