“You sure Lazarus is in that Hummer?” Viktor says.
“Hiding in there like a little girl,” Aleksio says. We bump onto the road, wheels barely intact—you can feel it through the bottom. Viktor hurls something out the window. “Go!”
Aleksio guns the engine. “Goodbye, fucker.” There’s a massive explosion behind us.
Sirens sound in the distance.
“Yuri’s five minutes up the road. We’ve got this!”
“Baby brother. The way you flew at them!” Viktor laughs and slings an arm around my shoulder. “It’s good to get bloody with you, brother. You’re a great warrior. More fierce than I ever imagined.”
I look into his eyes. My heart swells bigger than the sky.
Chapter Forty-One
Ann
“That conviction orderwas invalidated a week ago. It was invalidated, overturned. There are records of that on file if your men had bothered to check. No—right, overturned by a judge in a court of law…no, that’s bullshit—your men didn’t follow procedure. That’s right, you know how I know? Because I’m the one who got it overturned. I’m the one who saw that it was on file.”
I fight to open my eyes. They feel gluey, gravelly.
“…no, you listen to me. If you interfere with Mr. Dragusha’s rights one more time, deprive him of one more instant of his freedom, I will bring a suit against your department so fast…kidnapping…accessory to attempted murder…collusion with a criminal organization…”
I blink. The light is so bright.
A woman with bright blonde ponytails sits at my bedside. “Good morning!” She has an accent. Slavic. Russian.
The woman speaking legalese is across the room, pacing, phone glued to the side of her head. She has dark hair and an air of authority.
“She’s not as scary as she sounds,” the woman with ponytails says. She wears a red T-shirt with the iconic Rolling Stones lips. Russian.
“Okay,” I breathe.
“My name is Tatiana, but my friends call me Tanechka. Kiro sent us.” She smiles. “Nobody will bother you.”
“Okay,” I say again, unsure what’s going on. “Where’s Kiro?”
“He’s okay. He’s coming.”
“What happened.”
“Did you miss the whole press conference?” The dark-haired woman comes up to the other side of my bed. “It was quite the thing. I’ll let him tell you. He’s on his way with his brothers. I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble.”
Tanechka grins. “Let them give us trouble. I will fuck them up.”
“A press conference? His brothers?”
“Kiro pretty much called his own press conference. It’s how his brothers found him. I’m Mira. Hi.” She gestures at the tubes in my arm. “I won’t make you shake my hand.”
“He found his family by holding a press conference?” I imagine him up there, standing in front of cameras. The one thing he never wanted.
“Two brothers. Very fierce,” Tanechka says.
Mira grins. “He got himself brothers and a third of a massive criminal empire called the Black Lion clan, but we won’t go into that.”
“What? Black Lion clan?” Things start to make sense. “That’s why they were after him.”
“So you know it,” Mira says. “He’s a Dragusha. Don’t worry, the Black Lion clan…it’ll evolve once things settle.”