Page 70 of The Pakhan's Bride
Then I see Ekaterina come out from behind the burning Jeep, hands empty, eyes hard. Blood is dried in a streak down her left cheek, hair ripped from its usual perfect knot and falling wild to her jaw, cheekbones sharp as glass. Her lips are rouged, even now. Her suit is ruined by smoke and a tear at the sleeve. She is alone, no weapon. Her guards—what's left of them—wait behind the fire line, as if they know better than to follow.
The men in the orchard part for her. Syndicate, judging by the way they dress—half of them in tracksuits, half in tailored black, all holding rifles American-style. Several have those tight beards fashionable in Tirana. None wear insignia, but they don't need it. The way they look at Ekaterina as she approaches makes it obvious. She is currency. She stops ten paces clear of the nearest vehicle, where the ground is muddy with melted frost.She raises her hands, fingers splayed. For a second, her gaze cuts to me, then away.
"She's alive," one of the bearded men mutters. His Albanian accent is thick. "The bitch made it."
A man separates from the others then, his coat draped over narrow shoulders. I peg him as Syndicate boss—late fifties, jaw like carved bone, hair slicked back, eyes glossy. He flicks his gaze from Ekaterina to the rest of us, measuring, recalibrating. He doesn't smile. Instead, he lingers on her, chest puffing with the weight of his plans.
Then she moves. A tiny gesture, a twitch of her right hand, a brush at the lapel. The smallest thing, so easy to miss. But I see it. Twice she presses her thumb to her sternum, then traces her jaw with the backs of her fingers. It's nothing to anyone else. To me, it's a code older than anything we've said aloud—Trust me. Take the shot.
I feel the cold in my stomach. My whole body wants to reject it, to look away, to believe I've misread. But she doesn't break focus. She looks through me, as if she can still reach the little sister hiding behind my knees, the one who hasn't yet learned to lie.
Behind me, Konstantin's breathing slows. He's seen it, too, and he's too intelligent to not understand. Now the voices start to spike. The men shout for us to come out, to drop our weapons, to surrender the women. The Syndicate boss lifts a hand. His men fan wider, rifles up.
Ekaterina nods once.Shoot, or they take both of us. We're not getting out of here alive, little dove, at least not together.
And I know.
If she dies here, the Syndicate loses their leverage. If she lives, she's a liability for both us and them. This is her last play, and whether it's for me or for herself, it's the only one left.
I raise the pistol. My hand is steady, no tremor. The world flattens into lines and angles—the curve of her neck, the white triangle of her shirt, the black buttons, the scrap of magenta silk at her throat. She keeps her head up. She doesn't close her eyes. The Syndicate boss must see. "Wait!" he yells, English as clear as ice.
I fire.
One round. Clean. It takes her high in the chest, the kind of shot designed for certainty. She jerks back, then folds in place with a strange dancer's grace, knees giving way so she seems to bow at the last instant. Her hands never quite close. She hits the ground and does not move again.
The orchard goes silent, except for the ticking of cooling engines and the faint, wet rattle from Sokolov's lungs.
No one fires back. No one even speaks. For a heartbeat, the world ends with Ekaterina's fall.
Then the Syndicate men begin to retreat. At first it's confusion—three men drawing back, then five. The boss spits on the snow, curses wildly in several languages, and storms away, letting his plans sink with him into the trees. The rest follow, rifles lowering as if the burden has simply vanished.
Orlov inches up from his bloody patch, watching. Sokolov coughs once, and even that seems inappropriate.
Ekaterina lies in the mud, face turned up, hair fanned out like a flag. I don't look away. Not even when Lev starts to cry, or Konstantin slumps hard into me, or the last of the headlights dims as the Syndicate convoy flees. We wait until we're sure no one else is coming. Only when the orchard is empty do I slide the gun down, my hands numb and aching.
Konstantin leans heavier, head dropping to my shoulder. "You did what you had to," he says, voice flat and dry.
I did. I did do what I had to.
26
ZOYA
AFew Months Later
The command room is a hemisphere of screens, arranged to blue-wash the faces of everyone inside. The old desk is buried under power strips, energy drink cans, a tangle of data cables. A printer in the corner ticks and hums like an insect colony. On the largest screen, the Berlin summit plays in silent close-up—the patriarch's white head, the Albanis’ sea-glass eyes, the line of brothers flanking their father like chess pieces. Months ago, Orlov had installed a piggyback relay on a German security node during a diplomatic gala. No one noticed. Now, every time the building goes into conference lockdown, a ghost copy of the CCTV routes itself to a cold server back in the Moscow suburbs. From there, it's just a few keyboard taps and the entire summit unfolds like a stage play.
The patriarch sits with his back to the river, a line of frost-haired power drawn from the nape of his skull to the set of his shoulders. The last of the old Vory, a man who once crowned Mob bosses in three countries and made syndicates kneel just to hold territory west of the Dnieper. They call himDedushkanow, but there's nothing grandfatherly about him. He's shed his oldtitle for a German export license and a villa in the suburbs, but he keeps the scars as a kind of armor. His two sons bracket him—blond, blocky, twin mirages of ambition with hands twice the size of mine. One checks his phone every minute. The other just stares at the city as if daring it to blink.
Across from them, the Albani team—three men, three suits, three smiles as thin as cigarette paper. The one in the middle does the talking. He's olive-skinned, with a face that could pass for a banker until he laughs. His English is flawless, but his accent is thicker than the smoke in a Balkan nightclub. He slides a folder across the table.
"Old friends," he says, "let us not waste each other's time."
The patriarch lifts the folder. His hands are rough, but the nails are still buffed to a shine. He doesn't open it, just thumbs the cover, as if expecting it to be boobytrapped. "What is this?"
The Albanian leans in. "Opportunity. With the Russians in chaos, there is vacuum. We offer partnership, not subordination."
One son grunts. The other checks his watch. "Speak plainly," says the patriarch, eyes locked on the man opposite.
