Sometimes, death is better than staying alive.
In death, you can feel no pain, no shattering of your heart, and no need to cry every night before sleeping and every morning after waking up.
In death, there’s finally peace.
No more running, suffering, and having to witness your heart being split open while hopelessly watching.
Like every morning, I jolt awake after the same mixture of nightmares. My shirt clings to my back with sweat, and my hair feels damp.
The small room I’ve been using for weeks appears smaller, as if the walls are closing in on me and will crush me.
My heart that stupidly insists on beating goes overboard in its attempts to remain alive.
I tap my chest as images of the nightmare overlap in my mind. Some are filled with memories of my parents’ deaths. The look of despair on Uncle Anatoly’s face when he realized everything would be over.
The pure terror in Erik’s pale features when he begged me to stop screaming so the shooters wouldn’t find us.
Eduard’s blank eyes.
Timur’s half-shot face.
Erik’s raw shriek before he was silenced forever.
But most are filled with images of Kirill’s wedding. I always dream about it in red as if I’m witnessing it through a blood haze. I see Kristina’s throat slit open, her blood bathing him before he drops right beside her.
Till death do they fucking part.
I rub my hand against my face and slap my cheek. I need to focus.
It’s been a month since Anton found me in that cottage. We nearly died in that initial explosion, but my brother pushed me underneath him and we took cover beneath a table. We managed to escape before the second bomb went off.
I still refused to believe it was Kirill’s doing until I saw one of his guards speeding away from the site.
Makar.
He was Roman’s senior guard. After his death, he became responsible for various independent tasks Kirill put him on, including, but not exclusive to, spying and carrying out hits on some of the enemies Kirill shared with Roman.
Makar never answered to me or even to Viktor. Since he had direct communication with Kirill, I barely saw him, if ever. Sometimes, I forgot he was there, considering he doesn’t live in the house.
That moment, when I saw Makar, was when reality started to sink in. After I foolishly told Kirill my real name, he knew I was part of the family he and his father couldn’t get rid of, so he sent Maksim to Russia to kill my remaining family members and tasked Makar with wiping me off the face of the earth.
When those facts hit, I wanted to die and honestly considered it until Anton shook me and reminded me of all our family members who died that day.
He reminded me of Papa and Mama and that it wasn’t my time to go.
I still needed to exact revenge on the only man I’ve ever loved.
The man who chose another woman over me.
And because he hurt me, I attempted to hurt him back.
That day, Anton was more concerned about getting out of that place.
But we weren’t able to make a swift escape since it turned out there were also gunmen near the property who attacked us. After we killed a few, I picked someone who was about my build, put my ring and bracelet on him, then burned him and what remained of the cottage.
A part of me wanted to ruin Kirill’s wedding day. But the other part knew he wouldn’t care, considering he sent those people to kill me and all.
Besides, a DNA test would immediately prove it’s not me.
I still wanted to ruin the ring and bracelet I once revered, just because he gave them to me.
“Sasha!!”
The door to my room hits the wall as my baby cousin Mike runs inside. He’s grown so much since the last time I saw him over two years ago. His golden hair falls all over his forehead, nearly getting in his eyes as he crashes into me.
I pat his back. “Morning, Mishka.”
“Morning! Morning!” He slides his hand in mine. “C’mon, we need to have breakfast.”
I smile as he leads me down the hall of a small house located on the outskirts of Siberia. I never knew it existed, but apparently, it’s one of several safe houses my family owns all over the country.
Since Siberia is relatively safer than Saint Petersburg or Moscow, it’s the best place to be after the last attack.
We still don’t know how many men were there, but I know for sure that Maksim was right outside one of our family warehouses. He and his men exchanged fire with my uncle and the mercenaries he employed before he left. But not before one of his men shot Babushka.
She’s been recovering, but it’s bad. She hasn’t been able to leave her bed since. She hasn’t spoken to me either, saying that I’m already dead to her.
“Papa! Antosha! Sasha is here,” Mike announces the moment we arrive in the small kitchen downstairs. He then side hugs Anton, and my brother ruffles his hair.
Uncle Albert smiles at me and offers me a cup of coffee. His face has sunken, and he looks way older than I remember.
When Anton and I arrived here, my uncle hugged me, and I cried like a fucking baby while apologizing. He didn’t say anything. He just consoled me like Papa would have.
“Morning, Uncle.” I lower my head and sit down beside Mike. “Tosha.”
My brother releases a sound from the back of his throat but says nothing as he cuts his eggs and eats in silence. It’s weird to even look him in the face.
Apparently, Anton killed the real Yuri. One of Uncle Albert’s close acquaintances in the KGB who’s a plastic surgeon and a master of disguise gave my brother a nose job and altered his jaw’s structure so it’d imitate the real Yuri’s features. He also supplied him with some sort of pill to alter his voice. My brother cut and dyed his hair, bulked up, and wore brown contact lenses.
The result wasn’t the perfect Yuri, but that was okay since Anton made everyone think Yuri had been in an accident and needed reparative surgery. Hence, his look was enough to resemble Yuri, but not identical. The reason he targeted Yuri out of all of Kirill’s men was due to a couple of circumstances. Unfortunately, they shared the same body type, height, and eye shape. Two, he was a loner, an orphan, and didn’t speak to anyone aside from Maksim.
It’s like watching a psychopath in action. Anton didn’t hesitate to end the life of what was the weakest link in Kirill’s circle. He adapted some of his mannerisms and made sure to fit in within Kirill’s elite men.
He’d served in the Spetsnaz and had high-speed driving training, but he managed to hide his superior combat skills effectively.
Hell, he managed to fool me, and I’m his own damn sister. When I asked him why he did that, he said he had to do it to avoid suspicion. Besides, we all had to make sacrifices for revenge and the family.
Now that I know it was all a façade, I can see some of my brother’s old features in his face, but they’re subtle. It helps that he removed the lenses and allowed his hair to grow back to its original color. No wonder I always felt a sense of closeness and familiarity with Yuri. Maybe a part of me already recognized him as my brother.
He’s an older, more frightening version, though. While he was always silent and grumpy, now, he’s like a wall.
His dark hair is messed up at the top, his jaw is set, and his movements are nearly robotic. There was never much light in my brother’s eyes, but now, it’s completely gone.
It makes me wonder if the laughs and smiles he sometimes offered back in the military or in New York were genuine or just another façade.
He surely hasn’t smiled since we got back to Russia.
Not even once.
He stands up, and I snatch a piece of toast, then hastily drink my coffee, managing to burn my tongue. “Are we going on a run? Give me five.”
My runs with him in the morning and the combat training that he’s never stopped giving me since Kirill was shot are the only things that keep me sane. I’ve been channeling all my rage and feelings of betrayal and directing it at shooting targets and imagining Kirill’s face on them.
He slips on his coat without paying me attention. “Not today.”
“Why not?”
“I have an errand to run.”
“Oh, okay.”
He stares at me.
I shift beneath his gaze. “What?”
“Don’t go out like that.”
He means like a woman. I refuse to dress as a man again. I don’t care if I have to die for it.
“I’m not doing that anymore. You stopped being Yuri, and I stopped being Aleksander. If we’re going to do something, we’ll do it while being ourselves.”
He shakes his head but says nothing.
“Bring me candy, Antosha!” Mike asks. No, more like he demands.
My brother offers him a warm look and nods. “Okay.”
“And cake!”
“What type?” Anton actually indulges our cousin.
It’s weird to see him this patient with a kid, especially since he’s stoic to a fault.
“Strawberry, chocolate.” Mike counts on his fingers, his brows drawn with concentration. “Cheesecake and…and…all the cake!”
“I’ll see what I can find.” Anton pats his head and leaves.
Mike grins with triumph, goes to the adjoining room, and turns on the TV. Soon after, the sounds of cartoons fill the house. It’s so tiny that you can hear everything from anywhere.
My uncle pats my shoulder. “Never mind Anton, Sasha. You know how close-minded he can get.”
“There’s something I still don’t understand.” I toy with the jam jar, even though I have no actual appetite. “He spent over six years in Kirill’s company. How come he never took action? He could’ve easily killed him.”
“It was only five. He spent the first year recovering from his injury and devising this plan.”
Right. My brother was hurt badly in the shoot-out that I thought killed him. Anton has a gash on his back that’s covered by some tattoos. Everyone back in New York believes it’s from the accident he supposedly suffered. But it is, in fact, a souvenir from the massacre, after which Anton slipped into a coma for a few weeks, and Uncle hid it from us because he didn’t want to give us false hope.
After he woke up, Anton told Uncle to keep his survival a secret and went on to infiltrate Kirill’s men’s ranks.
“At first,” Uncle continues, “we had no concrete evidence that Kirill was the one who informed his father of the plan to annihilate our family. We only knew that Roman had something to do with the massacre.”
“Are you going to tell me what he was talking about that day?”
He purses his lips.
“I deserve to know, Uncle.”
“You know that our family is special, right?”
“Because of the noble blood, yeah.”
“Not only the blood but also everything that comes with it. See, we don’t just do business. We invent business. We’ve been the puppet masters of many politicians and have controlled the government. The president and his ministers needed to pay respects to us and ask our permission before they pass any law. We were—no, we are—Russia’s secret royalty.”
“What does that mean? We’re a cult?”
“Not a cult. Royalty. We’re what every government needs.”
“But governments are supposed to be elected by the people.”
“You really believe that nonsense? Every society has a secret order that controls politics and politicians. They might have different agendas, but the concept is the same.”
“If we were that powerful, why did I have to see my own parents and the rest of my family butchered in front of my eyes?”
“Because we made a mistake and allowed outsiders into our family business.” A distant look crosses his features. “We made a few investment errors, and the wrong person got into power, and that wrong person is now the president of Russia.”
“Fyodor Petrov?”
“That’s the one. He doesn’t like the concept of anyone controlling him or his decisions. In fact, he dedicated his youth to the KGB, trying and failing to get any incriminating information about us. It was a disaster that he came into power, and we had to finish him before he finished us.”
“And how did you plan to do that? Unless…you planned a coup?”
He nods. “We needed outside help for that. We had weapons and moles in higher positions, but not enough manpower to flip the Kremlin upside down.”
“Let me guess, Roman was one of the outsiders?”
“Unfortunately, yes. He was acquainted with your uncle Anatoly, and he offered his mercenaries and logistic support. Until he stabbed us in the back. The government only needed to issue the order to the general, Abram Kuzmin. Slap ‘elimination of a possible terrorist group’ on the operation and come after us.”
“So once Anton recovered, he decided to take things into his own hands?”
“Yes. However, like you, he believed Kirill had nothing to do with it until very recently.”
“What…changed his mind?”
“The attack on us and you a month ago, maybe?”
I clear my throat. “Right.”
“Just recuperate for now. There’ll be a chance for us to finally get Kirill.”
My heart aches, but I nod. Why the hell did I have to give my heart to the man who destroyed me? Not once, but twice.
I cram the toast in my mouth, then stand up and put on my coat. “I’m going to buy a few things.”
“Like what?” Uncle asks. “We have everything.”
“Woman…things,” I lie through my teeth. “I’ll be back soon.”
Mike bounds into the kitchen, his arms open wide. “I wanna go!”
“Maybe next time, Mishka. I will bring you candy instead?”
“Okay!” He jumps up with excitement although he had Anton promise him the same.
I kiss his cheek and jog out the front door, then head to the garage, where we keep three snowmobiles. I check my watch and smile when a dot appears on the screen.
So Anton is up to something.
I know, because he tends to disappear for hours and doesn’t tell me what he’s doing.
I’m done being kept in the dark, so I planted one of the trackers Uncle keeps in the engine of every snowmobile. I grab my own, put on my gloves, and speed across the field.
It takes us one hour to get to the smallest town on a snowmobile, and it seems that’s where Anton is heading.
I start to follow while keeping a safe distance. Before I can reach the town center, he’s on the road again, this time seeming to head out of town and into…nothing. There are no buildings in the field he’s entering. Only a forest.
Weird.
I follow him for another thirty minutes before he comes to a stop. Once I’m two minutes away from the target, I park the snowmobile beneath a low tree, mark the position on my watch, and then go on foot.
My movements are careful and silent, but I don’t even need to put forth an ounce of effort. I’m a sniper, after all. Moving like shadows is what we do best.
Anton’s snowmobile is parked outside a small cottage in the middle of the frozen forest. I hide behind a tree and take a closer look. The windows are busted, some of the wood is splintered, and the gaps are filled with ice.
What is he doing here?
As I get closer, I catch a glimpse of light from a window at ground level.
Of course.
Whatever this place is, it’s located underground.
I lift up my coat’s collar further, run to the entrance, then sneak inside and check my gun, just in case.
Sure enough, the interior of the cottage is shabby and fucking freezing at best. However, there’s an ajar door at the far end. I carefully slip through it and am greeted by dark stairs that are illuminated by a faint orange bulb.
I go down one step at a time. Due to the heat, the feeling slowly returns to my limbs.
Voices reach me from below, and I pause at the bottom of the stairs before I peek from behind the wall. The basement is more secured than the room upstairs, but it’s still shabby. The walls are made of concrete, but it has the same eyesore orange lighting as the stairway.
However, the basement isn’t what makes me gulp.
It’s my brother standing in front of a man hanging from the ceiling by his cuffed arms. I can only see Anton’s tense back through the shirt he was wearing this morning as he shoves a container of food in his prisoner’s face. “If you want to starve again, I can make that happen.”
My spine jerks at his dark tone. This is a part of Anton that I never wished to see. In a way, it’s similar to the version of Papa I was shielded from.
“Fuck you,” the man whispers in barely audible Russian.
My heart lurches in my chest as Anton drives his fist into the man’s face. “Try again and stop pissing me off.”
I lean my head sideways and see that, sure enough, it’s Maksim.
He’s hanging half naked, his chest full of lacerations and dry blood, his face bruised, and his lips bleeding from Anton’s punch.
“What did Kirill send you to do here?”
“Maybe it’s to see your true fucking face, asshole,” Maksim mocks and then coughs, choking on his own blood.
Anton punches him again, causing the chains to rattle. “I told you not to piss me off.”
My brother lifts his fist again, but I jump out of my hiding place. “Stop!”
