Chapter 1 - Runaway
The plane had already begun moving when Kait finally allowed herself to look out the window.
Copenhagen slid past beneath a veil of rain. Runway lights smeared across the glass, red and white against the dark, while the engines gathered enough force to press her back into her seat.
She held her backpack between her boots.
Everything she had brought fit inside it.
Two changes of clothes. Nearly every krone she had saved. Her passport. A photograph of Katya taken before Kait was born, with address written in Gregor’s handwriting that was old enough to be useless.
She had found it the locked drawer of his desk.
His voice had followed her all the way to the airport.
I never promised you a kutte.
Kait closed her eyes.
“You said I would prospect as soon as I came back.”
“I said we’ll see.”
“No. You said I needed training. You said I didn’t know enough about weapons. You said I had no discipline.”
Gregor had stood behind his desk with both hands braced against it, his shoulders filling the space between the shelves. He hadn’t looked angry. That would have been easier.
He looked tired.
“You were seventeen.”
“So you lied to me?”
“No… maybe… I hoped you would grow out of it.”
The words had stopped her.
She had gone completely still in front of him, her duffel bag sitting beside the door where she had dropped it. She had been back from Iraq less than a week. Her uniforms were still folded inside it. Sand remained trapped in the seams of one pair of boots.
She had graduated on time in a country that wasn’t hers, sitting through classes taught in a language she had barely spoken when Gregor brought her there. Then she had enlisted. She had learned to march, shoot, strip and clean a rifle, follow orders, sleep in the dirt, and keep moving when every part of her body demanded that she stop.
Every time it became too much, she remembered why she was doing it.
She was going to become Krait.
It had never occurred to her that Gregor might be waiting for her to become somebody else.
“You sent me to do all that because you thought it would make me quit?”
“I sent you because you needed direction.”
“You told me it would make me ready.”
“It did make you ready.” Gregor’s voice had softened. “For a life. A real one.”
Kait stared at him.
“I already chose my life.”
“Krait does not patch women.”
“Then change it.”
“It is not that simple.”
“It is when you’re the fucking president.”
His jaw tightened.
“Kaity. That is not something I can do. That is a major club decision that needs to go through the main table.”
“Then call King. Right now!”
“It’s not that fucking simple.”
“I did everything you asked.”
“I know.”
“I graduated. I enlisted. I went to the Middle Fucking East.”
“I know what you did.”
“Then let me prospect.”
“No.”
There had been no hesitation in it. No opening left for her to force her way through.
Just no.
She had felt something tear loose inside her.
Not break. Breaking implied an accident.
This had been ripped out by the man who put it there.
Gregor came around the desk, but Kait stepped back before he could reach her.
“You knew all this…,” she said. “The whole fucking time.”
“The MC will never accept it.”
“But you let me believe they would.”
“I thought you would come home understanding that you don’t need this shit.”
“You don’t know what I need.”
“You’re nineteen years old, Kait. You don’t know what you need.”
“I’m old enough to carry a rifle and bleed and fight for your fucking country.”
“This is your country too. And knowing how to use a riffle does not make you Krait.”
The humiliation burned hotter than the anger. Kait felt it in her face, in her throat, beneath her skin.
She had imagined this homecoming too many times. Gregor would look at her and finally see what she was capable of. The men who had watched her grow up would laugh when she asked to prospect, but he would shut them up. He would tell them she had earned the chance.
She had pictured herself wearing that kutte until the image felt like a memory.
Now Gregor stood in front of her and told her it had never been possible.
“So what am I supposed to do, huh?” she asked. “Become a snakehole? Get passed around like all your fucking whores until a patch makes me his ole lady?”
“Oh, come on. You know I would never allow that. That is not what—”
“You don’t even fucking know, do you? You have no idea what to do with me.”
“I want you alive.”
“Then let me! This is all I want. I can fucking do this.”
A tear finally rolled down her face.
For the first time, something changed in his face.
Fear, perhaps. Or recognition.
Kait reached for her duffel.
“Fuck it.”
Gregor moved between her and the door. “What are you doing?”
She looked up at him.
“I’m outta here.”
Gregor’s expression hardened. “No, Kait—”
“You don’t get to tell me no anymore. I’m going to Russia and find my grandfather.”
“Jesus fucking Christ. You have no idea what you’re saying. That is not just someone you find.”
“I’ll fucking find him.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I will… or maybe, I’ll find Katya first.”
Gregor caught her by the arm when she tried to pass him. Kait looked down at his hand until he released her.
“Do not go looking for them, Kait. You are not—”
“What? Not ready for that either?”
“You have no idea what they can do to you.”
“I guess I’ll find out.”
“Please, listen to me.”
“No. I’m done listening to you. You listen to me now.”
Her voice shook. She hated that it did.
“You promised me a chance. That is all I ever asked you for. I did everything you said, and I came back ready to earn it… I have never asked for anything… not even an explanation why we left Dryden. Why you made that decision so suddenly… not even when I had the right know why you took me out of my home, my school, when you took Kolton from me…”
Gregor said nothing. She was simply not ready for that either.
“If Krait won’t take me, I’ll find something that will. I’ll find Katya. I’ll find her father. I’ll work for the fucking Bratva if I have to.”
“You are not going to Russia.”
“You’re done telling me what to do.”
She pulled the door open.
“Kait.”
“And when you hear about me, you’re going to realize I could have been the best fucking Krait any of these assholes could ever be.”
She slammed the door behind her.
The airplane lifted from the runway.
Kait opened her eyes as Copenhagen fell away beneath her.
For one terrible second, she wanted Gregor to come for her.
She imagined the plane stopping at the end of the runway. A flight attendant approaching her seat. Her father waiting beyond the gate, furious and frightened, ready to drag her home. A leather kutte with a Prospect top rocker…
But no. Nothing happened.
The city grew smaller until the clouds swallowed it.
Kait gave Denmark the finger and settle in her seat.
She had stolen it from Gregor’s desk drawer.
Her mother stood outside a bar. She was a few years older than Kait was now, wrapped in a fur coat, her black hair spilling on the sides under a fur hat. Someone had written something across the back in blue ink.
Katya 1974 and a Moscow address.
She didn’t know whether Katya still lived there.
She didn’t know if that was even her address.
She didn’t speak Russian. She didn’t have anyone waiting for her. By the time she landed, most of the money she had saved would already be gone.
The anger that had carried her through the airport began to drain away, leaving something colder behind.
Kait turned the photograph over and studied her mother’s face again.
Then she folded it carefully and returned it to her pocket.
There was no point being afraid now.
She was now closer to Russia than she was to Denmark.
Sheremetyevo International Airport smelled of cigarettes, wet wool, and something industrial Kait couldn’t identify.
She followed the other passengers through the terminal with her backpack strapped over both shoulders, trying not to look as lost as she felt.
The signs were nearly useless. A few had English beneath the Russian. Most didn’t.
At passport control, the officer behind the glass studied her passport, then her.
He said something in Russian.
“I don’t understand.”
He repeated it louder.
“That’s not helping.”
The officer frowned and called to the woman in the next booth. After a brief exchange, he looked back at Kait.
“Purpose?”
“Visiting family.”
“Where?”
“Moscow.”
Kait pulled Katya’s address from her pocket and slid it beneath the glass.
He read it.
“Family?”
“My mother.”
That earned her another look.
Finally, he stamped her passport and waved her through.
Outside customs, Kait discovered that getting into Russia had been the easy part.
Men crowded the terminal doors offering taxis, hotels, cigarettes, currency—sometimes in Russian, sometimes in broken English. Kait understood exactly none of it.
Eventually, one word she knew.
“Taxi?”
She stopped.
The driver knew about as much English as she knew Russian, but between pointing, repeating themselves, and writing numbers on a scrap of paper, Kait managed to show him Katya’s address and explain that she needed somewhere cheap to sleep first.
At least she thought she did.
An hour later, she was staring through a rain-streaked window at a narrow building with peeling green paint and boarded windows.
Kait looked at the driver.
“Hotel?”
“Hotel,” he confirmed.
“This is the cheap one?”
“Cheap.”
“Yeah. I can see why.”
The hotel was worse inside.
The older man behind the desk spoke almost no English. Kait spoke no Russian. Negotiating a room became another miserable exchange of hand gestures, written numbers, and increasingly irritated voices.
Eventually, money changed hands.
“Bathroom up,” the man managed. “One. All people.”
“Shared?”
He stared at her.
“Never mind.”
He led her upstairs.
The room was barely larger than the bed. A stained mattress sat on a metal frame beneath a filthy window. There was one chair, a tiny table, and a radiator that knocked loudly without producing much heat.
The man flicked on the light.
It flickered overhead.
“Room.”
Kait looked around.
“This is fucking terrible.”
He smiled.
Apparently, that translated.
The bathroom was worse.
One toilet. One shower. Mold across the ceiling and somebody’s wet socks abandoned in the sink.
Kait showered quickly, changed into dry clothes, and returned to her room.
She locked the door.
Then wedged the chair beneath the handle.
Only then did she sit on the bed and unfold the piece of paper she had carried halfway across Europe.
Katya Dragunov and an address she couldn’t pronounce in a city she couldn’t navigate, written in a language she couldn’t read.
Her mother looked almost amused in it, staring at something beyond the frame.
“Fuck…”
Tomorrow, she had to figure out how to find her.
She put the photograph beneath her pillow, placed her knife beside them, and turned off the light.
Sometime after midnight, the door handle moved.
Kait’s eyes opened.
It moved again.
Her hand slipped beneath the pillow and closed around the knife.
Whoever stood on the other side remained there for several seconds.
Then the footsteps disappeared down the corridor.
Kait kept the knife in her hand until morning.
Kait woke to someone coughing in the hallway and gray light leaking through the filthy window.For a few seconds, she didn’t know where she was.Then the radiator knocked.Moscow.She sat up and pulled Katya’s photograph from beneath the pillow.That was all she had.By the time she left the hotel, the rain had stopped, but the cold hadn’t. Kait zipped her jacket to her chin and started walking.
Finding the address took most of the day.
She learned quickly that showing people the picture worked better than trying to pronounce anything written on it. Someone would point. Kait would walk. Then she’d show it to somebody else and get pointed somewhere different.
The Metro was worse.
She stood in front of the map trying to match Cyrillic letters she couldn’t read, rode several stops before realizing she’d gone the wrong direction, got off, and tried again.
After that, she stopped trying to understand the words.
She memorized their shapes.
By early afternoon, she had crossed the same street twice, eaten something from a kiosk she still wasn’t entirely sure about, stole a beanie and a pair of gloves, and started recognizing exactly how a Russian looked at someone who clearly had no fucking idea where she was going.
But slowly, the numbers began matching.
The streets narrowed.
Kait checked the paper again.
Then the number on the building.
She’d found it.
She even checked with someone passing by.
She stood across the street staring at an old apartment building wedged between two others.
For the first time all day, she didn’t move.
Her mother could be there.
Kait crossed the street.
The front door was locked. Beside it was a metal panel with ten buttons and names written beside them.
All in Russian.
“Fuckin’ aye.”
Kait studied the names beside the buttons.
Nothing looked remotely familiar.
She tried breaking Dragunov apart in her head, searching for anything that might resemble it.
Nothing.
“Fuck it.”
She pressed the first button.
A man’s voice answered.
“Katya Dragunov?”
Russian.
“Katya. Dragunov.”
More Russian.
“I don’t understand.”
The line went dead.
Kait pressed the next one.
“Katya Dragunov?”
A woman answered this time.
“No.”
Click.
Third button.
Then the fourth.
By the sixth, Kait had stopped attempting anything beyond the name.
She pressed the last button.
A long silence followed before an older voice answered.
“Katya Dragunov?”
The woman said something Kait couldn’t understand.
Kait looked up at the windows.
“Katya?”
The woman repeated herself.
“I don’t understand.”
Another sentence.
Then the connection ended.
Kait stood there with her finger against the button.
That was it.
Ten apartments.
No Katya.
She stepped backward onto the sidewalk and looked up at the building again.
She matched the address again.
That was definitely it.
Maybe she’d moved.
Maybe Gregor had written the address down wrong. She could just call him and ask, but she was not about to prove him right.
Maybe Kait had spent an entire day crossing Moscow for an address that hadn’t meant anything in years.
She folded the picture and shoved it into her pocket.
There was nowhere else to look.
So she walked.
At first she kept the photograph in her hand, watching faces as they passed. Dark hair. Light hair. Women younger than Katya. Women older than Katya.
It was stupid.
Moscow had millions of people.
Kait put the photograph away.
She spent the rest of the afternoon searching the surrounding streets. Katya had been standing outside some kind of bar when the photograph was taken, so Kait began trying to match buildings and surrounding landmarks. In the picture she could see the cake-looking building in the back but from where she was, she could only see the red building with the big clock.
Most of the bars were closed. The few that were open wanted nothing to do with the foreign girl carrying an old photograph and repeating the same name.
By nightfall, Kait had nothing.
She returned to the hotel exhausted, cold, and angrier than she had been when she left.
The landlord stopped her at the desk and demanded more money.
“I already paid.”
He answered in Russian.
“I paid for three nights.”
He held up two fingers.
“Three.”
“Two.”
“You said three.”
He shook his head and tapped the desk.
Kait knew he remembered. He also knew she had nowhere else to go.
She put enough money down for another night.
He picked it up and held out his hand again.
“That’s all you’re getting. Fuck you”
His voice rose.
“Oh you understood that one, motherfucker?”
He yelled at her, probably said the equivalent in Russian.
Kait leaned over the desk.
“Yell all you want. I still have no clue what you’re saying.”
The landlord stared at her, then at the knife clipped inside her jacket.
He waved her upstairs.
The following morning, Kait began again.
She returned to the apartment building. She walked every street around it. She showed Katya’s photograph at kiosks, bars, cafés, and one pawnshop
where the man behind the counter tried to get Kait’s number instead.
No one knew her.
On the third day, Kait widened the search.
She began asking in places where women like Katya might have gone. Old hotels. Casinos. Bars without signs. Rooms where men sat drinking in the middle of the afternoon and stopped talking when Kait entered.
A bartender studied the photograph longer than anyone else had.
“Katya Dragunov?” Kait asked.
His eyes lifted to hers.
“Dragunov?”
He slid the photograph back across the counter and said something in Russian.
“I don’t understand.”
He pointed toward the door.
“Do you know her?”
He pointed again.
Kait held her ground until two men at the end of the bar stood from their stools.
Then she left.
By the fourth night, the money in her backpack had been reduced to several careful stacks, each smaller than the last.
The landlord wanted payment every morning now. Food cost more than Kait expected. So she started stealing from vendors when they weren’t looking. She was on a strict Pirozhki diet. Transportation took money even when she managed not to get cheated. She had spent hours walking to avoid it, but Moscow seemed to grow larger each time she stepped outside.
Katya remained a photograph in her pocket.
Kait sat on the edge of the bed staring at the address.
She could return to Copenhagen.
The thought came quietly.
She still had enough money for a flight if she left soon. Rokkstar would be furious, but he would bring her home. He might never mention how badly she had failed. He might even pretend the entire thing hadn’t happened.
Kait tore the picture in half.
Then she stared at what she had done.
“Shit.”
She put the pieces together on the mattress, folded them along the tear, and shoved them back into her pocket.
She wasn’t going home.
Not yet.
That evening, she followed the sound of bass down a side street.
At first, she thought it came from one of the cars parked along the curb. Then a metal door opened beneath a faded awning, releasing a hard pulse of music into the cold.
Two women emerged laughing, their coats hanging open despite the weather. A man followed them out and lit a cigarette before the door closed again.
There was no sign outside. Nothing indicating a club. Only a large man stationed beside the entrance and a line of people disappearing down the concrete steps.
Kait looked at Katya’s torn photograph beneath the nearest streetlamp.
The building was wrong.
The year was wrong.
But the people entering were young enough to have parents who remembered 1974. Bartenders heard names. Men drinking in corners knew things they didn’t share in daylight.
Kait joined the line.
INSIDE
Jora Zmeyev spotted Oleg from across the club.
He was sitting in the VIP area with a drink in front of him, and girls at each side.
Jora finished speaking to the bartender, took the envelope he’d been handed and slipped it inside his jacket.
Then he walked over.
“What are you doing here?”
Oleg looked at him.
“Having a drink.”
“You have your own places to drink.”
Oleg smiled.
“Just checking on you. See how you’re doing.”
Jora’s expression didn’t change.
“Give me a fucking break.”
Jora looked around the club.
The bar was full. The tables were turning. Two girls worked the floor while Maksim stood near the back hallway talking to one of the doormen.
Nothing was out of place.
“You know this is my club. You don’t ever see me go to yours.”
Oleg took a drink.
“Well, maybe I like this club more.”Jora studied him for a moment.
“There’s talk about giving someone the neighborhood. And I think I just might want it.”
That got Jora’s attention.
He didn’t show much of it.
His boss, Barinov had assigned him the club as a test. He’d handed it to him to fix it after it ebcame a headache. Money disappearing from the deposits. Bartenders skimming. Dealers working the bathrooms without permission. Fights spilling into the street often enough that the police had started driving past twice a night.
Jora had replaced two men, broken the hand of another and made it clear that nobody sold anything inside without paying for the privilege.
The police stopped coming.
The money stopped disappearing.
Barinov’s envelopes got heavier.
Oleg tapped his glass against the table.
“You’ve done well here.”
“Yeah, and I intend to keep it.”
“That is Barinov’s call, not yours.”
Jora stared at him.
“Finish your drink and get the fuck out of my club.”
He walked away.
Jora turned and disappeared into the crowd.
Oleg scoffed and grabbed another shot glass.
OUTSIDE
The doorman stopped her.
He asked something in Russian.
Kait held up enough money to cover whatever everyone ahead of her had paid.
His gaze traveled over her jacket, jeans, backpack, and boots. Then he looked behind her as though expecting to find whoever had brought her.
“Alone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He said something else.
“I don’t understand.”
“American?”
“Danish.”
That meant nothing to him.
Kait pointed downstairs. “Yeah, American. Can I go in?”
The doorman stepped aside and waved her in. He didn’t charge her.
She turned once to make sure that’s what he meant, then she hurried in.
Heat struck her first.
Then the music.
The basement was packed tightly enough that Kait had to turn sideways to move through it. Cigarette smoke hung beneath the low ceiling. White lights flashed over concrete pillars and exposed pipes, illuminating pieces of faces before plunging them back into darkness.
Girls dancing on tables moving in ways that didn’t even seem humanly possible.
The music was relentless.
Born Slippy
Heavy and hypnotic, building in waves that seemed to move through the floor and into the crowd. Broken pieces of a man’s voice surfaced through the beat before disappearing again she wasn’t even sure what he was saying other than “boy.”
She pushed toward the bar.
Behind it, three people poured vodka faster than they accepted money. Kait waited until one of them looked at her, pointed at a bottle, and held up a finger.
The bartender poured without asking what she wanted.
Kait took the drink and turned to study the room.
People moved beneath the lights as though the music had stripped them down to nerves and bone. There was no rhythm Kait could follow, she felt a bit overwhelmed. No space between one body and the next. Men watched from tables along the wall. Some wore expensive jackets. Others wore black shirts and chains. Money passed between hands. So did small plastic baggies and pills.
This was the first place in Moscow that felt honest about what it was.
Kait drank half the vodka.
It burned all the way down.
She took out Katya’s photograph and put the pieces together on the bar.
The bartender barely glanced at it.
“Katya Dragunov?”
Bartender shook his head.
Kait took the photograph and turned from the bar.
A man seated at one of the tables was watching her.
He was older and less attractive than most of the people in the club, broad through the shoulders, heavy, with a fresh scar running from his lower lip into the stubble along his jaw. He had women sitting with him but he was looking right at Kait.
His gaze dropped to the pieces of paper she was fanning herself with.
Then he crooked two fingers, calling her over.
Kait hesitated.
The man pointed at the photograph and said something she couldn’t hear over the music.
Maybe he recognized Katya.
Kait moved through the crowd toward him.
She had almost reached the table when an arm slipped around her waist.
“There you are.”
