So she sat on the swing. After a little while, alone behind the hotel in the middle of nowhere with the red hills behind her, she began to gently kick her feet, swinging a few inches forward and backward. Little flakes of rust dusted onto her hands where she held the chains of the swing, and the whole apparatus creaked, but she didn’t mind. It was a lovely, familiar sound, almost like an old friend from childhood whom she hadn’t seen in far too long.
She thought about Sacha and Vlad and the other guys who were still inside the hotel, and she wondered what must be on their minds. Kirill and Logoshin both answered to Bratva higher-ups back in Moscow, men who had once been allies, part of the criminal hierarchy that ran the Russian Mafia. When their operation in America had fallen apart, ripples had traveled all the way back to Moscow, leading to the violent deposing of the man at the top, Anton Maksimov.
The Bratva boss had fled Russia, or so it was said, and the Bratva had splintered in two. A quiet civil war had erupted, with each man attempting to persuade the rest of the Bratva captains that he was the right choice to lead. It was mostly a chess match, a power struggle in which each man attempted to assert his control over pieces of the Bratva’s business, and if Trinity understood it correctly, the largest remaining piece was the money that came from their operations on the west coast of the United States. Whoever won this fight would win it all, and that meant violence and bloodshed. The squeak of the rusty swing turned into something else, and Trinity paused, dragged her feet to stop herself. To silence the swing. She sat and listened. Had she really heard a howl in the distance? The romantic in her wondered if it had been a coyote or a wolf. Were there wolves in Red Rock Canyon?
The wind picked up, and she shivered despite her thick, wine-red sweater. With a glance up at the stars she began to swing again, throwing her head back to study the constellations.
Off to her left, there came a cough. She glanced over but did not stop her slow swinging. In the darkness, someone struck a match. In the flare of orange light, she saw Kirill light his cigarette and then shake the match out. A dark silhouette from that one ember burning in the night, he approached her slowly and sat down on the swing beside her without a word. He drew deeply on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, and then he began to swing.
“It’s nice here,” Kirill said, taking another drag on his cigarette. “Quiet.”
Trinity glanced at him, making her swing twist sideways. The barbed-wire tattoo that circled his neck seemed blacker than black in the moonlight, and it made the sight of this killer on a swing set even more absurd. She couldn’t help but smile.
Kirill understood without asking, and he smiled in return. It faded instantly.
“Feliks was a good man,” Trinity said. “A good friend.”
“A good brother,” Kirill said, swinging his legs, making the rusty swing shriek as he rode higher.
They were lost in memory for a moment, and Trinity allowed herself to swing a bit higher as well, forgetting her fears of looking foolish. With Kirill beside her, the other Bratva men could hardly think less of her.
When Kirill stopped pumping his legs, Trinity did the same, and slowly their pendular motion ceased.
“It is frustrating, yes? Being stuck inside the hotel?”
Trinity nodded. “I’m gettin’ claustrophobic. Not just with the hotel—”
“I feel it as well,” Kirill interrupted. “We are trapped by our desire to stay alive. We must keep out of sight because we know they are hunting us, but remember: we are also hunting them.”
“They don’t seem intimidated by it,” Trinity said. “There are more of them. More guns, more shooters, more money.”
Kirill glanced up at the stars, perhaps wondering if Feliks’s kindness had earned the key to heaven, in spite of his sins.
“This is why we hide,” he said. “They believe they are smarter and stronger, that they will destroy us. But their confidence can be used against them.”
“You sound sure.”
He smiled, but this was a different sort of smile—thin and cruel. “There is nothing for you to fear, Trinity. Soon we will not be hiding. We will kill them or they will kill us. Either way, it will be over.”
“That’s not as comfortin’ as you seem to think it ought to be,” she said.
But Kirill wasn’t listening.
They heard footfalls coming around the side of the hotel. Trinity stiffened a moment, but when she saw that Kirill wasn’t troubled and heard the calm, easy pace of the crunching steps, she relaxed. The silhouette that appeared from the corner was tall and whip-thin, and she knew it had to be Timur. He’d been a thief and pickpocket as a child and into his teen years before he’d been caught and sent to prison, where the Bratva had taken him under their protection. Oleg didn’t trust him, which meant Trinity didn’t like him, but the skinny thief slunk toward Kirill with the proper air of deference, and so Kirill approved of him.
Timur said something in Russian.
Kirill took another drag on his cigarette. “Be polite, Timur. Speak English.”
The thief sniffed the air, as if he’d smelled something he didn’t like. He glanced at Trinity, but only for a second.
“Gavril called in,” he said. “There was a fight at Birdland—”
“The strip club?”
Timur nodded. “There was a fight earlier. Some of Lagoshin’s men were involved. The doorman heard them talking about a meet at the Russian church on E Street. You know the one?”
Kirill flicked the ashes from the end of his cigarette. “Stupid question. I assume Oleg paid the doorman?”
“He paid.”
“Too easy. How sure is Gavril that this isn’t a setup?”
Trinity frowned. “They couldn’t have known you’d have people there tonight, askin’ questions.”
Kirill smoked and knitted his brows. “Maybe not. But if they know we’re looking, they could be setting out bait for us all over. No way to confirm if they’ve laid a trap or not.”
“How many of our men are with Oleg and Gavril?” Kirill asked.
“Two others.”
Kirill nodded slowly. “All right. Tell them to be careful. And to kill as many as they can.”
Timur grinned a weasel-like grin, then turned and slunk back toward the motel.
Trinity felt as if she’d turned to ice. She stared at Kirill. “You’re just gonna stay here? The rest of us need to go, right now, and back them up. We have enough guns now. They need—”
“Stop.” Kirill took a long drag, then flicked his cigarette onto the cracked concrete. “They are all the way on the other side of the city. By the time we reach the church, whatever is going to happen will have happened. If it is not a trap, four men will be enough to cause problems for Lagoshin. If it is a trap and we all go, then they will kill all of us, instead of only four.”
He pushed off, rusty chains creaking, and began to swing again.
Trinity stared, feeling hollow inside. Only four, he’d said. But one of those four was Oleg.
“Breathe, Trinity,” Kirill said. “Whatever comes, it is out of our hands right now. In this moment, at least—when we can do nothing and we do not yet know the consequences—we are free.”
The swing set squeaked and squealed. She felt as if she ought to speak, to protest. Once again she thought she heard something howl in the distance.
She exhaled. In some perverse way, Kirill was right. What happened next was not within her control. Slowly, she pushed backward and then raised her feet, letting herself swing forward.
Breathing, for now.
* * *
They parked the Harleys a block from the church, away from the nearest streetlight. The sky to the west was lit up with the neon brilliance of the Vegas Strip, but here on what the locals called the alphabet streets, there were no jackpot winners. Some houses had been kept up well or recently restored, an attempt to drag the neighborhood into the light, but others had cracked or boarded windows, cars on blocks in the driveway, and badly peeling paint. Tourists wouldn’t come here, and in Jax’s experience with neighborhoods like this, the police wouldn’t bother to swing by very often either.