Page 138 of Lethal Alliance

I remember the resignation on his face the day the Orlovs strangled the life from his body.

And then I think of standing in front of Mikhail and taking the bullet that was meant for him. The first of many I would take to keep him alive, right up until a bomb I didn’t foresee ended his life forever. My guilt over that failure has haunted me every day since his death. It almost stopped me from being able to give his children the love they deserve.

I know how heavy it is to carry the responsibility for lives other than your own. And I know the pain of failing to protect them.

I stare out at the mountains opposite, the late-afternoon sun turning them buttery yellow. “Perhaps,” I say slowly, “my father was able to be different because he had you to protect him.”

Sergei makes a dismissive noise and shifts restlessly in his chair. “Aleksander was the best of men.” He says it with a finality that is meant to end the conversation.

I stifle a smile. It isn’t lost on me that those words are the exact ones my mother also recently used to describe Papa.

“Thank you for this.” I hold up the box, very aware that I’m still holding off asking the questions I really want to. Instead I say, “I have been talking with your son these past few days.”

Sergei nods, but doesn’t say anything.

“Alexei will be arriving soon.” I choose my words carefully. “There are matters we would both like to see settled before the wedding.”

He smiles faintly. “Go ahead and ask your questions, Roman. I will answer anything you wish.”

Part of me thinks I should wait until Darya is with me. But another part of me needs to hear this alone, to learn my father’s story for myself.

“What happened in Paris?” It isn’t the question I thought I’d ask, but it’s the first one that comes. “Darya told me about the crates of Graf vodka, and returning the treasures to the families who had entrusted them to you. I know that Fedorov eventually found you. How did you survive? Why didn’t you and my father die in the fire?”

“The night he came for our families, Fedorov had Aleksander and me arrested.” All trace of his previous warmth disappears the moment he speaks Fedorov’s name. Sergei’s voice is hard, his breathing hoarse. It’s unexpectedly difficult to see the sudden, fierce agony in his face. “Fedorov owned enough Parisienne police to have Aleksander and me locked up for the night on trumped-up charges. In the morning, he came to see us in our cell. He offered us a deal: he’d leave our families alone if we handed over the rest of the treasure. Your father had two children, a boy and a girl. I had three. My eldest was a girl, Irina. She was eight.”

He swallows his glass of vodka, his eyes closed. Then he takes a deep breath and begins again.

“We agreed to his deal, of course. Promises to our fathers aside, we had tried to leave the gulag behind us. We both knew nothing was more important than keeping our families safe. We led Fedorov to the Graf warehouse and watched while he took all the remaining pieces, which was no inconsiderable fortune.”

He pauses. I refill his glass.

“We didn’t realize it was already too late.” He stares through the glass to a past I can’t see, his face gaunt. “Fedorov never had any intention of allowing our families to live. He’d already killed them all and burned our businesses to the ground. After the warehouse, he took Aleksander and me to look at the smoldering ashes that remained. He left us there, on our knees, staring at the rubble where our lives had been. I imagine he thought we’d never rise up off that ground, and he was almost right.”

Blyat.

I’ve seen a lot of pain in my life, a lot I wish I could unsee. But I can’t imagine standing before the burned bodies of Darya and my children. I don’t want to. Even the thought makes me want to cross myself, and I was never raised a Catholic. I have a compulsive urge to make some kind of sign to ward off evil.

“Exactly.” I realize Sergei is watching me, old pain etched deeply on every line of his face. “Now maybe you understand why we did not speak of this. Such evil should be buried and forgotten.” He grimaces. “Along with all that followed that night.” He turns the vodka glass on the table, his mouth a hard line. “I will not go into details of what we did,” he says bluntly. “Other than to say that instead of dying, Aleksander and I chose revenge. Maybe it was the gulag in us, maybe the steppe, but neither of us were able to just give up. Instead we destroyed Fedorov’s empire, piece by piece. We burned every business he had to the ground. We took back every single piece he had stolen, avenged every family he had tortured or ruined. Only Fedorov himself escaped us. Paris whispered he had died in one of our last attacks, but we had no evidence to support the whispers. Fedorov was elusive, and after a time, we realized that if he wasn’t already dead, he was certainly gone. Aleksander and I left Paris; there was nothing left there for us. We came to Miami. We tried to start again.”

His voice is hoarse, starting to slur, but he waves me away when I mention he can stop if he wants.

“Let it be said,” he rasps, tossing the vodka off like it is water. “Then done. What else do you wish to know?”

I pour us both another glass. “Promises to your fathers aside, why didn’t you just get rid of the treasure, after all the trouble it had caused you?”

Sergei nods. “We talked about it. Discussed donating the entirety to a museum, or selling each piece off privately and creating a fund we could invite the remaining descendants to join. But every plan had an obstacle, a downside. They all risked exposing us. Both of us were wanted men. The KGB were still searching for us. The French authorities would have killed us on sight. And if the Americans had any idea of our true identities, we’d be jailed for the rest of our lives. Whatever our crimes, we’d spent more than enough time behind bars. Neither of us wanted to risk it again.

“The few Russians in Miami back then knew nothing of our history, and of course we had new names. Aleksander wanted a simple life; he always had. He built a small but respectable business doing jewelry repairs and making safes for small businesses. I... It wasn’t so simple for me.” He shakes his head. “Paris had taught me that a simple life couldn’t ever be mine, not so long as we had a fortune in lost treasure. And after all that had been lost, after the exile and name changes and all the death, those treasures seemed the only real thing, the one solid reality in a life of smoke and mirrors. I knew crime; I’d inhaled it with my first breath, lived among violent men in the gulag for as long as I could remember. And I was angry.

“So I ran a few card games, got into a lot of fights. I was running close to spending the rest of my life in prison, whether I planned it or not, and I was getting to the point where I no longer cared.

“Then one day, when I was sitting in Aleksander’s shop drinking vodka, a young girl came in with a broken necklace for repair.” His mouth twists in a smile of reminiscence. “Aleksander and I stared at the necklace in shock. We both recognized the piece as one we’d returned to a woman in France many years before. Aleksander asked the girl a few questions. It turned out the necklace had, quite literally, saved the girl’s mother’s life. She’d been alone and pregnant, with nowhere to go but the Paris gutters, which back then was death sentence enough in itself.

“Instead, she sold one of the diamonds in the necklace and bought a ticket to the US. Started a ballet school, which subsequently became one of Miami’s most popular. The girl told us her mother prized that necklace more than anything in her life. That she still talked about her miraculous delivery from certain death. She was superstitious, like so many Russians. She told her daughter that Russian émigrés like her had been raised on stories of theangely vodki, the ‘vodka angels.’ She said there were countless tales of lives saved, and changed, by a crate of Graf vodka at the door.”

He lifts a shoulder, smiling wryly. “She also mentioned that nobody could seem to get Graf vodka anymore.”

“Do you still own Graf?” I eye him curiously.

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