Chapter 12 · Real Name

Sorin's mouth was full of blood and he still smiled like he'd won something.

"Twenty years," he said, dragging air through a crushed windpipe, "and Hollen's boys still tell it at mess like a bedtime story. The Voss whelp. Burned up in a house fire in '98, they said. Except fire don't leave a scent like that." He rolled his eyes toward me, toward my bare throat where the patch used to sit. "Hello, Aleksei."

The name hit the room like a dropped glass. Every soldier still standing turned to look at me instead of the man bleeding on the floor.

"That's not my name," I said. It came out steadier than I felt.

"It's the name on the kill order," Sorin said. "Signed, sealed, filed. You want to know whose signature's on the bottom?"

Dimitri moved before I could answer. He put his boot on Sorin's wrist, the one still twitching toward a knife in his belt, and leaned his weight down until something in it popped.

"Shut your mouth," Dimitri said. Flat. Not loud. Worse than loud.

"Why," Sorin wheezed, grinning through it, "you already know, don't you, Volkov?"

The room went quiet in a different way.