Page 40 of Unbroken

Rafail

We need you now.

I place my phone down and stifle a sigh. Duty calls.

For one small sliver of time, I felt relief—from the grief I carry, from the responsibilities that hang over my head like a noose. For one little moment, I felt like myself again. And I want that back.

“We have to go,” I say quietly, and I imagine the look on her face tells me she felt the same. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

We head to the back. Past the bathroom doors, past a locked supply closet. There’s an unmarked hallway where the floor changes from warped wood to new linoleum.

At the end—an unlit door behind a row of industrial trash bins. No handle. Just a black panel on the wall.

I punch in the code.

Click.

The door hisses open just an inch.

“Wow,” Ruthie mutters, stepping past me, eyes darting. “This is some next-level James Bond shit, huh?”

But I see it in her shoulders.

The tension.

The fight-or-flight instinct flaring under thesarcasm.

Because she knows now: This isn’t just hiding.

It’swar.

“Yeah,” I say with a short laugh. “Remember a couple of years ago, when Rafail married Polina, and we had to borrow a safe house?”

She shakes her head. I guess those weren’t the kinds of things we talked about publicly. I forget she’s not technically Bratva.

“Well, after that, Rafail decided we needed our own. The larger the safe house, the easier it is to find—and then we’re fucked. So instead of one big one, we have multiple small ones scattered throughout the city and on the outskirts of Moscow.”

“Oh. That makes sense. Except… it’s a large family, so…”

“Rafail figured that a lot of people were often not home.” As his brothers have gotten older and married, started families of their own, and his sister Yana relocated to South Africa with her husband, the number of people at the Kopolov compound at any given moment was smaller than it used to be.

She looks up at me, her eyes luminous, her gaze just enough unfocused to make me look away. I have to protect her right now.

“What happens next, Vadka?” she asks quietly.

I swallow and hold my head up high. “Next, I keep you and my boy safe.”

Chapter 7

RUTHIE

“I literally feellike I’m on a TV show. This is fuckingawesome,” I tell him.

He gives me a mock serious look, but even mocking, Vadka all stern makes my heart beat faster. “It is notawesome. We are on the run from people who want to kill you.”

“Wait, I thought they wanted to killyou?Why do they give two shits about me?”

“They know that killing you is the best way to get to me, so that’s their plan.”

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