Page 101 of Bratva Baby

Grigor’s voice drops into something harder than shouting. “You built theft on my brother’s grave.”

Maks’s eyes come back to me.

There’s no plan in them now, just rage looking for the closest body.

“You did this,” he says to me.

I should move then, I know I should. My hand is near the gun at my back, and Niko is somewhere outside the gate, waiting for a signal he can use. Yuri is supposed to be near too, if Zhenya’s message reached him fast enough. Anton should be moving. Kolya should be using the gap.

All of that is true.

But Maks is faster than I expect.

He throws the phone to the ground so hard it skips across the concrete, and his hand goes under his coat.

The man by the gate reacts half a second too late. I reach for my gun, but my coat catches at the wrong angle, and Maks already has his pistol up.

For a tiny slice of time, everything becomes stupidly clear. The repair shed at my back. The open service gate to my left. The fake folder lying near Maks’s shoe. The scarf tight against my throat. My child under my hand because I’ve moved without realizing I’m protecting my stomach first.

Maks points the gun at me.

“You should’ve stayed in Prague,” he says.

Then the service doors behind him burst open.

The metal slams back against the wall, and Yuri Petrov comes through first with a shotgun in both hands and a face like he has spent all night driving toward this exact insult. Behind him, men flood into the yard from the side entrance and the outer fence line, rough coats, hard faces, guns up and ready.

Freight men. Yard men. Old-route men who look like they’d rather solve a problem with boots and rope than a meeting.

Yuri barks one order in Russian, and the whole yard shifts.

Maks’s men turn toward the doors.

That’s their mistake.

Niko fires from the gate.

The first shot takes the gunman nearest the shed in the shoulder and spins him hard into the side wall. Another man reaches for his weapon and gets tackled by two of Yuri’s men before he clears leather. Someone shouts. Someone slips on loose gravel. A gun goes off into the side of the repair shed, close enough that I feel the hit in the wall behind me.

Maks swings back toward me, desperate now, and I finally get my gun free.

My hand shakes, but the barrel points where it should.

“Don’t,” I say.

He stares at me like he can’t process that I’m holding a weapon on him. “You won’t.”

“No,” I say. “But you don’t know that for sure.”

His eyes flick toward my stomach, and the old cruelty tries to return, but it has nowhere to stand. He’s lost everything.

Then Anton comes through the service gate like fury learned to walk on blood loss.

Kolya is beside him, one hand gripping Anton’s arm whether Anton likes it or not, and two Reznikov men come in tight behind them carrying one of the record boxes between them. Anton’s shirt is dark at his side under the open jacket, and there is a pressure wrap pulled tightly over one shoulder. He looks terrible.

He also looks ready to murder every living man in the yard before breakfast.

My breath catches, and the gun dips for half a second before I force it back up.