“Who the fuck are they?” I snarl to Marko.
I already know the answer—the woman is screaming and begging, trying to pull away from Marko’s soldiers to get to her children.
She’s not Taras’s mistress—she’s his wife. And these are his kids.
“This is not what we discussed,” I tell Marko.
He ignores me.
Turning to Taras, he says, “You shot my wife right in front of me. I held her in my arms on the steps of the operetta. I watched her drown in her own blood from the holes in her lungs. Could you possibly imagine how that feels, Taras? No, of course not. A man could never imagine such a thing. He can only experience it.”
Marko turns, pointing his gun at the young boy who sits frozen on the weathered wooden boards of the farmhouse floor. He stares up at Marko, tears and mucus running down his face.
Marko says to Taras, his voice soft with anticipation, “I’m going to shoot your son twice in the leg, where you shot me. And then I’ll shoot your daughter right below the heart, where you hit Darya. Finally, I’ll strangle your wife with my bare hands, till the light leaves her eyes, so you know, you’ll truly know, the bitter agony of watching helpless, unable to save the ones you love. And all the while, I want you to beg for mercy. Beg and howl, like I did. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll let one of you live.”
“PLEASE!” Taras cries. “Let them go, they have nothing to do with this!”
“That’s good.” Marko nods. “Keep begging, just like that.”
His index finger curls around the trigger, the barrel of the gun aimed at the boy almost the same age as my own son.
As Marko’s finger squeezes tight, I ram into his arm, knocking the gun askew. The bullet smashes into a vase a foot above the boy’s head, and the Glock goes skittering across the floor.
Marko roars with rage, turning directly into the barrel of the AK-47 Dom points at his face.
My men are faster than Marko’s, and in better position. While the Malina were subduing Taras’ wife and children, my Bratva were already angling around them, ready to draw. They knew I would not allow this to pass.
“Drop your rifles,” Dom orders Marko’s men. “Or I’ll shoot your boss in the face.”
Marko stands still, looking at me, not at Dom.
“You made a promise to me, Ivan,” he says.
“And I kept my promise. You’re welcome to kill Taras. But not his wife, and definitely not his children.”
“He has to suffer,” Marko hisses. “As I suffer.”
“We’re not killing his kids,” I growl back at him. “I’m not fucking doing that.”
“You don’t have to do it—”
“No one is doing it.”
Marko’s men have lowered their rifles but not dropped them. They’re watching their boss for instructions.
“FUCKING DROP THEM!” Dom shouts at them. “We’ll kill every one of you.”
Slowly, resentfully, the Malina lay their rifles on the floor.
Now Marko is truly angry. His whole frame trembles with enough force to shake this ancient floor. His teeth are bared in a snarl, his fingers twitching and those blazing eyes fixed on my face.
He wants to charge at me. Maybe even more than he wants to kill Taras.
“You can have your revenge,” I repeat. “But only on the guilty. Not the innocent.”
I pull the KA-BAR knife from my belt and hand it to Marko, blade in my palm and handle held out to him.
Marko takes it.
His upper lip twitches beneath his ginger beard, his breath coming out between his teeth with a hissing sound.
He grips the handle and lunges, not at Taras, but at my brother. He means to cut Dom’s throat—only my brother’s quick twist to the right spares his life, the knife slashing open his cheek instead.
I shoot Marko in the knee, dropping him to the ground.
Then I shoot Taras Holodryga, right between the eyes.
“There,” I say bitterly. “It’s over.”
Taras’ wife and children are howling.
Marko kneels before me, hand gripping his knee as blood seeps through his fingers.
He looks up at me with burning fury.
“Someday you’ll kneel before me, as I kneel before you now,” he says, teeth grinding together like stone on stone. “You’ll beg and plead for my mercy. And I’ll remind you that we could have been brothers . . . that I held out the hand of friendship to you, before you spat in my face.”
Marko spits on the wooden boards of the farmhouse, never taking his eyes off of mine.
“It’s because we were friends that I don’t kill you,” I tell him. “My debt is paid to you. All bonds between us are cut. You have your city, I have mine—don’t come to St. Petersburg again, or there will be no mercy for either of us.”
I leave him there, with the body of Taras Holodryga and the unarmed Malina.
I take Taras’ wife and children back to Kyiv, depositing them with the remaining Banderovtsy.
Then I find a steady-handed doctor to stitch Dom’s face before I take my men home once more.
21
Ares
With her uncanny ability to press on my most vulnerable places, Nix surprises me coming up from the archives with my mother. I knew, I just fucking knew, she would catch some out-of-place detail between us and start scenting around like a wolf on the hunt.
It doesn’t help that a small part of me wanted my mother and Nix to meet. I wanted my mom to see her, speak to her face to face, so she would see that Nix isn’t some monster, some mini version of her father to be manipulated and wielded like an asset.
My mom couldn’t resist engaging in conversation, combing Nix over, looking for those tiny indicators of information that my mother’s government-trained father drilled into her during her formative years, until she could write an entire CIA dossier on someone after ten minutes of chit-chat.
I felt guilty as hell putting Nix in that position, oblivious and openly duped. Especially when I had to lie right to her face.
During all the time I spend with Nix, I’ve been letting myself believe that lies of omission aren’t really lies. And the lies I do tell her—my name and where I’m from—don’t really matter compared to the deeper truths I lay bare. She knows my genuine feelings, my fears, my likes, and dislikes . . . things that seem so much more essential than my fake history.
Perversely, I liked watching her talk to my mom. I saw my mother look Nix over with the slightly raised eyebrow that indicated she had encountered an object of interest. It would have killed me to see my mom dismiss Nix as boring.
Best of all was the knowledge that Nix had sought me out that day. That she had gone looking all over campus for a purpose that seemed glaringly clear the moment we were alone.
Her eyes roved over me. She had the hunter’s determination to bring me down and not go home again starving.
I’ve been wanting to fuck Nix since the moment she stepped out of the underground pool. Hell, I might even have felt that first flaring lust the moment I laid eyes on her crossing campus. That burst of sudden heat . . . it wasn’t all hatred.
I tell myself I can’t do it, that it would be wrong to sleep with her under false pretenses.