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The inn isn’t far. It’s dark out still, and if any cars passing on the highway find the sight of our black caravan disconcerting, they give no indication.Good. Because this is going to be very fucking messy.Just as it should be.
When we reach the inn, it’s clear Konstantin and his men want us to believe they’ve moved on. There are no cars in the driveway, and no men out on the perimeter in black or carrying guns. But our surveillance reported just moments ago that they’d more or less gone underground—hiding their trucks in the woods and disappearing inside of the inn. Locking all the doors and shuttering all the windows.
Cowards, all of them.They were doubtless warned by their leader, who knew to take himself and his quarry elsewhere, but left his men here to die. To pay the price for him. What foolsthey are, to listen. Do they realize what they’re worth to him? Less than nothing.
I get out, swing my rifle across my chest, having already screwed on the silencer. Still, the first spray of gunfire bluntly echoes into the surrounding forest; but as though conspiring with me, even the muffled sound is swallowed whole by the rain and the wind and the insulation of the trees.
Glass shatters from the front windows, and I keep the rifle low against my stomach, aiming with total indiscretion as I unload again. This time I hear a bellow from inside of the inn. I’m walking down the hill toward the building, fast, not breaking my stride even though I’m alone out here and making quite the target of myself. I wonder how I look to the men inside: like a fool? Or like a fearless avenger, not even concerned with being gunned down?
It doesn’t matter. I’m both, or neither. I’m blind to everything but finding her, and this is how I will do it.
I reach the front door, and don’t bother trying to open it. Instead, I step back, bring up my rifle, and unload a volley of bullets into it. Plywood splinters and sprays everywhere, falling in debris on the well-tended little porch. I aim for the doorknob, fire again. Spent cases rain over my shoulder, showering down at my feet. Finally, the doorknob jolts loose.
From the corner of my eye, I see the muzzle of a rifle shove out of one of the broken windows. I turn, firing before Konstantin’s man has the chance. I hear him shout, then thethumpof his body falling hard. Blood spatters the inside of the broken window.
“Aleks!”
It’s Yuri’s voice. I know better than to turn toward him—instead I swing my rifle back around, where another of Konstantin’s men is shoving his pistol out of a broken window to the left of the front door. I’m slower this time, but fortunately,Yuri is a good shot. I see the man’s head snap back before I even hear my friend’s gunshot; a dark hole appears in the dead center of the man’s forehead. His eyes roll back, and he vanishes with a loud, visceralcrashinto the house.
I don’t wait for Yuri. I kick open the front door.
Cold morning light, just appearing, floods into the small entryway of the inn. Immediately, I register every man in my sightline.Six of them, but somehow, I’ve caught them unawares, and three of them are only half in the room, staggering in from other doors, half-dressed and still reaching for their guns.
No fucking mercy.
I raise my rifle, pinning the trigger so lightly I could be turning on a light switch. But the result couldn’t be more different. Bullets spray, raining down over the men. Horrible, vicious satisfaction courses through me; I’m all vengeance and adrenaline, watching with infernos in my eyes as their blood cuts in visceral arcs across the walls. Yuri is at my shoulder then, and more of my men, picking off the rest. Another pair of men surge forward from a back room, but my magazine is spent. Still, I don’t leave them to Yuri or any of the others—they’re mine. They’re all mine.
I draw my pistol and squeeze out only two shots, one for each. I get one in the jaw, and he drops like a stone. The other takes the bullet clear in the temple and crumples like a ragdoll, a dark pool expanding behind his head, his eyes vacant and lifeless.
“Clear the house,” I tell Yuri. “Have the others do the property. Check in at all of the other locations.” This could all be a trap; one I’ve walked into almost gladly. Whatever it is, I have a sense Konstantin won’t expectthis—a slaughter.
He should. And he should know that he’s next.
Yuri disappears to give the orders. I move through the house, kicking over bodies to ensure none are still animate. In the back room, I find one man cowering, huddled over his phone, fingersdancing rapidly over the screen. Is he calling for backup? For help? Is he reporting the carnage that just happened here to his superior, or maybe to Konstantin himself? Maybe he’s calling a paramour or a mother to tell them goodbye. Too slow; too late. If he wanted to live, he should have bargained with the right side of this war.
I shoot him once in the back of the head, before his lips can form the word I have a sense they will:Please. No—there will be no pleading, no justice, no mercy; not now, not today. Kat is gone. In the hands of my enemy. If I have to kill every damn man in this God forsaken town to get to her, I will. And I want that known.
“All clear,” says Yuri, appearing in the doorway. His eyes narrow. “You’re shot.”
I look down. Indeed, my shoulder is stiff and wet with blood. I didn’t notice. I didn’t even feel the bullet. Now that I know it’s there, the pain drops into me like a sledgehammer, but I swallow the grimace that comes by reflex. No point in showing weakness now. I can’t afford to lose focus.
“Update from the other locations?” I ask. “Where is Kat’s son?”
“Everything is untouched. Absolutely everything, even the farmhouse property.” Yuri looks blandly at the dead man in the corner, then turns his head toward the door. “You were right about her being the one who left—it seems she went out the window and down the roof. There’s a way down through a willow near the back of the house.”
I nod. I figured as much. After everything I said to Kat last night, I can’t really be surprised she tried to flee. I wouldn’t even be too surprised if she delivered herself to Konstantin or his men, hoping to make some kind of deal; anything to escape a marriage to me.
Now she will need it more than ever. And if I find her alive, it is the first thing I will set in stone. What scrap of protection I can give her, I will. By force, if necessary.
“There’s something else,” says Yuri, giving me a strange look. Before I can ask what, a voice cuts through to us from the front of the house—one I didn’t in a hundred years expect to hear. Here, in the United States, of all places. Here, in the middle of—as Kat would so elegantly put it—bum-fuck nowhere.
I still don’t believe it. Even as I step past Yuri and out of the room, over the bodies of the men I shot down in the front room. But there is no denying it. She’s here—really, truly here. In the flesh.
I feel the blood drain out of my face. “Marya.”
Marya.Marya, a girl I’ve known as long as I’ve known anyone; she is the daughter of my father’s late best friend. We were brought up together, more or less. And there was always an expectation—for a long time unspoken, and now much more explicit—that she and I would end up together. It would be duty, and nothing else, of course. With both of our fathers dead, we have long been expected to take up their mantles. But while I come from the criminal execution side of the business, Marya comes from the capital.
In other words, she is a cash cow. And a pretty one at that.
