Page 100 of Kingmakers, Year Four

24

Ares

Christmas morning I visit my mom.

I stop by the Solar first to leave my gift for Nix outside her door.

I couldn’t get her anything expensive, because after all, Ares is supposed to be poor, but I bribed one of the cooks to make her an entire basket of fresh, hotverhuny,the only food she’s complained of missing at Kingmakers. The little pastries—deep-fried, crispy, and sprinkled with powdered sugar—smell exactly like funnel cake, which makes me surprisingly nostalgic as well. I hadn’t realized I was missing American food.

I also commissioned a basket of blueberry muffins for Hedeon, as penance for making him intervene in my fight with Estas.

I leave the muffins by his door, knowing an apology is less welcome if somebody wakes you up to offer it.

My mom gets a different sort of gift—a photo Freya sent in her last letter, found in the drawer of our father’s study in our house in Cannon Beach.

I’ve returned to that house several times during the summers when I’m not at Kingmakers.

It gives me no comfort, no sense of being at home.

The house is too cold and too quiet. My father’s absence an echoing emptiness that no light or sound can fill.

I never knew I could miss someone like I miss my dad.

I never knew how much I relied on him.

He was always there to tell me what I should do. Giving me a sense of security even in a world as chaotic and violent as ours. I always knew he’d keep us safe.

And he did—the night the Malina attacked us, he offered up his own life so we could escape, providing cover while we fled on the boat.

But he didn’t die. The Malina shot him, captured him, and dragged him off to a cell in some desolate place, in some unknown country.

We’ve been searching for him ever since.

We know he’s alive because Marko Moroz has been using my father to extort us for every penny the Petrov empire earns.

We siphon off as much cash as we can without the rest of the Bratva noticing. It’s our money, but if the high table knows that Ivan Petrov is missing, that he’s no longer in control of his territory, they’ll descend on St. Petersburg, and on our holdings in America, too.

Dominik has been running St. Petersburg, and Freya has been keeping the dispensaries going, even though she’s barely any older than Nix. She has the real Ares to help her, at least. During the summer months, my mother shores up the bulwarks. Come September, she returns to Kingmakers as Miss Robin so she can scour the archives for schematics not found anywhere else in the world.

We’ve seen where Marko holds my father. The first call was video—my mother insisted upon it to confirm that my father was still alive, refusing to pay a single penny without seeing him in the flesh. Her real purpose was, of course, to gather information.

Marko only showed us the interior of the cell. Even that provided several clues to where my father might be found. The type of stone that formed the walls, the shape of the doorways, the angle of the light . . . all have been studied to the minutest degree when my mother combs over the recording.

And my father himself has been giving us information, disguised by a simple code that, to our knowledge, Marko has never noticed during the monthly calls to Dominik where proof of life is exchanged for another ransom payment. Once a month my father tells us what he’s observed, and slowly, painstakingly, we narrow our options, cutting closer and closer to the source.

It was a coded message from two months ago that gave my mother the idea of a mine.

My father had observed a fleck of yellow powder on one of the soldier’s boots.

We’ve tried following Marko and his men. As far as we can tell, only Marko and his lieutenant Kuzmo visit the place where my father is held. The rest of the guards must stay there permanently.

Tracking Marko is no easy task. He leaves from his compound deep in the mountains outside of Kyiv. He flies on his private jet, which is regularly combed for explosives and tracking devices. He’s paranoid and reclusive, the growing list of enemies who would want to see him dead causing him to ramp up his security measures by the month.

The only places he goes regularly now are the Four Seasons in Kyiv to meet with his accountant, and wherever the fuck he’s got my dad.

Even tracking him to the Four Seasons is dangerous. He saw Adrik’s SUV following him once, and he called Dominik, bellowing into the phone, “If you ever fucking try to track me again, I’ll cut off Ivan’s arm and mail it to you in a box. You take one step toward me, you even think of raising a hand against me, and I’ll chuck an incendiary grenade into his cell. Your only hope of getting him back alive is to pay me my fucking money and bide your time.”

None of us believe that Marko will ever release him.

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