Maya

"Massey, slow down," I said, turning to look out of the window of the small European two door car. Its paintwork was chipped and scratched, not to mention faded from a dozen winters sat on the curb without protection from the driving snow of an Alexandrian winter, or the beating sun of an Alexandrian summer. We'd dispensed with the stretch limo for this. I didn't like using it at the best of times, but Conor swore that the bulletproof windows would come in handy someday. I didn't doubt it, especially not in a city where half the criminal gangs were out for my head. But I didn't have to like it.

"Sorry boss," Massey replied sheepishly, after tapping the brake so hard my head almost bounced off the dashboard. "Are we here?"

I nodded. "I think so."

The grubby, pollution-stained brick tenement blocks, built in the 1940s to house workers flooding to Alexandria from across the country. They fed the factories that then fed the war effort, and their homes soared into the sky. They pricked the haze that hung low over the city, like the choking black smoke stacks of a hundred coal fires. I shivered. They should have been knocked down decades ago, but corruption and special interests – much of it my father's doing – had kept them firmly in place.

"Imagine living here," Massey muttered as he brought the car to a halt, more gently this time. "I think I'd rather top meself."

I looked at him reproachfully, but it seemed to bounce off him like water off a ducks back. I doubted he'd even noticed my attempt at scolding him. Massey lived in his own world, a world of leprechauns, rainbows and pots of gold, as far as I could tell. A world without responsibility. I was jealous of him. "Plenty do. The suicide rate here's three times higher than the rest of the city, and Alexandria's already got a rate higher than the rest of the country."

Massey looked around with dismay. "More power to them," he said. "Better dead than this."

I rolled my eyes. There was no point chiding him, he wouldn't change. And frankly, I didn't want him to. "Come on," I hurried. "We haven't got much time. Are you ready –"

"To do what needs to be done?" Massey finished, cradling what looked very much like a second world war bayonet in his hands, light from the fading skyline glinting off his eyes in a menacing caricature of. "Born ready."

That I really didn't doubt. For all his jokes, his easy smiles and infectious laughter, Massey was still a very scary man. A scrapper – and a killer. Conor hadn't told me the whole story, and out of respect I hadn't asked, but a few dark, throw away comments here and there had helped me paint a picture. He'd been raised to fight by the Irish Republican Army, a group of terrorists, or freedom fighters, depending on who you asked.

I didn't. By the sounds of it, his childhood had been short and brutal.

I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the thought, and to make sure that I gave my own boy, and the one kicking in my belly, a better life than that. That was what I was fighting for – the reason I wanted to scour Alexandria of its sins. Not to take control, or to be called the Boss, for creature comforts or earthly pleasures. But to make sure that my babies didn't have to grow up like Massey. "Come on then," I said, disguising the upset in my voice with false enthusiasm. "Let's go."

* * *

I fought the urge to rest my hands on my knees and double over from the exertion. Just my luck, the kormilitsa – wetnurse – my network of spies had pointed to lived on the top floor of the towering apartment block. And the elevator was out.

"You okay?" Massey asked with concern. "You sure Conor would be okay with you doing this, you know, in your condition?"

I shot him an acid look. "Conor's my husband, not my keeper. And I'm your boss," I said, placing my emphasis on the very last word. "So unless you want your next task to be cleaning toilets with a toothbrush, I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself."

Massey grumbled, but to his credit, he kept the muttered protestations to himself – mostly. I turned a blind eye. He rapped twice on apartment 53's door – two commanding hits that left whoever lived inside in no doubt that they were to open the door – or else. The decaying open-brick corridor echoed with the noise, and then fell deathly silent. Even the sound of children's laughter from inside the apartment, which I realized that my heaving struggle for oxygen had drowned out, seemed to fade away, before roaring back with twice the vigor.

I grinned to myself, hiding behind Massey's back in case the door opened. Kids are kids.. I thought. You can't keep them down.

"No, no, no," came a thrice repeated, long-suffering refrain from just inside the door. "Pyotr, you know better –"

A click, and the door opened an inch, revealing a slice of a harried, middle-aged woman's face in between the doorway and the paint-chipped door itself. "What is it?" She barked brusquely. A child squeaked.

And then she saw Massey. I watched from behind him as her throat muscles contracted and she gulped, her head rocking backward with dismay. "No, no," she whined. "I pay Mister Victor already. I am just old lady, no husband, I cannot pay more. I already do favor for Mister Victor, like he say. No, no…"

My heart broke.

"Wait out here, Massey," I ordered. He turned and stared at me with surprise, but I shook my head surreptitiously, my eyes flaring with command. The last thing I wanted to do was have him kick down a door that led to an apartment filled with playing kids. That was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to change in this city. If I allowed myself to break my own rules, it would be a slippery slope… I stepped forward, and sneakily elbowed him aside.

"Mrs. Linsky?" I asked, softening my voice and plastering a broad smile on my face. "Perhaps I could come in," I continued, catching a sweet smell pouring from her apartment. "We could share a couple of sbiten?"

Her eyes flared at the sound of my voice. Massey shot me a surprised, amused look as he heard me lay on a Russian accent so thick I doubted that even my great grandparents had spoken so, when they farmed in the Siberian tundra.

I studied the woman carefully now the Irishman was out of my way. She wasn't as old as she had first appeared, not much past forty, if I was any judge. But she had the worried, lined face of a woman at least ten years older. Hope, like a candle in the breeze, had been snuffed out. She was reduced to surviving, and existing, not living.

She stared at me with worried eyes, but in the traditional Russian way, deferred to my authority. I didn't like it, but there it was. Like most Russians of her generation, I guessed she had memories of living under complete domination in the Soviet Union, or had parents who did. She let me in for the same reason she did Victor a favor – fear. I resolved not to take advantage of her. A click echoed through the corridor as the woman loosened the chain holding the door closed, and she ushered me in.

I stepped through, and hissed to Massey to, "stay here."

"You have a lovely apartment, Mrs. Linsky," I said, looking around at a small, pokey place that was anything but. The walls had taken on the jaundiced yellow that indicated a smoker had lived here, once. For a long time. More poignantly, the kids I'd heard from the other side of the door were nowhere to be seen. Hiding, no doubt, the elder children caring for younger, keeping them quiet. Mrs. Linsky caught my gaze.

"I told my husband not to smoke," she said, "every day. But did he listen? Of course not." She handed me a steaming mug of hot sbiten and pointed at a faded paisley couch. "Please, sit."

I did as I was told. The couch groaned and gave off the unmistakable sound of the spring breaking as I sat. I started speaking, more to distract myself from the cloying poverty of my surroundings than anything else. "Thank you," I said, glancing at the hot drink in my hands. "I'm sorry for coming here without any warning, Mrs. Linsky –"

"Alina."

"Alina," I repeated. "But we've much to discuss."