Page 174 of Dark King Daddy

“I’ll eat something,” he said.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Before the meeting.”

“Before the meeting.”

“Good.” I swallowed. “I love you.”

The words carried more today. I felt the weight of how much I could lose.

“I love you. Have a safe journey.”

“You’ll see me soon.”

I felt the future stretch out in front of me, dark and uncertain.

Ilya took Route 17.

We weren’t alone. Boris followed two car lengths behind. I could see his windshield in the side mirror—steady, professional, the same distance maintained since we left Dover Street. The streets of Brooklyn had given way to the highways of New Jersey, then the highways had given way to industrial roads—flat, gray, lined with warehouses and fenced lots and the occasional body shop with a hand-painted sign. Teterboro was close. Ten minutes, maybe. The kind of roads where nobody walked and every building looked like it had been built to be forgotten.

I was thinking about my old life.

Things had been certain before I married Daniil. I’d been the daughter of a Pakhan, sure, but my life had been simple for the most part. Restoring buildings, drawing up plans. I had a home. Stability. Now, I felt like my life was twirling in the centre of a vortex. I was meant to be moving in, taking my things to my marital home. My drafting table was due to arrive on Friday. Would I be there to receive it?

I was thinking about this when the truck hit us.

The impact came from the left. A dark vehicle—a pickup, maybe, something heavy and high-shouldered—came through the intersection we were passing and struck the SUV behind the driver’s door. The sound was enormous. Metal folding. Glass fracturing. The seat belt locked across my chest and my ribs compressed and my head snapped sideways and my teeth clicked together hard enough to taste copper.

The SUV spun. Not a full rotation—a quarter turn, maybe less, the rear swinging out until we faced the opposite direction, the front tire jumping the curb and the vehicle tilting and then stopping, lodged against a concrete barrier with the engine making a sound that was not an engine sound. A grinding. A clicking. Something broken inside the machinery that would not turn over again.

Ilya’s head was forward. His hands on the wheel. He lifted his face and I saw blood at his hairline—a cut, not deep, but bright against his skin.

“Ilya—”

The first shots came through the rear window.

The glass did not shatter. It starred—a web of fractures radiating from a hole the size of a fist, and then a second hole, and then the window collapsed inward and the sound changed. The shots were loud. Louder than I expected. A flat, percussive report that filled the interior of the SUV and left a ringing in my ears.

Ilya dropped. Not hit—ducking, pulling himself below the steering column, reaching for something beneath the seat. I could not see his hands. I could see the dashboard. The cracked screen of the navigation display showing our position on a grey road between two grey buildings. The clock: 11:53.

Boris’s voice. From behind—from the other vehicle. I could not hear the words. Shouting. The kind of shouting that carried information I could not assemble into language because my ears were ringing and my chest ached where the belt had locked and the world outside the windows was smoke and noise and the particular confusion of a thing that was happening too fast.

My phone was in my bag. I reached for it, but it slid, the bag fell to the floor and the phone with it and the phone slid beneath the seat, beneath the metal rail, into the space between the seat and the door where my fingers could not reach.

“Stay down.” Boris. He had come from somewhere. He was at the rear door—my door—pulling it open. The air came in cold and sharp and carried the smell of gasoline and burned rubber. He pushed my head down, his hand flat on my skull, pressing me below the window line.

The other guard—the second man from Boris’s vehicle—was at the rear of the SUV. He had the door open on the driver’s side and he was firing. The muzzle flash was bright in the gray morning. I could see his arm, his shoulder.

Ilya was speaking into his phone. His voice was fast, clipped, Russian. Coordinates. Our location. The words I could parse: ambush, Teterboro, two vehicles, armed. He was calling for help. He was calling for help while blood ran down his forehead and into his collar.

The gunfire paused. Three seconds. Four. I pressed my face against the seat and breathed the leather and the gasoline and I thought: Daniil. I thought his name. I could not reach him. The phone was under the seat. I could not tell him. I could not tell him I was here, on a grey road in New Jersey, and the world had broken open.

The other guard fell.

He went backward—not slowly, not in stages. One second he was at the rear of the SUV, firing. The next he was on the ground beside the open door, his arm at an angle that arms do not make, his face turned toward me through the gap, and I could see that his eyes were open and his mouth was open and he was not moving.