Kingmakers, Year Four

Chapter 1

1

The Spy

Three Years Ago

I wake to my mother’s hand clamped over my mouth.

“There’s someone in the house,” she murmurs in my ear.

I slide out from under the light summer sheet, moving silently and listening for whatever sound might have alerted her. I hear nothing at all—not even the whir of a fan or the mild hum of the appliances down in the kitchen. Glancing at the digital clock on my nightstand, I see only a dark face.

The power’s been cut.

That’s what she heard—not a noise, but the sudden absence of sound as everything in the house shut off.

I’m wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt. It’s been sweltering in Poseidonia, the sea breeze barely managing to cool the villa by midnight. I bend to retrieve my shoes. My mother gives a swift shake of her head.

She’s barefoot beneath her silk pajamas, padding noiselessly toward the window. She checks the garden below, and the deck to the left, without ever bobbing her face into view. Then she motions for me to follow her toward the door, staying against the wall where the boards are less likely to creak. She glides along like a shadow, her dark hair tousled with sleep.

She’s left the door cracked. I join her, waiting for her to scan the hallway in both directions before we move.

She’s about to head toward my sister’s room when I grab her shoulder.

“She’s not in there,” I murmur. “She fell asleep in the study.”

I saw Freya passed out on the chaise with an open book splayed across her chest. I covered her with a blanket before I went to bed myself.

My mother curses silently. The study is at the very top of the villa, accessible only by the staircase on the other side of the house.

Changing direction, she heads toward those stairs .

My father intercepts us, dressed in sweatpants and no shirt. His broad chest is heavily inked with the tattoos I know as well as my own face, crossed by the strap of the AR hung over his shoulder. He passes a second rifle to my mother, who sets the stock against her shoulder and assumes a low, ready position.

They split apart, creeping down the hallway with my father in the lead, my mother covering him. They duck under each window we pass. I’m careful to do the same.

I still haven’t heard anything. I’m hopeful that my father’s soldiers will deal with the threat down on the grounds. We always bring at least six men with us, even when we come to the summer house. As my father’s wealth has increased, so has his caution.

We’ve almost reached the stairs.

I hear the creak of someone coming up. My father motions for us to fall back. He gets low, his rifle pointed at the doorway.

The hulking figure holding a Beretta is instantly recognizable to me—my father’s cousin Efrem, big and bear-like, with an incongruous set of spectacles perched on his nose. His shoulders drop in relief when he sees the three of us.

“Where’s Timo and Maks?” my father demands.

“Unresponsive,” Efrem says, tapping the radio on his belt.

My father’s face darkens. That’s not good.

“We need to—” Efrem starts .

He’s cut off by the sharp crack of shattering glass and a thudding sound. My father grabs me by the shoulder, yanking me to the ground as an explosion blasts through the house. The whole floor heaves beneath me, a wave of pressure and heat roaring out from the direction of our bedrooms.

Now that the silence is broken, the night comes alive with gunfire and shouting. The sharp staccato of automatic weapons bursts up all around us, seemingly from every corner of the grounds. I smell smoke. Not pleasant campfire smoke—the acrid stench of paint and fabric and carpet burning.

“We’ve got to get to the helicopter!” Efrem says, trying to grab my mother’s arm.

She shakes him off impatiently. “That’s where they’ll expect us to go,” she says.

We flew in on the helicopter. It’s parked on our private pad on the west side of the grounds. But my mother is surely right—anyone attacking the house would have blocked that route first.

“The garage, then,” my father says.

Several vehicles are parked in the underground garage, including Efrem’s Land Rover.

“No,” my mother says quietly. “The gardener’s shed.”

I don’t understand at first. Then I remember that the gardener has his own ancient Jeep, and the shed is located directly beneath the study. We still have to retrieve my sister .

My father heads up the staircase, trusting my mother’s judgment.

We follow after him, Efrem guarding the rear.

As we reach the top floor, I see two figures ducking into the study. These are not my father’s men—they’re dressed in tactical gear with balaclavas over their heads and rifles on their shoulders.

My mother gestures for me to follow her. While my father and Efrem circle around behind the men, she and I exit onto the balcony. We creep along the open deck, carefully avoiding the lounge chairs, and the empty glasses and sun-bleached books my sister forgot to bring back inside with her.

I peek through the French doors. Freya is no longer asleep on the chaise. She’s nowhere to be seen at all. The two men are searching the room, using the lights mounted on their scopes.

My mother covers them with her rifle, but she isn’t firing. She knows any noise will draw the whole invading army down on us. She’s giving my father a chance to handle them quietly.

In tandem, my father and Efrem sneak up on the men. Efrem’s knife is already drawn. My father is bare-handed. He seizes the first soldier from behind, ripping the man’s own Bowie knife from his belt and cutting his throat in one slash.

Efrem’s opponent swings his gun around. Efrem is forced to drop his knife so he can yank the man’s hand away from the trigger .

My mother readies her rifle, barrel pointed directly between the soldier’s eyes.

Then an arm darts out from under the chaise, stabbing a letter opener down through the top of the soldier’s boot, pinning his foot to the floor. My sister rolls out from under the chaise, leaping to her feet. My father snatches up Efrem’s knife and finishes disposing of the second soldier.

My mother cracks the French doors, hissing, “Come on!” to the others.

Freya joins us on the balcony, followed close behind by Efrem and my father.

“What the fuck is happening?” she whispers to me.

Unlike my mother, Freya’s hair is pin-straight, barely a strand out of place despite her exertions. It gleams blue-black in the moonlight, a dark veil around her pale face.

My mother motions for us all to stay silent.

I can still hear fighting down on the grounds, on the west side where the helicopter is located, and also at the front of the house where we would have gone to access the garage. My mother was right—she’s always right.

Meanwhile, shouting and thundering feet seem to be coming from every direction inside the house. They’re searching for us, room by room.

My mother vaults the railing, descending the trellis. She’s light and nimble, as is Freya. I’m not sure the spindly wood will hold my wei ght. I hesitate, wanting to let the women get down first, but my father pushes me forward.

“Go, son,” he murmurs.

As soon as my mother’s feet touch the ground, she sprints for the gardener’s shed, Freya close behind. She keeps her rifle ready. A soldier rounds the corner of the shed, and she shoots him between the eyes.

He falls backward, his finger jerking convulsively on the trigger of his AR. A burst of bullets fire up to the sky.

“ Blyad ,” my father hisses behind me.

Now I hear more shouting and more men sprinting toward us. My father drops to one knee, calling to me, “Keep running!”

One of the soldiers points his gun at me, before being blasted off his feet by my father.

The doors of the shed burst outward as my mother drives right through them, bumping over the grass and screeching to a halt directly in front of me.

I jump in the open back of the Jeep, followed closely after by Efrem. As he leaps over the tailgate, he’s shot from behind. He falls heavily onto my lap, a dark stain blossoming on his back with awful speed.

My father fires twice more, hitting the man who shot Efrem, then he jumps into the back with me.

“Go!” he shouts to my mother .

She floors the accelerator, speeding not toward the front of the house, but over the grass and through the lemon trees toward the side gate.

Freya takes my mother’s rifle so she can cover our right side, while my father watches behind us. I try to prop Efrem up, ripping off my shirt so I can use it to apply pressure to the wound.

“I’m sorry,” he says to my father.

“It’s not your fault, moy drug, ” my father says with surprising gentleness.

It’s the kindness in my father’s voice, more than the horrible waxy color of Efrem’s face, that tells me my uncle is going to die.

I press harder against the wound, the wadded shirt already soaked through with blood.

Efrem pushes his Beretta into my hand. His dark eyes meet mine for a moment, and he tries to say something through colorless lips. Instead, he lets out a long, rattling breath and his head falls back, his glasses slipping askew and eyes staring blindly upward at the night sky. Each bump of the Jeep jolts his limp body.

“Nine o’clock!” my mother barks, wrenching the wheel to the left to give my father and sister a better angle. They fire at the three soldiers guarding the side gate.

The gate is chained shut and padlocked. Gripping Efrem’s Beretta tight, I roll out of the back of the Jeep and crouch behind the tire. Once my father and sister have dropped the first two soldie rs, I shoot the third one in the chest, then I run to the gate. I empty the clip at the padlock until it’s destroyed, ripping away the chain and shoving the gate open.

My mother drives forward, only pausing long enough for me to leap in once more before she roars down the dark, winding road that leads along the sea cliffs.

I’m about to say, “We made it!” when two black SUVs screech out onto the road behind us, speeding after us at a reckless pace. A heavily tattooed man in tactical gear leans out the passenger side window to fire at us.

“Stay low!” my mother shouts back at us.

With its wide-open back, we’re poorly protected in the ancient Jeep. Worse, the newer and better-maintained SUVs are gaining on us.

“Who are they?” I ask my father. “Bratva?”

Their tattoos look like my father’s.

He shakes his head.

“Malina,” he hisses through his teeth.

My skin freezes.

The Ukrainians are every bit as ruthless as the Bratva—maybe even more so. They’re our dark twins, our twisted doppelg?ngers. Never have they been more dangerous than since Marko Moroz solidified his control of Kyiv by stabbing a pen through the eye of his own former mentor .

“Look!” Freya calls back to us, pointing up into the sky.

Our helicopter swoops up over the villa, passing over the stone walls in our direction.

“Who’s flying it, though?” my father mutters.

The radio on Efrem’s hip crackles.

I snatch it up.

“ I’m coming to get you, boss . . .” a familiar voice says.

I grin. It’s Maks, my father’s Avtoritet, and a close friend to me, despite the twenty years between us. I’m almost as pleased to hear that he’s still alive as I am to see him flying to the rescue.

Until I hear a booming shot ring out, and I watch a bright flare arcing across the sky, from the top of the villa directly toward the helicopter.

Like a deadly firework, it hits the tail of the chopper and explodes outward in all directions. The helicopter whirls around and around, the body now wrenched along by the blades. It crashes down to the ground where it erupts into a fireball so immense that I feel the heat blast hit my stunned face moments later.

“NOOO!” I shout.

My father shoves me down as more gunfire whizzes over our heads from the pursuing SUVs. Still, I catch a last glimpse of the lone man standing atop our villa, an MK 153 resting casually across his shoulder .

Even at this distance, there can be no doubt of the identity of that goliath figure. It’s Marko Moroz.

My father fires back toward the SUVs, keeping them at bay. He hits a tire and the Escalade fishtails back and forth across the road, but it doesn’t roll. The driver recovers, still following after us.

“Get ready!” my mother shouts.

She yanks the wheel to the left again, pulling us into the overlook above the marina. Directly below, a dozen boats are moored, including our cruiser.

She grabs her rifle back from Freya and she and my father take cover behind the Jeep, firing toward the approaching SUVs.

“No time to climb down!” she shouts at me and Freya. “You’ll have to jump!”

“Go with them!” my father tells her. “I’ll cover you.”

“No!” she says fiercely, her dark eyes glinting in the glare of the Jeep’s headlights. “I’m with you until the end.”

My sister is already climbing over the seawall while the SUVs screech to a halt in front of us, their headlights blinding, their doors opening. My father fires toward the windows, driving the men back inside.

Then, teeth gritted, he seizes my mother’s rifle and wrenches it out of her hands.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he says .

He picks her up bodily and chucks her over the wall.

I hear her howl of fury as she falls.

“Go!” he says, shoving me after her. “Make her leave!”

As I leap over the wall, I catch one last glimpse of my father firing in several directions at once as the Ukrainians close in on him. I see his body jerk as he’s hit in the shoulder and the leg, but he won’t stop shooting.

I fall down, down through the black night toward the freezing water. I plunge into the sea, sinking so deep that I have to swim upward with all my might to break the surface again. As soon as my head pops up, I stroke hard for our boat.

Freya has already climbed in. She casts off and starts the engine.

I see my mother’s dark head. She’s not swimming for the boat—she’s trying to reach the pier so she can climb back up to my father.

It will never work. He’ll be dead long before she gets there.

I seize a handful of her hair and haul her backward.

“LET GO OF ME!” she shrieks, twisting around in the water.

The last person in the world I would want to fight is my mother. And not out of respect—because she’s fucking terrifying. Still, I have to obey my father.

“IT’S TOO LATE!” I bellow. “You’re going to get us all killed! ”

I see the wild look in her eyes, that savage determination that I’ve never seen falter, never once in my life.

Then reality hits her harder than any hammer.

Her face slackens, and she looks back toward the cliff with pure misery instead.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing her hand and swimming for the boat.

I’ve barely managed to haul her in before the Malina reach the edge of the cliff and begin firing down on us. Splinters explode off the railing. A bullet hits the deck an inch from my foot.

Freya opens the throttle, speeding us out of the harbor.

I look back at the flashes of gunfire still lining the cliff.

My father can’t protect us anymore.