Page 55

YULIAN

As a pakhan, I’m used to giving orders. More than anything, I’m used to them being executed swiftly and flawlessly. Without questions—without hesitation.

That all goes to shit when Nikita’s involved.

“I want a milkshake,” she yawns, still fighting the anesthetic in her system. “With whipped cream. Then I’ll talk.”

I could fight her on this. Pull rank, remind her who’s in charge. Or better yet, I could simply make her talk. She’s too weak to fight back, let alone win.

Soft, the beast in me mocks as I turn on the blender. You’ve gone too fucking soft, Yulian.

Maybe so. But I’ve sworn an oath. On Kira’s grave, the day of her funeral.

That I’d always look out for her little sister.

She drags herself to the kitchen counter, IV in tow. I don’t try to help her walk, and she doesn’t ask. Wounded or not, Nikita’s still one of my top lieutenants. A soldier.

Her pride needs healing, too.

“Ew!” She pulls a face at her first sip. “Is there protein powder in this?”

“According to your nurse, you’ve been eating your muscles.”

“My nurse?” Her brow knits, then realization dawns on her face. “Oh! The one with the shitty car and balls of steel.”

“Her name’s Mia. She’s the one who brought you to me.”

“Seriously?” She takes another, careful sip. Her lips are all cracked with dehydration. She almost chokes a couple of times, struggling to swallow. “Wow. Did I just happen to carjack the nurse you’re fucking, or did you develop a scrubs kink while I was gone?”

“If you’re going to choke on that, at least say something useful.”

“Hey, I’m on the mend. You should indulge me with sweets and gossip. How else am I supposed to get better?”

“I’ve indulged you plenty.” I fix her with a hard look. “Now, talk.”

She rolls her eyes, but obliges. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Figures.” She stretches in her chair, careful not to displace the IV in her arm. “It’s gonna be tough. My memory’s still hazy.”

“Try.”

“Gee, thanks. That’s helpful.”

“Start with the Ws. You know how it goes.”

Back when we were kids, our parents preferred belt and cane over shrinks. Mine never went that far, but the Morozov patriarch wasn’t very tolerant. As such, Nikita’s frequent lapse in memory and focus were written off as laziness, lack of intelligence, and occasionally disrespect.

She didn’t get an ADHD diagnosis until she was well within her twenties.

Nikita purses her cracked lips. “Right. Okay, well, I’ve got no proof about who took me.”

“But you have a guess.”

“Same guess you must have.” Her voice hardens on those words. It tells me we’re on the same page about this.

Only one common enemy turns her tone to ice like that.

Prizrak.

That’s the “who.”

“One W down,” I tell her solemnly. “Four more to go.”

“I remember where I was taken,” she says, deep in thought. “I was following a lead. I’d been getting reports of homeless people disappearing without a trace, all in a single area.”

“Brownsville,” I fill in.

“Yeah,” she frowns. “How’d you know?”

“GPS in your phone.”

She doesn’t seem particularly surprised or even offended. “Oh, cool. I forgot you installed that.”

Nikita is infamous for her ability to get lost in a glass of water. Once, she went hiking and dropped off the grid for a whole weekend because she couldn’t find her way back to the path.

It was a beginners’ trail.

“Anyway,” she says, “I went to check out this construction site. Seemed like a promising place to start.”

“You shouldn’t have gone alone,” I growl. “You know how we operate. Our rules exist for a reason.”

“It was just a teeny-tiny building!”

“It was a Prizrak nest. If you’d told someone, we could have made real progress. Instead, they made you disappear.” I clench my fist on the counter. “I don’t have to explain to you what I thought happened, do I?”

She considers me, her green gaze fixed on me like water. Calm, unfazed. “I knew you’d never stop looking.”

Damn right I didn’t. And yet, in the end, I wasn’t the one who found her.

It was Mia.

“I made a promise to your sister,” I tell Nikita, eager to steer my thoughts away from Mia. “I wasn’t going to let some mudak put you in the ground next to her.”

“I love you, too, Yuli.”

I hold up a hand. “Don’t.”

“Sorry for triggering your feelings allergy.” She doesn’t sound sorry at all. “As for our Ws…”

“Go on.” I’m eager to get to the end of this conversation, find out where to strike. If we hurry up, we can still find traces. Traces we can follow.

But Nikita dashes all my hopes with a single sentence. “I have no idea where I was kept. And before you start barking with your alpha voice, I was drugged out of my mind.”

I ignore her provocation and clench my teeth. “I find that hard to believe, considering you escaped.”

“I got lucky,” she shrugs. “Someone must have fucked up my dose. I woke up, freed myself, hobbled away with the first weapon I could find. I was too high to get a car in motion, so I waited in the backseat. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Fuck. “You’re telling me we don’t even have a trail.”

“Sorry to disappoint. Next time I have to run for my life, I’ll make sure to bring breadcrumbs.”

“I don’t think you understand the reality of the situation,” I snarl. “Our enemies are packing up, Nika. They’re shipping themselves overseas. If we don’t catch them now?—”

“Overseas?” Her face goes pensive. “So that wasn’t a dream, then.”

The hell…? “Explain yourself,” I demand.

“While I was under, I heard voices. Just now and then, between doses.” She purses her lips, eyes narrowed, trying to grasp a memory just out of reach. “They were talking about leaving. Said they had one last job to finish, and then they’d be gone.”

One last job.

My blood freezes. It can’t be anything else.

All these years, they’ve kept close tabs on me. I couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t struck yet, but now, it all makes sense—they were preparing their escape hatch.

And if it’s ready, so are they.

Conflict grips my stomach, twisting hard. Every drop of guilt I’ve been suppressing rises, a torrent of acid burning up my throat.

Suddenly, my phone buzzes with a text. I check it distractedly, not even looking who it’s from.

And then I see it.

A selfie—from Mia.

She’s grinning, carefree and light despite the hellish day she just had. Her hair is still damp from the shower. I can almost smell her shampoo through the screen, creamy and sweet.

In her arms, Eli is giving the camera a gap-toothed grin, his Garfield plushie held tight in his arms.

Looking forward to tomorrow!

P.S.—Your biggest fan says hi.

Time slips through my fingers. I have no idea how long I spend staring at the screen, lost in the image of Mia and her son.

Smiling.

Happy.

Safe.

“I need to make a phone call.”

Nikita doesn’t say anything. She knows better than to get in the way when I’m like this. Dark, rumbling thunderclouds are gathering above my head, a storm in the making.

I walk out into the balcony and dial Maks’s number.

“Calling again so soon?” Maksim laughs on the other end of the line. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were growing soft on me, boss.”

“Shut up,” I say. “I need you to put guards around Mia’s building. Better yet, make it the whole fucking block.”

He curses under his breath in Russian. “We’re in the endgame, then?”

“The end of the endgame.”

“Then you’d better hurry. Move up our schedule, set a date with Mia for an engagement party or?—”

“No.”

Maks falls silent for a moment. “‘No’?”

If what Nikita said is true, then I can no longer take the risk of involving Mia. Things have officially become too dangerous—too unpredictable.

I thought I could stomach putting her on the line. Told myself I’d be able to protect her again. But if things are at this stage, then…

This time, Prizrak won’t miss.

And I can’t do it. I can’t sacrifice her on the altar of my revenge. I can’t let her son grow up an orphan.

I can’t let him turn into me.

“I’m letting Mia go.” The words claw my throat to ribbons on the way out. “Tomorrow night.”

For a long while, my second-in-command doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. I can hear his disappointment through the line.

So be it. I’d rather be weak than a coward. I won’t spend one more second hiding behind a single mother’s skirts to draw my enemies to me.

Revenge be damned.

Eventually, Maksim finds his voice again. “That’s your choice, then?”

“That’s my choice.”

More silence. “Very well.” He clears his throat. “I’ll arrange the perimeter.”

Then he hangs up.

I walk back inside and toss Nikita a spare burner phone. “Stay inside,” I warn. “If anything happens, call me.”

“You’re going out?”

I can’t stay one more second cooped up like this. If I do, I risk shattering every piece of furniture in my penthouse. I need to clear my head—to hit something. Someone. Anything.

Anything to keep my mind off what I’m about to do.

Because, tomorrow, I will lose Mia Winters forever.