Page 73

Abby

Y akov?

I stare at Dimitry’s rigid back.

Yakov. The man who tortured Dimitry and his mother. The man he ran from back in the halfway house.

“Fuck,” Roman mutters beside me. His face is covered in blood, every muscle taut, his eyes narrow with tension as they flicker between Dimitry and Yakov.

Then I see the men behind him, and my heart seizes in my chest.

“ Dad? ” I barely manage the word.

My father gives me a strained smile. “Hey, girl.” He glances at Roman. “Let me get my daughter out of here.”

“Not yet,” mutters Roman, still staring at Dimitry. His arm is like a vise around me, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Yakov,” he says quietly. “That fucking piece of shit.”

“Roman.” My hand covers his on the gun. When he glares at me, I just shake my head.

Not this time. You can’t save him from this.

“Leave them be,” I whisper .

Roman stares at me, his face grim as death. But he doesn’t argue.

Rodrigo is still on the sofa, staring at Juan like he’s seeing a ghost, which I imagine it certainly feels like. Yrsa, Lucky, and Mary are huddled together next to Turbo, of all people, who is grinning at me like a maniac.

“Dimitry,” Leon is saying warningly. “Please. Before we run out of time—”

“Step away, Leon.” Dimitry’s voice is getting stronger, as is the fury slowly rising inside me.

“This man is mine to kill.” He gives Leon a look that, even in profile, could freeze the Arctic.

“I don’t know what the fuck you were trying to pull by coming here tonight,” he says softly, “but it’s over now.

I suggest you leave while you still can. ”

Leon’s face hardens. The two men stare at each other, their expressions so similar they could be two coins struck from the same die. And suddenly, it clicks into place.

Why Leon has always seemed so oddly familiar.

Why I instinctively trusted him, without even knowing him.

Why he was so ready to help us.

I suck in my breath sharply, covering my mouth with my hand to stifle my exclamation. Roman glances at me, frowning, but I can’t speak.

All I can do is watch.

“Well, now. This is something.” Yakov sits back in his chair, his dead smile slowly returning. He raises his mangled hand, dripping with blood, and gestures between the pair before him.

“Dimitry doesn’t know, does he?” He shakes his head wonderingly. “And yet you’re here together. Tell me, Leon. How long have you been lying to your son?”

Roman starts abruptly next to me. His eyes narrow as he stares between the two men. Then he looks at me .

I nod.

Understanding dawns in his eyes. “Christ,” he murmurs quietly.

Dimitry is still as marble, his face entirely unreadable.

“He’s trying to stall,” Leon says fiercely, staring at Dimitry, “because he knows this place is wired to blow. He’s just trying to keep us talking so we go down with him. Please.” His eyes search his son’s. “You have to trust me, Dimitry.”

Without waiting for an answer, he turns back to the man I knew as Jacey.

“Tell me what happened to her.” He cocks his pistol. “You know you’re going to die here, one way or another. After everything, you owe me that, at least. Tell me what happened to my wife.”

Dimitry stares at him. “Your wife,” he says blankly. “My mother.”

“Jesus,” I hear my father murmur behind me.

Leon nods, still staring at Jacey. “Ekaterina,” he says, the name rasping in his throat.

“I can tell you that.” Dimitry’s voice is hard as cut glass as he nods at the man in the chair. “She went to find him .”

“Oh, she found him.” Leon leans forward, looming over Jacey, his gun pressed against the man’s chest. “I want to know what happened after that. I want to know what happened on that yacht.”

Dimitry frowns. For a moment I think he will ask another question.

Instead, he glances at Leon, his eyes narrowing.

Whatever he sees in his father’s face clearly forestalls his question, because instead of asking it, his fist crashes brutally into Jacey’s face, crushing his nose and sending blood down his face.

“Answer my father,” he hisses furiously. “Before I break every fucking bone in your body. ”

Jacey doesn’t react at all. It’s as if he doesn’t even feel the pain. He just licks the blood off his lips and smiles his dead smile up at Dimitry.

“You always were a tough little fucker,” he says silkily. “You’d never cry, would you? No matter how many times I burned you or raped your mother in front of you, still you refused to fucking cry. It used to drive me mad.”

Leon moves forward like lightning, shoving his knee down onto Jacey’s mangled stump. “Talk, you bastard,” he snarls.

But Jacey just keeps smiling. “You gave them to me, Leon,” he says softly. “You told me they’d be my family. But they never were, even though she was mine long before she was yours—”

“I told you to look after my family. To treat them like your own. I trusted you.” Leon’s voice is low and lethal. “But Ekaterina was never yours. Never. She didn’t want you, Yakov, did she? Not even after you supposedly rescued her.”

“ Don’t fucking call me Yakov .” For the first time, Jacey’s control slips.

Roman shifts uneasily beside me, his finger tightening on the trigger again.

“Would you prefer me to call you Jacob Cohen?” Leon’s face is barely inches from the other man’s.

“The name we chose together when we planned our defection to Mossad? The name you had when I went back to Russia for my wife and son and you betrayed me to the KGB? You must like that name, after all. You had it put on your headstone in Israel after faking your death on that yacht. And you’ve called yourself by those initials ever since. ”

Jacey , I think.

J.C.

Jacob Cohen.

“You didn’t want to be Yakov, did you?” Leon crashes the butt of his pistol across Jacey’s face, adding to the blood Dimitry has already drawn.

“Because then you would have still been Ekaterina’s adopted brother, and you never did accept that, did you, Yakov?

Did you think that all it would take for her to love you was changing your fucking name? ”

A spasm of something crosses Jacey’s face. “We were never brother and sister. My parents adopted her—”

“She was your family , you bastard.” Leon slams his gun across his face again.

“You stole her from me!” The darkness in Jacey’s face makes me shudder. “You went behind my back—”

“We were in love, you sick fuck.” Leon cuts him off brutally, grinding his knee into Jacey’s bleeding stump. “You know it’s the truth. She told you herself. You were our child’s godfather , for Chrissake.”

He shakes his head furiously.

“None of this matters. Not anymore.” He jams the gun between Yakov’s eyes.

“I know she went to see you. She sent me a letter, the last one I ever got from her, telling me she was going to the yacht to kill you.” He pulls back the hammer on the gun.

“She told me where to find Dimitry, in case she didn’t make it back.

By the time I finally got out of prison and came looking for her, you were supposedly dead.

But there was no trace of Ekaterina—and my son was gone.

” He presses his knee down harder. “Don’t waste my time,” he says harshly.

“We will not stay here long enough to die with you. You took my son from me once. I won’t let you do it again.

You can give me answers now, or I’ll take you with me and torture you until you do. ”

Dimitry smashes his gun over the man’s head. “Talk,” he snarls.

The sound of gunfire is coming closer. Roman eyes the door uneasily. His eyes meet Juan’s across the room, and he tilts his head at the door .

Juan nods and murmurs something to Rodrigo, who nods, though he still looks dazed.

“Turbo,” Juan calls in a low voice. “You told me you want to lead the Banderos and take over our business in Australia?”

Turbo nods emphatically.

“Well, muchacho —now is the time to show us why we should trust you.”

Turbo’s smile widens. He claps my father on the shoulder, then heads for the exit with Juan and Rodrigo, throwing the latter a pistol as he nears them.

“Get ready to run,” Roman says in a low voice.

I nod, but my eyes are still glued to where Dimitry and his father loom over the man in the chair.

Dimitry hits him again, and Yakov spits blood to the floor. He eyes the two men sullenly.

“Ekaterina hid herself on the yacht.” He says it flatly, without emotion.

“I didn’t know she was there. I didn’t,” he repeats, when Dimitry snarls low in his throat.

“Or I never would have blown it up. By the time she came up on deck I was already in the lifeboat, fifty yards away. The charges were set. It was too late to go back,” he says, his voice dropping.

He shakes his head slowly. “It was too late, Leon.”

For a moment there’s nothing but the horrible, ragged intake of Leon’s breath. When he speaks, his voice is broken as well.

“You’re telling me you watched her die.” His voice cracks on the word. “You saw it with your own eyes.”

“I saw it.” Yakov nods, his expression an odd mix of defiance and something that almost looks like pain. “I can still see her silhouetted on the deck when the flames came for her.”

“You bastard.” Leon’s voice shakes with fury and grief. “You absolute fucking bastard.”

Whatever genuine emotion I either saw or imagined in Yakov’s face darkens into spite .

“I could have killed you many times before today, Leon.” His voice is low and insidious.

“I knew about your little shop in London, about the secret auctions you attended, trying to draw me out into the open. I even know about the secrets you trade to every intelligence agency from London to Moscow. Do you want to know why I let you live all this time?”

Leon stares down at him, every muscle in his body rigid.

“Because this was my revenge.” Yakov smiles silkily.

“The years of pain I can see in your eyes. The endless nights of not knowing. The useless rage and frustration at the years you can never get back.” He puts his face so close to Leon’s they almost touch.

“Now you know how it feels,” he whispers, “to lose the only family you ever had. And I didn’t just take Ekaterina and your son, Leon.

I broke them. I broke them both. Over and over again. ”

Leon rears back like he’s been burned, his pistol shaking as he aims it straight at Yakov’s sickening smile. Dimitry pushes his arm down, shaking his head warningly at his father.

“You never broke her.” Dimitry’s cracked voice breaks my heart. “Or me. Never. No matter what you did to us, we never forgot him.” He nods at Leon. “He was what kept my mother alive. She loved my father even more than she hated you.”

Yakov’s eyes flash. “I should have fucking killed you the night I took her.”

“Yes.” Dimitry’s face stretches into a lethal, cold smile that sends shivers down even my spine. “You really should have.”

“That smile,” Yakov whispers, staring up at him. For perhaps the first time, I sense a glimmer of fear behind his dark eyes. “That fucking smile.”

Dimitry leans in closer. “I want you to remember my smile,” he says softly. “It’s the last thing you’ll ever fucking see.”

“Dimitry.” Roman’s voice comes across the room, low but still commanding. “We have to go, brother. This place is wired to blow. ”

Dimitry glances at Leon. “Together,” he says.

Leon nods.

The two of them stand back from Yakov’s chair and raise their guns.

By the time they’ve finished firing, Jacob Cohen, Jacey— Yakov— is gone from this world forever.