Kingmakers, Year Four

Chapter 24

24

Ares

C hristmas morning I visit my mom.

I stop by the Solar first to leave my gift for Nix outside her door.

I couldn’t get her anything expensive, because after all, Ares is supposed to be poor, but I bribed one of the cooks to make her an entire basket of fresh, hot verhuny, the only food she’s complained of missing at Kingmakers. The little pastries—deep-fried, crispy, and sprinkled with powdered sugar—smell exactly like funnel cake, which makes me surprisingly nostalgic as well. I hadn’t realized I was missing American food .

I also commissioned a basket of blueberry muffins for Hedeon, as penance for making him intervene in my fight with Estas.

I leave the muffins by his door, knowing an apology is less welcome if somebody wakes you up to offer it.

My mom gets a different sort of gift—a photo Freya sent in her last letter, found in the drawer of our father’s study in our house in Cannon Beach.

I’ve returned to that house several times during the summers when I’m not at Kingmakers.

It gives me no comfort, no sense of being at home.

The house is too cold and too quiet. My father’s absence an echoing emptiness that no light or sound can fill.

I never knew I could miss someone like I miss my dad.

I never knew how much I relied on him.

He was always there to tell me what I should do. Giving me a sense of security even in a world as chaotic and violent as ours. I always knew he’d keep us safe.

And he did—the night the Malina attacked us, he offered up his own life so we could escape, providing cover while we fled on the boat.

But he didn’t die. The Malina shot him, captured him, and dragged him off to a cell in some desolate place, in some unknown country.

We’ve been searching for him ever since .

We know he’s alive because Marko Moroz has been using my father to extort us for every penny the Petrov empire earns.

We siphon off as much cash as we can without the rest of the Bratva noticing. It’s our money, but if the high table knows that Ivan Petrov is missing, that he’s no longer in control of his territory, they’ll descend on St. Petersburg, and on our holdings in America, too.

Dominik has been running St. Petersburg, and Freya has been keeping the dispensaries going, even though she’s barely any older than Nix. She has the real Ares to help her, at least. During the summer months, my mother shores up the bulwarks. Come September, she returns to Kingmakers as Miss Robin so she can scour the archives for schematics not found anywhere else in the world.

We’ve seen where Marko holds my father. The first call was video—my mother insisted upon it to confirm that my father was still alive, refusing to pay a single penny without seeing him in the flesh. Her real purpose was, of course, to gather information.

Marko only showed us the interior of the cell. Even that provided several clues to where my father might be found. The type of stone that formed the walls, the shape of the doorways, the angle of the light . . . all have been studied to the minutest degree when my mother combs over the recording.

And my father himself has been giving us information, disguised by a simple code that, to our knowledge, Marko has never noticed during the monthly calls to Dominik where proof of life is exc hanged for another ransom payment. Once a month my father tells us what he’s observed, and slowly, painstakingly, we narrow our options, cutting closer and closer to the source.

It was a coded message from two months ago that gave my mother the idea of a mine.

My father had observed a fleck of yellow powder on one of the soldier’s boots.

We’ve tried following Marko and his men. As far as we can tell, only Marko and his lieutenant Kuzmo visit the place where my father is held. The rest of the guards must stay there permanently.

Tracking Marko is no easy task. He leaves from his compound deep in the mountains outside of Kyiv. He flies on his private jet, which is regularly combed for explosives and tracking devices. He’s paranoid and reclusive, the growing list of enemies who would want to see him dead causing him to ramp up his security measures by the month.

The only places he goes regularly now are the Four Seasons in Kyiv to meet with his accountant, and wherever the fuck he’s got my dad.

Even tracking him to the Four Seasons is dangerous. He saw Adrik’s SUV following him once, and he called Dominik, bellowing into the phone, “If you ever fucking try to track me again, I’ll cut off Ivan’s arm and mail it to you in a box. You take one step toward me, you even think of raising a hand against me, and I’ll chuck an incendiary grenade into his cell. Your only hope o f getting him back alive is to pay me my fucking money and bide your time.”

None of us believe that Marko will ever release him.

He told us five years—that was my father’s punishment for his betrayal the night Marko sought his revenge on Taras Holodryga. Five years in a cell, and payments every month.

The closer we get to that five-year mark, the more certain my mother becomes that Marko intends to kill my father, keep the money, and pour out his endless lust for revenge on the rest of us.

So that was Plan A: find my father, break into wherever he’s being held, and bring him home. Knowing that if Marko even caught a hint of what we were trying to do, he would slaughter my dad immediately.

Plan B is Nix.

We knew she’d be vulnerable at Kingmakers—out of her father’s tight circle of protection.

You can’t attack Kingmakers to kidnap a student. But if you’re already inside . . .

We planned to take her and trade her life for my father’s.

The only reason my mother hasn’t done it already is because it’s risky—Marko is volatile, irrational. A simple trade might not go as planned. And my mother believes we’re closer than we’ve ever been to finding my father .

I cross the deserted castle grounds.

It’s too early in the morning for anyone else to be stirring, after the night of extended revelry at the Christmas dance.

My mom will be awake. She doesn’t sleep much anymore.

I crack the heavy library door, entering the cool, dark space.

I know she’ll hear me coming in. She’ll hear me walking up the ramp, even with the thick carpet underfoot.

Sure enough, she’s waiting for me halfway up the ramp, perched on the edge of the desk, a simple black robe wrapped around her slim frame.

She looks more like herself than I’ve seen in a long time. This is how she dressed normally: in simple, dark clothing. Moving as smoothly as a shadow come to life.

I can just see the tiniest hint of her natural dark brown color coming in at the roots of her red hair. Time for another application. She dyes her hair in the sink of her small apartment at the very top of the Library Tower.

She’s not wearing the false glasses. Unencumbered and unshielded, her dark eyes glitter with the full force of their intensity.

“How was the dance?” she says.

I hesitate, wondering if she knows I got in a fight.

I didn’t see her at the party, though that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there. She hears all the gossip that passes between students in the li brary, allowing her to know more of what goes on at the school than the Chancellor himself.

No students today, though. So no gossip.

As blandly as possible I say, “It was good.”

Then, to distract her further, I thrust my gift into her hands.

My mother unwraps it, smiling slightly.

“I was hoping for a new Ruger, but it doesn’t feel heavy enough . . .” she teases me.

When she sees the framed photograph, her face goes still.

It’s a picture of my father and her, dancing at a wedding—I don’t know whose.

My father is spinning her around, her hand up-stretched and his arm the axis. My mother’s head is thrown back. She’s laughing, her skirt flared around her legs like a bloom around the stem of a flower. My father is staring at her like he’s never seen anything more captivating. He’s grinning like the luckiest man in the world.

“Freya said he kept it in his desk, face-up in the top drawer, so he’d see it whenever he?—”

“Yes,” my mother says softly. “I remember.”

She can’t take her eyes off my father’s face .

I know she has pictures of him hidden upstairs. But she’s looking at this one like she’s seeing my father in the flesh, standing before her now.

“There’s no one else for me, and there never could be,” she says quietly.

“I know, Mom.”

She looks up, startled, like she forgot I was there.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’ll keep this safe for him. It’s his favorite.”

My stomach twists. Maybe Freya should have left the picture in the desk. Taking something out of my father’s office feels like a bad omen—like we don’t think he’ll return.

Reading my face, my mother says, “Don’t worry—I have good news for you.”

I swallow hard. “You do?”

“Yes,” she breathes, her excitement barely contained in the slight tremor of her shoulders. “I think I found him.”

“How?”

“I had it narrowed down to six —”

“I remember,” I say, mentally running through the maps she showed me in the archive.

“When he spoke to Dominik last week, he said he saw snow. It only snowed in one place out of the six that day. ”

Grabbing my arm, she pulls me toward her desk, shoving aside a pile of unsourced books and unfurling a long, crumbling scroll.

“Look!” She points to the blueprint, to the spider-fine script in the corner bearing the name.

Irkolasan Uranium Mine , it says.

The powder on the soldier’s boot—yellowcake. Uranium concentrate.

I have to lick my lips before I can speak.

“Where is it?” I murmur.

“Kazakhstan.”

My heart is thudding hard against my chest. I can hardly believe it’s true. After all this time . . . we could actually go to him.

“What do we do now?”

“We scout the location and plan our attack,” my mother says. “We have to be meticulous. If we make a single mistake, if they know what we’re doing . . .”

She doesn’t have to finish that sentence. We have to break in unheard and unseen—or the first shot fired will be directly into my father’s skull.

I let out a shaky breath.

“We won’t need Nix, then,” I say.

My mother turns to look at me, her gaze sharp and unyielding .

“Nix is coming with us. As insurance.”

Now my heart drops down to my toes.

What my mother means is, if Marko Moroz puts a bullet in my father’s head, she’ll do the same to his daughter.

I return to the Octagon Tower, the full weight of reality crashing down on my shoulders.

We got what we wanted: we finally found the map.

But that seems so unreal that I can’t really enjoy it.

The thing that seems intensely clear and present is the fact that Nix is about to find out that I lied to her—when I rip her out of her bed and fucking kidnap her.

It may be a week or it may be a month until it happens, but she’s going to know that I’ve been manipulating her. That everything I did was for the purpose of destroying the one person she loves.

My chest is so tight that I can hardly draw a breath.

I almost run into Hedeon in the common room on the fourth floor.

“Hey,” he grunts, his face unshaven and his stubble dark against his skin. “Did you make muffins for me?”

“I didn’t make them,” I say. “But I dropped them off. Felt bad about dragging you into that thing with Estas last night. ”

“Don’t worry about it.” Hedeon shrugs.

I notice that he’s still wearing his rumpled dress shirt and trousers, like he hasn’t gone to bed yet.

“Did you sleep in here?” I say, nodding toward the battered sofa.

“Didn’t sleep at all.”

The dark shadows under his eyes confirm it.

“What’s wrong? Didn’t get enough dances with Cara?”

“Cara is perfection,” Hedeon says quietly. “Way too fucking good for me.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s trying to be convinced otherwise—he’s just stating a simple truth.

“I think she likes you,” I tell him.

Hedeon ignores this. “Did you see Sabrina Gallo dancing with Ilsa Markov?”

“Yeah.” My cock stirs at the memory of Nix sandwiched between the two girls, Ilsa Markov cupping her breasts from behind while she took Sabrina’s face in her hands and kissed her . . . “Pretty hard to miss it.”

Hedeon nods. “Everyone was watching. Including the Chancellor.”

My stomach does a long, slow f lip.

“Well,” I say, with a fake chuckle. “He’s only human.”

“He was talking to Sabrina after the Quartum Bellum ,” Hedeon says. “And he let her off easy the first day of school, after she clocked Estas.”

“He didn’t punish Nix, either,” I say, trying to hide my pounding pulse.

“I think he’s got a thing for her,” Hedeon insists.

I take three slow breaths, my brain racing behind my dull expression.

“So what if he does?”

“I think he has a type,” Hedeon says. “He likes them young. Dark-haired. And wild. Just like my mother.”

The silence stretches between us, Hedeon’s angry stare drilling into me, with all the heat of his long-suppressed rage.

“If he’s your father . . .” I say, “Then what are you going to do?”

With calm surety, Hedeon replies, “I’m going to kill him.”