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LUCIA

A half-hour hike up narrow alleyways, followed by three flights of stairs, do little to improve either my mood or my aching feet. The stairs are a bitch, but our Moroccan carer’s family lives in the apartment below us, which is convenient for both her and us. There’s also a small terracotta-tiled terrace outside that catches the sun and offers a glimpse of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s a nice place for Papa to sit, even if it’s a far cry from the fountains and courtyards of my childhood.

To my relief, Mariam is smiling when she opens the door. A smile means that Papa isn’t dead or in the hospital.

She bursts into a torrent of heavily Arabic-accented French, from which I discern that although Papa is sleeping now, he’s been very agitated all afternoon. Mariam can’t make out why.

“It started after our walk,” she explains. “But he speaks in the Russian, and I don’t understand.” Like all our acquaintances, Mariam believes Papa to be my friend rather than my father.

“That’s fine. I’ll find out what it is when he wakes up.” I hug her, and despite my protestations, she insists on feeding me a plate of the heavenly tagine sitting in a conical terracotta pot on the stovetop. One of the best parts of having Mariam care for Papa, other than her truly gorgeous heart, is her utterly amazing cooking.

“You are too thin,” she says, eyeing me critically. “You are working too much. How do you ever sleep?”

With one eye open, most of the time.

“That’s why I’m so lucky to have you.” I smile at her, but instead of returning it, she glances sideways, chewing her lip nervously.

Oh, shit.

“What’s going on, Mariam? Is there something you need to tell me?”

Please don’t say it, please don’t say it...

“My son got an engineering job in Madrid. We will be moving next month.”

Yep. She said it.

I plaster a smile on my face like I mean it. “That’s wonderful news, Mariam. You must be so proud.”

I’m genuinely happy for her. From a selfish perspective, however, it’s a massive crisis.

It took me six months to find this apartment, and Mariam. The thought of trying to manage Papa alone for that long again, plus working fifteen hours minimum a day, seven days a week, is daunting, to say the least.

“You don’t worry,” she says, covering my hand with her own hennaed one. “I will help you find someone.”

But they won’t live downstairs, nor will they be Mariam.

I smile and tell her not to worry at all, but the truth is, I’m exhausted even thinking about returning to the merry-go-round of agencies and temporary staff.

After she leaves I enter the plain, whitewashed bedroom where Papa’s long frame is stretched out under the covers. Despite his age and frailty, there’s still a certain breadth to his shoulders, a nobility in his long nose and deep-set eyes, that is a reminder of the feared pakhan he once was. Founder and boss of the mighty Petrovsky clan—until Vilnus Orlov, a man Papa considered an ally , staged a coup while Papa was lying in a hospital bed recovering from his first stroke.

Vilnus would have killed Papa the same day. Along with my brother Alexei, my mother Maria, and me. Except for one problem: he couldn’t access the vault beneath our Miami compound.

The vault is the reason the Orlovs came for our family in the first place. And without its contents, Vilnus will never truly rule my father’s empire, no matter if he now calls the Petrovsky interests his.

Vilnus spent four years torturing my parents, my brother, and me, in his bid to open the vault. When his efforts managed to actually kill our mother, Alexei and I knew we had to get Papa out.

In the end, though, it was only Papa and I who managed to escape.

I feel the familiar pang of guilt. It kills me every day that my little brother is still trapped with the Orlovs. I would happily have stood between Alexei and those bastards until my last breath. Papa had certainly intended to do just that. But he was sick, Alexei was barely sixteen—and neither of them would even consider running without me.

In the end it was only my fear of what the Orlovs would do to Papa that convinced me to leave Alexei behind.

Not a day goes by that I don’t question that decision.

Papa stirs on the bed. I sit on the mattress beside him, covering his hand with my own. His pale blue eyes flicker open. His hand grips mine suddenly, with surprising strength.

“I’m here, Papa,” I whisper in Russian. “It’s okay. I’m safe.”

But his hand grips mine even harder, with an urgency that makes me raise my head and frown as he tries to mouth a word. He shakes his head angrily as I try one, then two, suggestions. Finally, with an effort that strains his entire body, he gets the word out.

“ Ko-rob-ka ,” he says.

Box.

I freeze, my heart slowing to a dull thud. I go to the cupboard where I keep the lockbox containing our money and fake passports.

It’s gone.

I slump to the floor, my head in my hands.

Nothing else is missing, but then again, there’s nothing else in the tiny apartment worth taking.

Any opportunist would have taken the lockbox.

I can’t be sure that the thief was the Orlovs.

And you can’t be sure that it wasn’t.

Either way, we certainly can’t stay here.

But we can’t run, either, no matter how much I know we should.

I barely have enough cash in my bag to pay for a room for the night. I think of the tip I told Roman to keep and actually laugh, a choked, strangled sound that I immediately stifle so Papa won’t hear.

What I really need is the kind of power CEO Man represents, the hellfire needed to regain the world that was stolen from my family. But I’m about as close to possessing either power or hellfire as I am of making my crazy fantasies about Roman himself come true.

It takes another two hours for me to gather our few possessions, get Papa and his wheelchair down the three flights of stairs, and check in to a cheap motel down the hill. I leave a note for Mariam, wishing her luck. I can’t ask her to come with us. I won’t put her in that kind of danger.

I get Papa settled as comfortably as is possible, given his wounds, and buy some soup, which he insists on feeding to himself.

Then I kiss his forehead and go back to work.

If we plan to eat tomorrow, I don’t have a choice.

B y the time I finally stack the last of the chairs on the tables, it’s after two a.m.

I’m exhausted in a way that goes beyond the physical. I’ve spent all night with a knife slipped under the register, scanning every face that walks in. Anyone could have been watching where I took Papa, even though I made the taxi double back a dozen times, costing me even more money I can’t afford. For all I know, right now, Orlov men could be torturing my father.

As if in response to my thoughts, the sparrow tattoo on my upper left shoulder tingles as if it was a real bird.

Suddenly I’m back in Miami, strapped face down on a table, my skin bare under the tattooist’s needle.

“ D o you know what happens to little Russian blyats who think they can fly away? Do you?”

Vilnus’s scarred, brutal face is only inches from mine. He hits my cheek, hard, with his open palm. “They have their wings cut off.”

“Leave her alone!” Fifteen-year-old Alexei struggles with his bonds in the chair opposite, his eyes glowing with rage despite the blood running down his face.

“Tell me how to get into the vault and I will.”

“He doesn’t know,” I gasp, trying to breathe through the dual pain on my face and back. “If we knew, we’d tell you.”

“ Pizdozh ! Don’t lie to me.”

Alexei strains against his bonds. “She doesn’t know. I don’t know. None of us do. How many times do we need to say it?”

Crack! A fist smashes into Alexei’s nose.

“No!” I scream. “Don’t hurt him, please. It’s true. We don’t know how to open the vault.”

“Then we should just kill you all now and blow the damn thing up.” Vilnus fingers the long blade that is his favorite tool of torture.

“You can’t.” This comes from a man I assume must be another Orlov. He’s an older man, his forearm inked with the tattoo of a rose entwined in barbed wire that signifies a long time spent in a Russian prison. He rarely comes to the compound, but when he does, he terrifies me.

“Their fingerprints are part of the vault’s security system, that much we do know.” His eyes are as cold and dead as if he were already a corpse.

“Fingerprints can be copied.” The tip of Vilnus’s blade presses into my back, right above where the tattooist is working. I know what the needle is marking me with: the red sparrow of the Orlovs. All his men carry that tattoo on their hands, the mark that warns them against either speaking to outsiders or, more specifically in my case, of ever trying to leave.

“And we can’t ever be sure a copy will work,” snaps the older man. “What we need is the man who built that vault, but you’ve already killed him, Vilnus, haven’t you? So now we have to find someone who knows what he does.”

“Or”—Vilnus drags the knife down my back in two short, brutal strokes that makes me scream and Alexei struggle in vain against his ropes—“we cause enough pain for these two spoiled little brats to start talking. Until then...” He draws the knife across my skin again, this time horizontally. “...let this serve as a reminder: if you try to run away again, little sparrow, I will find you. And then, fingerprints or not, I will kill you.”

I reach over my shoulder, touching the raised scars still there. Vilnus drew the knife deep enough down my back that the tattooist worked around the wounds while they were still bleeding.

A red sparrow, with its wings and head cut off by the scars Vilnus made.

When we escaped six years ago, the first thing I did after we’d reached the relative safety of Argentina was get ink over those scars. Now they are drawn over to look like a cage with an open door.

Because Vilnus’s little sparrow did fly away, despite his threats. And I’m never going back.

Not alive, at least.

I return to the motel after my shift, bone achingly tired and terrified of what I might find when I open the door. I’m almost catatonic with relief to find Papa awake, sitting stiffly upright in a motel chair. His gnarled old fingers grip the kitchen knife I took from the flat when we left.

My heart cracks a little more.

Papa should be safe in his own bed, with an army of servants looking after him, not trying to protect himself from possible killers.

“Papa.” I ease the knife from his hand, speaking in soft Russian. “You should be sleeping.”

He tugs gently at my hand.

“ Docha ,” he says, more clearly than I’ve heard him speak in weeks. Touched, I fold down to rest at his feet. Papa isn’t given to endearments. And it’s been a long time since he’s called me docha , which is a little like “sweet daughter” in English.

He puts a hand on my head, and for a moment I savor it, the touch that for my earlier life meant safety and security.

Until it didn’t.

“ Docha —shouldn’t—work,” Papa says, laboring over the words.

“I’m okay, Papa.” I squeeze his hand. “I’m happy to work.”

“Petrovsky.” He thumps the side of his chair as he says the word, a dangerous spark in the pale, washed-out eyes.

Danger. The life force of our family.

He thumps the chair again. “Petrovsky—work—enough.”

My heart twists so hard it hurts. I know what he means.

Sergei Petrovsky is almost ninety years old. He has worked from the time he was born in a Russian gulag until his first stroke at eighty-four. Along the way he’s lost two wives to violence and hardship, and all but two of his children. Through it all, never once did my father lose faith.

And never once did he stop working.

He worked tirelessly his entire life, to ensure that the next generation of Petrovskys wouldn’t have to.

Yet now he’s here, the strongest man I know stuck in a squalid hotel I can barely afford, being babysat by illegal workers I have to bribe. We have hardly enough money to buy breakfast, let alone new identities.

In all the six years I have been running, this moment feels pretty close to being the lowest.

Roman Stevanovsky’s words pop unexpectedly into my mind, even though this morning seems like a lifetime ago: “A life without danger is like sex without passion—not really worth having. Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Lopez?”

In some strange way, those words give me comfort.

Danger is lifeblood.

It keeps me alive, and Papa alert.

The life that was stolen from us still exists out there. I have to believe that everything we are enduring now is just another step on the way to building it back.

“Papa.” I cover his hands with my own, speaking in the Russian of my childhood. “Do you remember what you used to tell me, when I asked you to let us see inside the vault?”

He shakes his head impatiently, but I go on anyway. “You always said the same words: ‘that is a story for another day, myshka.’ Then you would tell me that loyalty, honor, and integrity are treasures far greater than any behind that locked door. You said that a future built on those qualities cannot be bought or inherited, only earned. Well—now is my time, and Alexei’s time, to earn our own futures.” I grip his hands, and he tightens his own around them, his eyes boring fiercely into mine.

“But I promise you this, Papa: one day, Alexei and I will take back everything Vilnus stole from us.

“All of it.

“And on the day we open that vault, we will have earned the right to call ourselves Petrovskys again. We will have earned the right to call ourselves Sergei Petrovsky’s children.”