No Mercy for Pakhan

ed like cold lake water and diesel and something else underneath, something that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the man she had run from. Her

it out loud to believe it was real, that she had actually boarded that plane instead of finding one more excu

e distance. Ruth had raised her after her mother left and her father drowned himself in debts he could never repay, debts that had circled back a

to unlearn. The skyline slid past the window, familiar and hostile at once, gray towers stitched together with old grief. Somewhere in that skylin

's weight anchoring her lap like the only truth she had left. Dmitri Sokolov did not know Alexei existed. He was never going to know. She had buil

instead, on the small fist curled against her sleeve, on the impossible fact of him existing at all. He had been the one good thing to come out of the worst year of her

thout owning it completely, and a son would have been a claim he could never release, not even if loving that claim meant destroying the two people he claimed. She

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e sheets and the steady beep of a monitor that measured out what little time remained. Elena sat by the bed with Alexe

ce a thin rasp of its old self. "Tir

e coming easy after five years

made her stomach drop. "He has his father's eyes. I never met the man and I know that

than she let on, and there was no point denying it now with her aunt's hand trembling in hers and the machines counting

tually," Ruth murmured, closing her eyes. "T

for it to matter," Elena said, and hated how

said, the ghost of a smile touching her

s had gone silent. She stayed until the nurse came to check vitals, then stepped into the hallway to breathe, Alexei still lim

is eyes tracked her without apology, made the old fear rise up her spine like ice water. She recognized the posture before she recognized the fac

s heavier with dread, and did not look back until she was safely inside a cab with

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t door in the kitchen that never quite latched. Elena laid Alexei down in the back bedroom, tucked a blanket around his should

with a child would exercise in an unfamiliar city. She knew better. She had grown up in rooms where men like the one at the hospita

actly the same terrifying certainty she remembered. She had loved him once with a desperation that frightened her more than his world ever had. That was the part she had never told anyone, not even Ruth. It had not been fear that drove her out of Ch

mming and eased the curtain back a single inch. Black sedan, engine running, windows tinted past any reasonable legal limit. She watched it for th

e allowed herself to admit the truth she had been outrunning since the plane touched down. Coming back to Chicago had never been a question of if he would find

d anyone who had ever loved Dmitri Sokolov enough to memorize the geometry of his face, and this city was full of men who had spent years memorizing exactly that. She pressed her pal

numbers and enemies through that relentless mind of his. She wondered if he ever thought of her. She wondered if he would forgive her, if he found out, for the five years he