PROLOGUE — THE ALLEY

Liora Voss

Moscow, Ulitsa Arbat — Arbat Street

I waited outside the school gates for more than two hours. My phone had gone warm in my hand from calling Mackenzie—my mother—over and over again.

Twenty-three times.

Every call went to voicemail.

Dusk bled across the city in shades of tarnished gold, turning the streets of Moscow into something dim and bruised. The wind cut straight through my thin jacket, sending dead leaves skittering around my battered sneakers. My feet throbbed. Hunger clawed at my stomach. And the anger—sharp, familiar, exhausting—was the only thing keeping me upright.

Again.

At some point, waiting started to feel worse than walking.

So I left.

Home was far, but I knew a shortcut: a narrow alley behind a decaying bar I usually avoided without thinking twice. That evening, frustration made the choice for me.

It was the worst mistake of my life.

The moment I turned the corner, everything changed.

Seven men.

Five with guns.

The alley smelled like cheap smoke, stale piss, and something metallic hanging heavy in the air—something I understood a second too late. My whole body locked against the damp brick wall behind me.

The first shot cracked through the alley like thunder.

Two men hit the ground almost immediately. Blood sprayed across the frozen stones, dark and gleaming beneath the weak light of a flickering streetlamp. The sound their bodies made when they fell turned my stomach. Shouting followed. Then laughter. Cold, careless laughter.

Then more gunfire.

I should have run.

I couldn’t move.

A voice sliced through the chaos—low, controlled, absolute.

“End it.”

I looked at him.

Tall. Broad. Dark hair touched with gray at the temples, the same steel threaded through his neatly kept beard. Maybe in his forties. Maybe older. His eyes were pale enough to look colorless in the half-light, and there was something in them that felt colder than the Moscow wind.

He didn’t need to raise his voice.

Everyone listened anyway.

The Capo.

Three younger men stood near him, all cut from the same brutal mold—same hard features, same watchful stillness, same violence sitting just beneath the surface. Brothers, maybe. Their suits were dark, immaculate, and far too expensive for a place like that. They moved with the confidence of men who had never feared consequences.

One of them noticed me first.

Gray-blue eyes. A smile with no warmth in it.

“Tough night for you, девочка,” he said. “Wrong alley.”

I turned to run.

A hand clamped down on me before I could take a second step.

I gasped as someone dragged me backward, an iron grip locking around my waist and pinning me against a solid chest. A gun pressed to my temple, cold enough to burn. My breath caught so hard it hurt.

“Don’t,” a rough voice murmured beside my ear. “You’ll only make it worse.”

Tears blurred my vision before I even realized they were falling. My hands shook. My knees threatened to give out.

And through all of it, I looked at the Capo again.

He was already watching me.

Not casually. Not with irritation. Not even with surprise.

His gaze settled on me with a terrible kind of certainty, as though my presence in that alley had become something more than an inconvenience. As though, in the span of a heartbeat, he had already decided what would happen next.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please let me go.”

He stepped closer.

The streetlamp caught the edge of his face, carving his features into shadow and bone. There was nothing kind in him. Nothing soft. He was the kind of man who looked as though mercy had never once crossed his mind and survived.

“We can’t do that, malen'kaya,” he said quietly. “You saw too much.”

Another of the younger men came nearer, lighter-haired than the others, his expression unreadable in the dark. He studied me for a long moment, calm and detached, as if weighing a problem rather than looking at a terrified girl.

“She’s a witness,” he said.

“Shut up, Noah,” the man restraining me snapped.

At once, the Capo lifted a hand.

Silence.

It fell fast and complete, heavy as snowfall.

He stopped inches away from me. His gaze moved over the wrinkled uniform, the trembling legs, the panic I could no longer hide. When his eyes returned to mine, something in them sharpened.

Not desire.

Decision.

“You’re coming with us.”

I struggled then—instinct, fear, and desperation. It made no difference. Someone caught my wrists. A damp cloth was forced over my mouth and nose, and the sweet chemical smell hit me so fast it made my head spin.

“No—wait—please—”

The alley tilted.

The last thing I saw was the Capo standing over me, watching in silence as the darkness closed in. His expression never changed.

But there was something in it I understood all the same.

No doubt.

Not pity.

A promise.

And as the world vanished, one final thought echoed through me like a sentence already passed:

My life would never belong to me again.