Page 6

My eyes are squeezed shut. My whole body is trembling. Zevran’s fingers are still inside me, slowing now, and his other arm is wrapped around my waist, holding me together.

Troy isn’t making noise anymore.

I’m afraid to look.

I feel Zevran’s dark, quiet laughter against my throat.

“Open your eyes, printsessa. Open them and see what you have done.”

1

Zevran

Six days earlier

The peeling clapboard house sits on a street that was probably respectable once. Two stories with dirty bay windows. Two cars parked outside that don’t belong to the neighborhood. A light on in the downstairs window at eleven at night with the curtains drawn. A man on the stoop idly watching the street.

He’s not very good at it. I’ve spent six hours watching a man pick his nose and scratch himself. The glamor of this work never gets old.

I’ve counted five men on rotation. One at the door, two on the first floor, one in the basement. Possibly one upstairs. There’s a second entrance at the rear through a service alley that nobody is covering, which tells me these men are confident rather than careful, which is the best kind of men to work against.

Dragan named the crew when he gave me the job. I put them down eighteen months ago. Burned the safe house and buried the men who mattered. The dead leader’s brother, Pyotr Simeon, has built it back up sloppy, the way you do when you’re running on spite and greed instead of sense.

Pyotr Simeon is not here, as far as I can tell. But he can wait.

I’m here for Viktoriya Morozova.

Twenty years old. Pale hair, green eyes and, when I looked her up, dozens of over-posed and filtered selfies on her social media. She’s going to be spoiled and exhausting. I’m already sick of her.

Viktoriya was taken eleven days ago, so fuck knows what kind of state I’m going to find her in. Probably not raped, given what my client told me this gang usually does with pretty girls. Probably. But she’ll be starved, dehydrated, and hysterical with fear. Possibly drugged and beaten in places that don’t show.

I’ve pulled women out of places like this before. I’ll pull more out after Viktoriya. The job requires a clear head and a steady hand, and sentiment is the enemy of both.

So I don’t feel it. At least not while I stay busy.

I’m Corvale Bratva. Vor v zakone, which means the jobs I take, I take because I choose to. I make sensitive problems go away. Dragan calls me when a situation has moved past the point where the Pakhan has decided sending a soldier makes sense. I am what comes after the soldiers have failed.

Dragan is avtoritet. Enough weight to hand me a job and enough sense not to phrase it as an order.

I don’t know what makes me so good at this sensitive kind of work. I guess it’s my kind heart and soothing personality.

I check my watch. My gun. My knife.

Then I go in through the back.

The back door needs one kick, just below the lock, and the frame splinters. The door pops open, and then I’m moving through with my gun raised.

The kitchen is small and smells of cigarettes and bad cooking. The first two men are at the table with a hand of cards. I shoot the one facing me, the sound of the silenced bullet no louder than a whisper. His head snaps back, the light in his eyes instantly dying. The second man is reaching for his weapon and opening his mouth to yell. I cross the kitchen in two strides and slam his head into the table hard enough to scatter the cards. Then I put a bullet in his skull.

I pause to listen, wondering if my entry has alerted the other men.

Apart from blood dripping from the table onto the linoleum, there is silence.

Two down. I’m already bored.

Moving on, the hallway is narrow, with wallpaper peeling at the seams. A staircase to the left. A door to the right, light bleeding under it, and the sound of a television tuned to a sports game.

I could do this in my sleep.