Dad frozen in his tracks. He has nothing to say, and he sure as hell doesn’t have any money to give this enforcer. Hopelessness overtakes me, and I prepare myself for the worst.
Then, the blast of a gun rips through the kitchen.
I scream.
He’s dead. He’s dead. My father is dead.
But when I open my eyes, I see that I’m wrong.
Dad hasn’t been shot. The man holding me coughs once and stumbles, his hand with the gun shaking suddenly. His grip on me loosens and I lunge towards Dad, throwing myself in his arms.
The Hulk is halfway through the act of spitting up blood when a second shot hits him.
I whirl around to see who’s shooting. Standing in the open doorway is a man dressed in black from head to toe, wearing a ski mask to conceal his identity, and dark sunglasses on top of that.
It’s the other creep from the grocery store.
Terrified, I cower further into Dad’s arms, watching as the Morozov enforcer collapses on the kitchen floor. There’s an awful silence for a few long seconds. The echo of gunshots rings in my ears.
“Who the fuck are you?” Dad demands of the masked man.
He says nothing at all. Barely even glances in our direction.
Instead, he walks over to the dead man in our kitchen and draws something in the blood seeping from the man’s body.
It’s a set of scales.
Immediate recognition hits me like a train.
“The Justice Killer,” I whisper.
When he’s finished, the vigilante I’ve heard so much about puts his gun away and takes off through the back door, disappearing as quickly as he showed up.
I don’t realize how hard I’m shaking until we’re left alone in the kitchen. I immediately dive for the phone.
“What are you doing?” Dad asks.
“Calling the police! Two nutcases just broke into our house.”
“Let’s think about this, Vic. This guy is one of Morozov’s men.”
“No, Dad!” I snap harshly. “I don’t care. There’s a dead guy on our kitchen floor. I have to call the police.”
9
Matvei
I’m standing outside of Niko’s psychiatrist’s office, waiting for his appointment to be over, when my phone buzzes.
“What?” I demand.
Timofei, on the other end, has nothing to say that I want to hear. By the time he finishes telling me what happened—that Faddei, one of our best collectors, is dead; that the vigilante struck us again; that one of our debtors, Daniel Elwood, was bailed out of his payment pick-up by this masked man who thinks he’s a superhero—my rage is near boiling.
When Niko emerges, I snatch him up, say the briefest of goodbyes to the doctor, and roar towards home in my car.
We pull into the garage. I kill the engine, step out, and walk around to help Niko out of his seatbelt. I notice with a grimace that he’s spilled Cheez-Itz crumbs all over the backseat. It should be a fucking crime to rub orange cracker dust all over the Italian leather upholstery of a three hundred-thousand-dollar convertible, but such is my life as of late.
“Come on, Niko,” I say. He’s fighting me with the seatbelt, making things more difficult. I take it that the appointment did not go well.
That’s hardly a surprise. Nothing seems to be going well these days.
“No!” he snaps. “I don’t wanna!” His little brow is furrowed with the mightiest anger he can summon.
I almost want to laugh, but even now, in the midst of my own anger, I can see the same familial traces in his face that are coursing through mine. The dark, stormy eyes, the clenched jaw. He truly is a Morozov. I wish, not for the first time, that my brother was still here to see him.
But right now, I’m in no mood to put up with a child’s tantrums. I tug him out of the seat forcefully.
I try to put him on the ground to walk with me into the house, but he has apparently decided that his legs don’t work. He drops to the ground like a man taking a bullet and starts to cry.
“I want my daddy!”
Again, I feel the harsh twinge of sympathy, along with a curdling of longing to reprimand him like I would one of my own soldiers.
But I don’t have time to navigate this meltdown.
Scooping him up, I sling the boy over one shoulder and march inside. One of the maids—Luciana? Arielle? I can never remember which one is which—greets me to take my coat. Instead, I slump Niko into her waiting arms.
She’s surprised, but hides it gamely. “Give him a bath,”