“You need a doctor,” I tell him.
“You know what I need,” he hisses, staring at me with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “And it’s no fucking doctor.”
“Marko, you better lay down—”
“I’ll lay down when I’m dead!” he howls. “They killed her, Ivan, they fucking killed her!”
I heard the night it happened. Marko Moroz and his wife were gunned down outside the Operetta in Kyiv. They had been seeing a showing of Rigoletto.
I even know who did it.
Last year, Marko drove a pen through the eye of his former mentor Petro Holodryga. Holodryga had helped Marko take over large swaths of territory in Kyiv, allying his Banderovtsy with Marko’s Malina.
No one knows exactly what prompted the argument during what was supposed to be a friendly meeting between the two groups. The Banderovtsy didn’t take kindly to their boss becoming a cyclopean corpse. When the dust settled, four of Holodryga’s men were dead, shot and stabbed by Marko’s Malina during a meeting where all promised to come unarmed.
To no one’s surprise, Taras Holodryga, Petro’s nephew and the new leader of the Banderovtsy, soon retaliated, orchestrating the drive-by outside the theater. I don’t know if he meant to kill Daryah Moroz too. If he did, he sure as fuck should have made sure that Marko was dead first.
“We have to kill him,” Marko hisses in my face, pupils black pinpricks in the foggy green. “You have to help me, Ivan.”
I can feel my men watching. They’re giving us a wide radius so that Marko has the impression of confidentiality.
Though I can’t see her, I know Sloane will be watching, too, from somewhere inside the house—likely holding Freya in her arms, as our daughter is particularly attached to her mother at the moment and follows her everywhere she goes.
I know what Sloane would want me to say.
“You want revenge, my friend,” I say. “And you deserve it. But you can’t rush into this. Your daughter—”
“I’m doing this for her!” Marko cries, his face as red as his beard. “They slaughtered her mother! Nearly left her an orphan! How can I ever look my baby girl in the face if I let this pass?”
I take a deep breath.
Nix Moroz is only three years old, the same as Freya. She will never know her mother. Probably won’t even remember her.
What would I do if someone killed Sloane? If someone took her away from us?
Seeing my expression shift, Marko presses his point.
“You owe me, Ivan,” he says. “St. Petersburg belongs to you because of me.”
“I gave you the lion’s share of the profit. I kept my agreement.”
“Money comes easy,” Marko insists. “I got you power, control. The security to keep your family safe! You owe me the same.”
I don’t want to start a war with the Banderovtsy. And I don’t want to ally with Marko once more—not after everything he’s done.
Yet . . . there’s truth in his words.
I do owe him a debt that money can’t pay.
And he does deserve his revenge.
You don’t kill a man’s wife.
What’s really holding me back is the knowledge that Sloane will not approve. She wouldn’t want me to do this.
Still, I feel that I must.
So for the first and only time in my marriage, I go against the silent advice of my wife echoing through my brain.
I say to Marko, “I’ll help you.”
We take six of my men and six of Marko’s.
As I guessed, Sloane is not at all happy with my plan. Still, she wants to come with me.
“I don’t trust him,” she says, her dark eyes furious and resentful. “He’ll stab you in the back, Ivan. You know he’s jealous—you still have your wife and children.”
“And he still has his daughter,” I remind her. “So he has something to lose, too.”
Sloane frowns, not letting go of my hand.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen her frightened before. Not even when I had her locked in the cells beneath this monastery, when we were not yet well acquainted.
“Why are you smiling?” she demands.
“I was only thinking, if you failed to kill me, there’s no fucking way that Marko could pull it off.”
Sloane laughs, though I know she doesn’t want to.
“Sometimes I think we’re invincible, because what you and I have can’t be killed,” she says. “Still . . . be careful, my love.”
I kiss her hard. “Nothing could keep me from coming back to you.”
Sloane only agrees to stay with our children because Dominik will be with me to watch my back.
I’m sure he endured a similarly tense parting from Lara. Their youngest son Kade is a curious child who gets into everything, and his older brother Adrik grows wilder by the day.
If all goes as planned, we shouldn’t be gone for long.
We meet the Malina in Kyiv, checking our gear for the assault on Taras Holodryga’s compound.
It isn’t wise to retaliate so quickly. Taras knows that Marko survived the attack. He’ll assume that we’re coming for him.
Marko insists that Taras thinks this particular house is unknown to anyone but his inner circle. It’s a small farmhouse in Baczyna, seven hours outside Kyiv along the Dnister River. The farmhouse has, of course, been renovated to the appropriately luxurious standards of a gangster, but it still sits in an orchard of plum, cherry, and walnut trees, lacking any serious impediments to attack like the stone walls of the monastery.
“He’s holed up there with his mistress,” Marko snarls. “Like a rat in a hole.”
We drive out in the dead of night, surrounding the farmhouse from all sides. With night vision goggles and tactical coordination, it’s not difficult to dispatch the four soldiers patrolling the orchard.
One of Marko’s men is shot entering the actual house, but it’s only a mild injury to the bicep. In less than five minutes we’ve rousted Taras and his woman from the master bedroom.
Taras looks weak and pitiful, his soft belly hanging over the waistband of his boxer shorts. I can see the lamplight gleaming on his skull through his thinning hair. His pale eyes blink up at us, half-blind without his glasses. Marko finds the glasses and rams them onto his face.
Taras is blubbering and pleading. He has none of the steel of his uncle, and even less of his strategy. Petro Holodryga would never have been foolish enough to fail to kill a rival and then hide in such an unprotected place.
“Go ahead,” I say to Marko. “Take your revenge.”
Marko towers over Taras, his limp all but forgotten. The devil is raging behind his eyes, fully awake and in control of Marko’s goliath body. He deals the man a vicious blow to the mouth that knocks out one of his front teeth. Taras’s head lolls limply.
I expect Marko to draw his gun and shoot Taras between the eyes.
Instead, I hear the screams and whimpers of two children being dragged down the farmhouse stairs.
Marko’s men throw the kids down on the floor—a boy and a girl, six and four years old at the most. The children are bawling, messy-haired, and dressed in matching pajamas.
Dom throws me a quick, wide-eyed look. His hands tighten on his rifle.
I can see Maks, recognizable even in his balaclava because of the patch over his eye, shifting position behind Marko’s lieutenant.