Christopher Golden - Sons of Anarchy - Bratva

“Glad you’re enjoying yourself,” Jax snapped.

Chibs didn’t have time to reply. The doorman had taken over for the jarhead bouncer, who moved to block their path.

Jax threw his hands up. “The trouble’s back there, brother, and we don’t want any of it. Step aside, and you won’t see us again.”

The jarhead flared his nostrils and for a second, Jax thought he would put up a fight. Then he moved to let them pass.

“Don’t come back,” he said. “The Russian pricks have connections. I throw them out twice a month, no choice in the matter. But you guys ain’t Russian.”

Joyce started to say something, but Jax shoved him forward, into the foyer, and then all four of them were pushing out through the front door and into the parking lot. They were awash with piss-yellow light from the lampposts, and Jax kept moving until they were in the darkness beyond that sickly illumination, not far from where they’d parked their bikes.

“What happened back there?” Chibs asked.

“One of the girls was a little too eager,” Joyce said. “Got on the Russians’ nerves.”

“You didn’t help,” Opie said. “You could’ve gotten rid of her before it blew up like that.”

An eighteen-wheeler blew by on the main road, kicking up wind and grit. Joyce turned to glare at Opie like he’d just insulted his mother.

“I just did you a favor, asshole.” The coiled burn marks on his face had a pearlescent hue, catching the light from the parking lot. When he grimaced, one side of his mouth did not move as freely, thanks to those burns.

“You let it fall apart,” Opie said.

“All right!” Jax barked. “We’ll figure out another angle. Let’s just—”

Chibs tapped him on the back. “Jackie.”

Jax turned and saw Yurik emerging from Birdland. The Russian glanced around, looking jaundiced in that yellow glow. Jazz still played on the outdoor speakers, a jubilant tune that seemed almost absurd as theme music to this hardcore Bratva leg breaker. Yurik spotted them and started over.

“Careful,” Joyce said.

“He’s alone,” Jax muttered. “If this was trouble, you think he’d put himself out here like this? You guys keep back.”

Jax strode back across the lot—back through that piss-yellow light, awash in too-happy jazz—and met the Russian halfway. Yurik had a split lip and a bloody nose and his left eye had started to swell, and Jax wondered if it had been the bartender who’d managed it or if one of the noble bystanders had gotten in a lucky punch.

“There’s a Russian Orthodox church on E Street, right across from the park. Ninety minutes, you be on the steps of the church.”

“You can help me find my sister?”

Yurik dragged a hand across his nose, leaving a bloody streak on his arm. “Ninety minutes. Maybe you help us find Oleg. Maybe we let you take your sister away before she gets hurt.”

Behind thehotel was a rusted old swing set that sat on a concrete block with grass growing up through cracks. Trinity could see it from the window of the room she shared with Oleg and had felt the lure of it for days. She’d resisted, mainly because she had earned a level of respect from Kirill and the other men in Oleg’s Bratva and she thought sitting on the faded, dirty yellow swing and kicking her feet back and forth would undo the image she’d cultivated with them.

Tonight, she didn’t care. Oleg and Gavril had gone into Las Vegas, searching for any sign of Lagoshin and his men. Boredom and anxiety had crept inside her, made nests under her skin, and now the little twitchy spiders of dread were being born and crawling all through her body. Some of those spiders were doubt—doubt about her choices, doubt about her love, doubt about her chances of surviving the next twenty-four hours, never mind the next twenty-four days.

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.