Page 46 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

“South.”

The minutes pass slowly. Blue light washes over the front-camera view as a police car stops outside the shop. Two officers get out and stand at the window with flashlights.

I text Rosa: Police at the shop. Nobody hurt. I’ll call soon.

“Vera.” Nikolai’s voice changes. “He’s at Zorin’s yard.”

I hold the phone tighter. At his end, Grisha’s voice comes through Anton’s speaker again, tight and fast. I catch my name, and Daniel’s, and a word I don’t know.

Nikolai listens. Then he’s back.

“Daniel went in through the gate,” he says. “The yard lights went off. Two men came out and looked straight at Grisha’s car.” A breath. “Zorin knows he was followed.”

I sit very still at his kitchen table. “Nikolai…”

“Yes.”

I don’t know what I was going to say. Stop. Be careful. Don’t go. “I’m glad you came back,” I say instead.

20

NIKOLAI

We leave the cars on the freight road behind the dead box-trailers, where Grisha and I sat in a van and watched twenty-two pallets go through the gate.

The yard is dark. The only light is the square of the office trailer door, standing open at the top of the steps, and the glow of a phone screen at the bottom.

Anton points toward the north fence, where the two road guards have stopped to watch Grisha’s car. He takes two men with him to secure them. Two come with me to the side gate, the one you have to lift by the frame before it will swing. We went over it three times on the map tonight.

We move between the abandoned trailers outside the fence. Through the mesh, I can see Daniel at the office steps.

Zorin is in the doorway with the light behind him, a heavy man in shirtsleeves, and Daniel is yelling up at him.

“I didn’t know they’d follow me! You told me to get her inside and call you! I tried, but she didn’t come!”

Zorin says something too low to carry.

Daniel juts his chin in defiance. “I’ll fucking tell them everything. They’ll pay for information on you.” And I know he just signed his own death certificate.

The first shot is loud in the empty yard. The second is louder.

Daniel drops onto the bottom step as his legs give out beneath him. Then he rolls over onto his side on the gravel and doesn’t move again.

I’m fifty yards away, on the wrong side of the fence, and all I can think is that I promised Vera we wouldn’t hurt him.

Zorin stands in the doorway with the gun hanging at his side. Then he calls out a name into the darkness, and I see the tall one appear from behind a forklift where he always stands to smoke.

He’s approaching my gate, toward the vehicle parked on the other side, probably to get Zorin out. He flicks a cigarette; he doesn’t know we’re here yet.

I lift the gate by the frame and swing it hard enough to send him sprawling into the gravel.

He’s back on his feet in an instant, knife in hand, feet planted wide apart in a fighting stance.

I know his face. I’ve seen it in Grisha’s grainy photograph, lit by a cigarette. I’ve seen it over a knife, close enough to smell his breath, the night I walked six blocks and sat down under the only light in a narrow alleyway.

He knows mine too. He comes in low, the way he did before. Last time I had my hands open. Not this time.

I block his knife arm with my first move, and the blade catches my left forearm before I get hold of his wrist. I turn into him with my whole weight behind me and drive him back against the side of a parked trailer, hard. The steel booms like a drum. He tries to get his knee up, but I’m faster. I twist his wrist until the knife falls and the sound he makes isn’t a word.