The Spy by Sophie Lark

20

Ivan Petrov

St. Petersburg

Fifteen Years Ago

The next time Marko Moroz comes to the monastery, I hardly recognize him.

He jumps out of his car, limping to the gates before Maks can even reach him, gripping the iron bars in his massive hands and howling, “IVAN!” at the top of his lungs.

I had already heard what had happened, and I suppose I was expecting him, though not so soon, because by my last intelligence, he was lying in a hospital bed in Kyiv with seven bullets in his body.

I can see the bandage on his jaw where one of those bullets went through his cheek, shattering half his molars before exiting right below the opposite ear.

I know what kept Marko alive. The same thing that brought him here: the thirst for revenge.

I had been playing in the yard with several of the dogs—or at least, to their eyes playing. Really, we were training the latest litter. As soon as my radio crackled, I sent my son into the house.

My son paused, looking at me with those blue-green eyes that have always been so startling in his face. He got my olive skin, and hair a little lighter than mine, more like Dom’s. Those eyes must be from some distant ancestor unknown to Sloane or me. They’re deeper than ours, and gentler. Too gentle, I sometimes fear.

“Go on inside,” I said again sternly. “And take the pups.”

Obediently, he scooped up the two fluffy ovcharkas, one under each arm, and ferried them into the house.

He’s a good boy. Calm, serious, and already showing flashes of his mother’s brilliance.

I don’t want Marko to see him.

I nod for Maks to open the gates.

Marko comes lurching up the drive, limping heavily on the leg that received two of the bullets.

“IVAN!” he bellows again, though by this point we’re close enough to see each other plainly.

I walk toward him with an ugly feeling of impending doom. Marko has the appearance of a bill unpaid. My own fate coming to claim me once more.

He looks haggard and wild-eyed. Skinnier than I’ve ever seen him—he must have lost forty pounds in the hospital, or more. He’s diminished in all ways. Yet more dangerous than ever.

“IVAN, THEY KILLED HER!” he howls, falling into my arms.

Thinner or not, he’s still almost heavy enough to knock me backward.

I can smell the alcohol seeping out of his pores, and the sickly scent of wounds not well-cared for.

“You need a doctor,” I tell him.

“You know what I need,” he hisses, staring at me with bulging, bloodshot eyes. “And it’s no fucking doctor.”

“Marko, you better lay down—”

“I’ll lay down when I’m dead!” he howls. “They killed her, Ivan, they fucking killed her!”

I heard the night it happened. Marko Moroz and his wife were gunned down outside the Operetta in Kyiv. They had been seeing a showing of Rigoletto.

I even know who did it.

Last year, Marko drove a pen through the eye of his former mentor Petro Holodryga. Holodryga had helped Marko take over large swaths of territory in Kyiv, allying his Banderovtsywith Marko’s Malina.

No one knows exactly what prompted the argument during what was supposed to be a friendly meeting between the two groups. The Banderovtsy didn’t take kindly to their boss becoming a cyclopean corpse. When the dust settled, four of Holodryga’s men were dead, shot and stabbed by Marko’s Malina during a meeting where all promised to come unarmed.

To no one’s surprise, Taras Holodryga, Petro’s nephew and the new leader of the Banderovtsy, soon retaliated, orchestrating the drive-by outside the theater. I don’t know if he meant to kill Daryah Moroz too. If he did, he sure as fuck should have made sure that Marko was dead first.

“We have to kill him,” Marko hisses in my face, pupils black pinpricks in the foggy green. “You have to help me, Ivan.”

I can feel my men watching. They’re giving us a wide radius so that Marko has the impression of confidentiality.

Though I can’t see her, I know Sloane will be watching, too, from somewhere inside the house—likely holding Freya in her arms, as our daughter is particularly attached to her mother at the moment and follows her everywhere she goes.

I know what Sloane would want me to say.

“You want revenge, my friend,” I say. “And you deserve it. But you can’t rush into this. Your daughter—”

“I’m doing this for her!” Marko cries, his face as red as his beard. “They slaughtered her mother! Nearly left her an orphan! How can I ever look my baby girl in the face if I let this pass?”

I take a deep breath.

Nix Moroz is only three years old, the same as Freya. She will never know her mother. Probably won’t even remember her.

What would I do if someone killed Sloane? If someone took her away from us?

Seeing my expression shift, Marko presses his point.

“You owe me, Ivan,” he says. “St. Petersburg belongs to you because of me.”

“I gave you the lion’s share of the profit. I kept my agreement.”

“Money comes easy,” Marko insists. “I got you power, control. The security to keep your family safe! You owe me the same.”

I don’t want to start a war with the Banderovtsy. And I don’t want to ally with Marko once more—not after everything he’s done.

Yet . . . there’s truth in his words.

I do owe him a debt that money can’t pay.

And he does deserve his revenge.

You don’t kill a man’s wife.

What’s really holding me back is the knowledge that Sloane will not approve. She wouldn’t want me to do this.

Still, I feel that I must.

So for the first and only time in my marriage, I go against the silent advice of my wife echoing through my brain.

I say to Marko, “I’ll help you.”

* * *

We takesix of my men and six of Marko’s.

As I guessed, Sloane is not at all happy with my plan. Still, she wants to come with me.

“I don’t trust him,” she says, her dark eyes furious and resentful. “He’ll stab you in the back, Ivan. You know he’s jealous—you still have your wife and children.”

“And he still has his daughter,” I remind her. “So he has something to lose, too.”

Sloane frowns, not letting go of my hand.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her frightened before. Not even when I had her locked in the cells beneath this monastery, when we were not yet well acquainted.

“Why are you smiling?” she demands.

“I was only thinking, if you failed to kill me, there’s no fucking way that Marko could pull it off.”

Sloane laughs, though I know she doesn’t want to.

“Sometimes I think we’re invincible, because what you and I have can’t be killed,” she says. “Still . . . be careful, my love.”

I kiss her hard. “Nothing could keep me from coming back to you.”

Sloane only agrees to stay with our children because Dominik will be with me to watch my back.

I’m sure he endured a similarly tense parting from Lara. Their youngest son Kade is a curious child who gets into everything, and his older brother Adrik grows wilder by the day.

If all goes as planned, we shouldn’t be gone for long.

We meet the Malina in Kyiv, checking our gear for the assault on Taras Holodryga’s compound.

It isn’t wise to retaliate so quickly. Taras knows that Marko survived the attack. He’ll assume that we’re coming for him.

Marko insists that Taras thinks this particular house is unknown to anyone but his inner circle. It’s a small farmhouse in Baczyna, seven hours outside Kyiv along the Dnister River. The farmhouse has, of course, been renovated to the appropriately luxurious standards of a gangster, but it still sits in an orchard of plum, cherry, and walnut trees, lacking any serious impediments to attack like the stone walls of the monastery.

“He’s holed up there with his mistress,” Marko snarls. “Like a rat in a hole.”

We drive out in the dead of night, surrounding the farmhouse from all sides. With night vision goggles and tactical coordination, it’s not difficult to dispatch the four soldiers patrolling the orchard.

One of Marko’s men is shot entering the actual house, but it’s only a mild injury to the bicep. In less than five minutes we’ve rousted Taras and his woman from the master bedroom.

Taras looks weak and pitiful, his soft belly hanging over the waistband of his boxer shorts. I can see the lamplight gleaming on his skull through his thinning hair. His pale eyes blink up at us, half-blind without his glasses. Marko finds the glasses and rams them onto his face.

Taras is blubbering and pleading. He has none of the steel of his uncle, and even less of his strategy. Petro Holodryga would never have been foolish enough to fail to kill a rival and then hide in such an unprotected place.

“Go ahead,” I say to Marko. “Take your revenge.”

Marko towers over Taras, his limp all but forgotten. The devil is raging behind his eyes, fully awake and in control of Marko’s goliath body. He deals the man a vicious blow to the mouth that knocks out one of his front teeth. Taras’s head lolls limply.

I expect Marko to draw his gun and shoot Taras between the eyes.

Instead, I hear the screams and whimpers of two children being dragged down the farmhouse stairs.

Marko’s men throw the kids down on the floor—a boy and a girl, six and four years old at the most. The children are bawling, messy-haired, and dressed in matching pajamas.

Dom throws me a quick, wide-eyed look. His hands tighten on his rifle.

I can see Maks, recognizable even in his balaclava because of the patch over his eye, shifting position behind Marko’s lieutenant.

“Who the fuck are they?” I snarl to Marko.

I already know the answer—the woman is screaming and begging, trying to pull away from Marko’s soldiers to get to her children.

She’s not Taras’s mistress—she’s his wife. And these are his kids.

“This is not what we discussed,” I tell Marko.

He ignores me.

Turning to Taras, he says, “You shot my wife right in front of me. I held her in my arms on the steps of the operetta. I watched her drown in her own blood from the holes in her lungs. Could you possibly imagine how that feels, Taras? No, of course not. A man could never imagine such a thing. He can only experience it.”

Marko turns, pointing his gun at the young boy who sits frozen on the weathered wooden boards of the farmhouse floor. He stares up at Marko, tears and mucus running down his face.

Marko says to Taras, his voice soft with anticipation, “I’m going to shoot your son twice in the leg, where you shot me. And then I’ll shoot your daughter right below the heart, where you hit Darya. Finally, I’ll strangle your wife with my bare hands, till the light leaves her eyes, so you know, you’ll truly know, the bitter agony of watching helpless, unable to save the ones you love. And all the while, I want you to beg for mercy. Beg and howl, like I did. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll let one of you live.”

“PLEASE!” Taras cries. “Let them go, they have nothing to do with this!”

“That’s good.” Marko nods. “Keep begging, just like that.”

His index finger curls around the trigger, the barrel of the gun aimed at the boy almost the same age as my own son.

As Marko’s finger squeezes tight, I ram into his arm, knocking the gun askew. The bullet smashes into a vase a foot above the boy’s head, and the Glock goes skittering across the floor.

Marko roars with rage, turning directly into the barrel of the AK-47 Dom points at his face.

My men are faster than Marko’s, and in better position. While the Malina were subduing Taras’ wife and children, my Bratva were already angling around them, ready to draw. They knew I would not allow this to pass.

“Drop your rifles,” Dom orders Marko’s men. “Or I’ll shoot your boss in the face.”

Marko stands still, looking at me, not at Dom.

“You made a promise to me, Ivan,” he says.

“And I kept my promise. You’re welcome to kill Taras. But not his wife, and definitely not his children.”

“He has to suffer,” Marko hisses. “As I suffer.”

“We’re not killing his kids,” I growl back at him. “I’m not fucking doing that.”

“You don’t have to do it—”

“No one is doing it.”

Marko’s men have lowered their rifles but not dropped them. They’re watching their boss for instructions.

“FUCKING DROP THEM!” Dom shouts at them. “We’ll kill every one of you.”

Slowly, resentfully, the Malina lay their rifles on the floor.

Now Marko is truly angry. His whole frame trembles with enough force to shake this ancient floor. His teeth are bared in a snarl, his fingers twitching and those blazing eyes fixed on my face.

He wants to charge at me. Maybe even more than he wants to kill Taras.

“You can have your revenge,” I repeat. “But only on the guilty. Not the innocent.”

I pull the KA-BAR knife from my belt and hand it to Marko, blade in my palm and handle held out to him.

Marko takes it.

His upper lip twitches beneath his ginger beard, his breath coming out between his teeth with a hissing sound.

He grips the handle and lunges, not at Taras, but at my brother. He means to cut Dom’s throat—only my brother’s quick twist to the right spares his life, the knife slashing open his cheek instead.

I shoot Marko in the knee, dropping him to the ground.

Then I shoot Taras Holodryga, right between the eyes.

“There,” I say bitterly. “It’s over.”

Taras’ wife and children are howling.

Marko kneels before me, hand gripping his knee as blood seeps through his fingers.

He looks up at me with burning fury.

“Someday you’ll kneel before me, as I kneel before you now,” he says, teeth grinding together like stone on stone. “You’ll beg and plead for my mercy. And I’ll remind you that we could have been brothers . . . that I held out the hand of friendship to you, before you spat in my face.”

Marko spits on the wooden boards of the farmhouse, never taking his eyes off of mine.

“It’s because we were friends that I don’t kill you,” I tell him. “My debt is paid to you. All bonds between us are cut. You have your city, I have mine—don’t come to St. Petersburg again, or there will be no mercy for either of us.”

I leave him there, with the body of Taras Holodryga and the unarmed Malina.

I take Taras’ wife and children back to Kyiv, depositing them with the remaining Banderovtsy.

Then I find a steady-handed doctor to stitch Dom’s face before I take my men home once more.

* * *