Page 72 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
Blood bubbled on his lips, scarlet and frothy, speaking of punctured lungs and severed arteries. His Saint Michael pendant swung between us, catching light from the fires still burning around us, a piece of blessed metal that couldn’t protect him from very human consequences.
“Saint Michael will come again,” he rasped, the words barely audible over the sound of his own drowning.
I leaned closer, making sure he heard every word of my reply. “Not if I bury every last one of you.”
Petro Kozak died with a prayer on his lips and my father’s knife in his chest, falling backward into the ruins of his holy war. The pendant at his throat caught one last flash of firelight before the darkness took him, and I felt something that had been twisted inside my chest for twenty-seven years finally straighten.
The war that had started when I was ten years old was finally over.
I stood slowly, my body cataloging damage and sorting pain into categories of urgent and manageable. Cracked ribs, possible concussion, lacerations that would need stitches, but wouldn’t kill me. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, given time and medical attention.
Nothing that would keep me from going home to my wife.
The walk out of that industrial graveyard felt like a pilgrimage in reverse—not seeking redemption, but carrying it with me in the form of justice finally served. The fires were already dying, smoke rising into a sky that was beginning toshow the first hints of dawn. Chicago’s skyline emerged from the darkness like a promise kept, all glass and steel and the dreams of people who had never had to kill to protect what they love.
My phone buzzed with messages—Trev reporting Mila’s death, Maxim confirming Anya’s safety, Drew coordinating cleanup operations that would erase tonight’s violence from official records. The machinery of our world spinning back into motion, covering tracks and settling scores with the efficiency that came from generations of practice.
But all of that felt distant, secondary to the single driving need that had pulled me through this war from the beginning.
I needed to get home. I needed to see Anya. I needed to put my hands on her and prove to both of us that we’d survived another night in hell.
***
The safe house emerged from morning mist like something from a fairy tale, all warm light spilling from windows and smoke curling from the chimney. It was the kind of place where normal people lived normal lives, where the biggest danger was burning dinner or forgetting to pay the electric bill.
I parked the Charger—battered but still breathing, much like its driver—and sat for a moment in the sudden silence. My shirt was torn, blood crusted on my knuckles and face, and I probably looked like exactly what I was: a man who had spent the night doing violence in the service of love.
Through the front window, I could see movement. Eleanor making coffee in the kitchen. Maxim checking weapons that hopefully wouldn’t be needed again anytime soon. And there, curled on the couch with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, was the woman who made all of this worthwhile.
Anya looked up as I opened the door, and her face went through a dozen emotions in the space of a heartbeat. Relief, joy,concern, love—all of it written in expressions that I’d remember when everything else about tonight faded into history.
I walked to her, ignoring the protests from ribs that were probably cracked and muscles that were definitely strained. She started to stand, started to reach for me, but I was already dropping to my knees in front of her.
My hands found her still-flat belly, and I pressed my lips gently against the place where our child grew. Six weeks along, the doctor had said. The size of a grain of rice, but already more important than anything else in this blood-soaked world.
“No one will ever hurt what is mine again,” I whispered against the soft cotton of her shirt, meaning it with every fiber of my being.
Her hands found my hair, stroking gently as she examined the damage the night had left on me. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing that won’t heal.” I looked up at her, memorizing the way relief had softened her features, how love made her beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with genetics or cosmetics. “It’s over, Anya. Really over this time.”
“Petro?”
“Dead. Mila, too, according to Trev’s report.” I rested my forehead against her stomach, letting exhaustion finally claim me now that the adrenaline was fading. “The Kozak line dies with them.”
The silence that followed was different from the tense quiet that had been our constant companion for weeks. This was peaceful, settled, the kind of silence that existed between people who had survived something terrible together and found themselves still capable of love on the other side.
“What happens now?” Anya asked, her voice soft with possibility.
I thought about the question, about the future that stretched ahead of us. A child to raise, a business to run, a lifeto build in the spaces between violence. It wouldn’t be normal—men like me didn’t get normal—but it might be good.
“Now we go home,” I told her, pushing myself to my feet and pulling her into my arms. “We plan a nursery. We figure out baby names. We pretend the world isn’t insane long enough to give our child something worth inheriting.”
She laughed, the sound bright and clean in the morning air. “That simple?”
“That complicated,” I corrected her, thinking about all the details that would need handling—territory disputes, succession planning, the thousand small decisions that kept an empire running. “But we’ll figure it out.”
Because that was what families did. They figured it out, adapted and overcame, and built something stronger from the pieces of what had come before.
