Page 27 of Vasily the Hammer

The name on the caller ID has me giving my phone a double-take. A blast from my past, but since it’s Flagstaff past, I can’t assume it will be nearly as fortuitous as Sasha’s call. More likely a harbinger of doom, despite it being from a man of the cloth.

“Niko?” I grumble, my voice so raw I doubt he’ll take offense for not getting any of thepadreshit he deserves. I respect him. I’m proud of him for taking the path he did. But he and my brother used to shoot frogs and squirrels with air pistols just to torment the neighborhood girls with when they were kids. He’s still and always will be Niko outside of church.

But then I get back, “Kseniya.”

Fuck. Fuck this goddamn phone. It’s not the first time it’s given me the wrong name. If I’d known it was Kseniya, I would have given myself some time to wake up and taken the call in my bathroom to keep Ana from overhearing.

“How’s my favorite sister?” I ask in Russian, hoping to get some privacy that way.

“Rude,” I get in surround sound from Kseniya and Ana. In the two weeks they knew each other, they were thick as thieves. For a couple months afterward, Kseniya told me— extremely aggressively— that she still talked to Ana regularly, and then suddenly she was pissed at me for a solid week straight when Ana abruptly cut ties with her without explanation. She was just gone, the calls going directly to voicemail, the texts eventually blocked.

Tony, no doubt. My guess is he found out she still had ties to me and put an end to it.

Kseniya then says, loudly enough and in English so I’m sure Ana hears and understands perfectly, “Do you have agirlover?”

Yep, leave it to Kseniya to blow my cover. She was just as much of a nuisance last time, too, blabbing to Ana that my heavy Russian accent was amplified to intimidate Americans. It would have come out eventually, as we got closer, and yeah, it would have been an awkward conversation, so I guess Kseniya did me a favor.

But it wasn’t any of her business.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” I snarl in English, hoping that they’ll both find a satisfactory explanation there. I stand back up and march out to the kitchen, figuring I have a couple minutes before Ana follows me out. “And before you get on my case about not visiting—”

“It’s not that,” Kseniya rushes out. “Or, not just that.”

This is an old conversation. I’ve offered to send a car or a jet to bring her to LA as many times as she told me to come to Flagstaff. She’s refused to travel because of Maribel’s age, but now that the baby is getting bigger, I don’t know how much longer she’ll refuse.

I can’t offer her that now. Not while Ana is here and in this limbo.

“It’s a bad time,” I say instead.

“It’s always a bad time,” she bristles.

“No, I mean...” I drop my voice in the hopes Ana won’t hear. I stick my head into the fridge for good measure. “You can’t come to LA right now. There’s shit happening here. Don’t worry too much about it, but—”

“Yeah, not worrying about your shit because I have my own shit to worry about.”

I’m tempted to make a crack about toddler gymnastics classes— not the type of mom I was expecting Kseniya to be, but that switchflipped the moment her pregnancy test came back positive— but she keeps going.

“Alex is missing.”

“What?”I smack the back of my head on a fridge shelf, but the pain doesn’t even register. Niko’s little brother was nearly killed during the skirmishes between the Bratva and the IRA, the ones that led to my own brother’s death. Alex was hospitalized for weeks. He was young, about Ana’s age, but there was long-term damage, so I quietly released him from his duties with us. Let the poor kid have the life I’d wanted back then. He’s still in Flagstaff, but—

But I guess he’s not.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I blurt out.

“That’s what I’m doing, dummy.”

“But why you?”

She sighs like I’m the most exhausting person in the world. I’m her brother, so that’s just life. And it’s not like I’m saying I’m mad at her for telling me, but the brigade should be keeping an eye on Alex. One of them should have communicated this to me.

Then again, there have clearly been holes in the Bratva. Holes as big as fire-gutted factories now.

“Father Niko already tried. He just said the second he started to get worried about his brother, he contacted Dima, and Dima told him not to worry, he had it under control, but it’s been radio silence ever since.”

“Fucking Dima,” I hiss through gritted teeth.

“Uhh, what’s up with Dima?”

---