Page 84 of Kingmakers, Year Four

“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 ofRigoletto.

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.

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