Chapter 52
The Hunt Resumes
Lucan
I arrive at Kollbein’s place, under the old freight bridge. The city is asleep, quite here, unaware of the dangers lurking in its shadows.
I kill the engine one streets away and walk the rest on foot. My boots find the packed snow without crunching. I time my steps with the wind. I let the storm do my hiding for me. The air smells like salt and smoke and distant diesel from the harbor.
The back door’s lock is new. That means he’s afraid.
Good.
Bad men enter through back doors.
I don’t pick it. I don’t force it. I knock once; soft, polite.
The door opens fast.
Kollbein stands there in his shirt sleeves, eyes tired, jaw set like a man who has spent too long pretending he can control the outcome of other people’s violence.
He still got bruises onto his face from our last conversation.
He looks like the kind of man who used to be feared in bars until a new generation of monsters made fear quieter and more surgical.
Behind him the house is dim and warm. A television murmurs in another room.
He doesn’t step aside. He doesn’t invite me in.
“Vapor,” he says, and there’s relief in it, relief that I am still alive, relief that the problem he created hasn’t come back to bury him.
I don’t waste breath.
I step forward and put my gloved hand around his throat.
It happens in one smooth movement, no flourish, no warning. My fingers close where his pulse beats, and I feel it instantly: that small, frantic flutter of a body realizing it is no longer the one making choices
I slam him backward into the wall, hard enough to rattle the picture frames. The house shudders. A glass on a nearby shelf trembles.
His hands come up to my wrist. He doesn’t try to pry me off. He knows better. He knows fighting only teaches me how easily I could break him.
“You knew,” I say quietly. The filter of the mask hisses.
He swallows against my grip. It’s a wet sound. His face reddens. But he doesn’t plead. Kollbein is not brave. He is disciplined. There’s a difference.
“You knew where you were sending me,” I say again, and this time the words are edged, sharpened, because now I can taste the memory of him sending me to the lion den.
His eyes flicker.
He nods once. A small movement. A confession.
I lean in close enough that he can smell the cold on me, the smoke, the residue of underground air that never fully leaves my clothes.
“You sent me into his trap,” I murmur. “On purpose.”
His throat works beneath my hand.
“I didn’t—” he tries, and it comes out strangled.
“Don’t lie,” I say. My voice is almost gentle. That’s what makes it terrifying. “Don’t insult me with it.”
Kollbein’s gaze darts toward the hallway, toward the room where the television murmurs. His eyes come back to mine, glossy now, not from pain but from the exhaustion of carrying a choice he didn’t want to carry.
He forces the words out anyway, raw and shaking. “He threatened my wife.”
I feel something inside me settle. Not sympathy. Understanding. Understanding is colder than sympathy. It is the ability to see the shape of someone’s fear and measure it.
“And my boys,” he adds, voice breaking on the last word. “He… he made it clear. If I didn’t route you the way he wanted, he would take them apart. Slowly. Publicly. He said he’d mail me pieces.”
The house is quiet except for his breathing and the storm outside. The television’s murmur is a soft, oblivious thing, some commercial, some laugh track, some normal world that has no idea how easily it could be swallowed.
I hold him there for a long moment. Long enough that his pulse stutters under my thumb. Long enough that he starts to panic, and that panic makes him honest.
“I had no other choice,” he whispers. “He came by my house, he held a knife to my boy’s throat.”
There are always choices. But some choices are only different ways of dying.
I loosen my grip slowly. Not all at once. I let him feel the difference between mercy and release. When my hand drops, he coughs, sucking air in like he’s been underwater. He stays against the wall, one palm pressed to his throat, eyes burning with a shame that doesn’t cleanse anything.
I could kill him for what he did.
But the underworld won’t thank me for it.
“He’s good,” I say, my voice flat. “Einar.”
Kollbein looks up. His eyes are bloodshot now. “He’s not—”
“He’s good,” I repeat. “At threats. At leashes. At turning men like you into tools and making you thank him for the privilege.”
Kollbein’s jaw tightens like he wants to argue, but there’s no argument to make. His silence is agreement.
I step away from him, glance down the hallway again.
“You should have told me,” I say.
His shoulders sag. “If I told you—”
“You think I wouldn’t have killed him before he could hurt your family?” I ask, offended.
Kollbein’s mouth twists. “I didn’t expect you to care.”
I smile. It’s not humor. It’s a wound showing teeth. “I don’t, it would have been convenient for me though.”
That lands between us like a dropped weapon.
He exhales, eyes closing briefly as if he’s realizing what kind of man he put in a cage and then pointed at someone else.
“You’re going after him,” he says.
“That has always been my job,” I reply.
Kollbein straightens as much as he can with his pride mangled and his throat still aching. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a phone, not his daily one, not the one he uses for family or business or pretending to be normal. This one is stripped down. Ugly. A tool.
He holds it out like an offering.
“Green light,” he says hoarsely. “From my side. No interference. No questions about what has happened. I’ll make sure the people under me keep their mouths shut.”
I don’t take the phone.
I look at his hand, then at his face.
“I don’t need your green light,” I say.
His fingers tighten around the device. His eyes flicker with something like relief again, because my refusal means he doesn’t owe me the illusion of authority. It means the hunt is not his doing. It means he can tell himself he is not choosing violence, only failing to stop it.
Kollbein nods once. “I know, you do as you please.”
I step closer, just enough to remind him how easily I could put him back against the wall.
“But you will do what you said,” I add. “You will keep your side quiet. You will keep your men’s curiosity in check.” I watch him carefully, “and you’ll take care of the crime scene I just emerged from, including the bodies.”
Kollbein’s throat bobs. He doesn’t ask further. He already knows.
“I’ll make sure all of that will be arranged,” he says. “On my life.”
Kollbein swallows again, then straightens, the movement careful, respectful in the way men get when they understand the hierarchy has shifted without their consent.
“What do you need from me?” he asks. “For your hunt.”
I study him for a moment longer than necessary. Let the silence stretch. Let him sit with the fact that he’s asking a serial killer how to commit violence more efficiently. Men like Kollbein always believe they’re different because they don’t pull the trigger themselves.
They’re wrong.
“I need a place,” I say finally. “One that doesn’t exist on any map anyone still living uses.”
His brow furrows. “Define that.”
“Abandoned,” I reply. “Far from roads. Far from water routes. No power lines. No cameras. No wildlife worth mentioning.” I tilt my head slightly. “Somewhere even birds know better than to linger.”
Kollbein exhales slowly through his nose. “You want to make sure he can’t be found.”
“No,” I correct. “I want to make sure he can be heard.”
That lands.
He doesn’t ask what I mean by it. He nods once, already running through inventories in his head, old industrial sites, decommissioned research facilities, bunkers sealed after accidents no one officially acknowledged.
Iceland is full of places like that if you know where to look.
Places swallowed by weather and neglect and bad decisions.
“I can arrange that,” he says.
“Good.”
“And after?” he asks carefully. “When it’s done.”
I turn back toward him slowly.
This part matters more than the killing.
“When this is done,” I say, “Einar’s name disappears. Not in the way men usually disappear in our part of the market—contract completed. No, he’ll die in the least memorable way.”
But I’m not done yet.
“I want Level Three opened,” I continue, thanks Henrik for the tip. “Not as a contractor. Not as an asset.”
His eyes flicker. He understands immediately what I’m asking.
Level Three isn’t just access.
It’s autonomy.
“You want to operate completely independently,” he says.
“I already do,” I reply. “I want the underworld to stop pretending otherwise.”
Silence presses down between us, thick and heavy. The television murmurs again somewhere down the hall, laugh track swelling at the wrong moment, obscene in its normalcy.
“I don’t take orders,” I say. “I decide what gets done. When it gets done. And who deserves it.”
His jaw tightens. “That kind of freedom… it disrupts balance.”
I step closer. Not threatening. Informational.
“So does fear,” I say. “And fear has always balanced things better than bureaucracy.”
Kollbein studies me then, really studies me, like he’s looking at a structure collapse in slow motion and realizing it was load-bearing all along.
“You’d be outranking men who built this system,” he says quietly.
“I already do,” I answer. “They just haven’t admitted it yet.”