Chapter 22 - Harper
Hot air, smoke, and the metallic sting of burned wiring pushes past my face as Damian hauls me through the half-collapsed archway. My legs shake, but they move, following the dim beam of his flashlight as it slices through dust thick enough to taste.
We’re alive.
Barely, but we are alive.
And the world above us still wants us dead.
I rub grit from my eyes, and the motion sends pain down my arm. Everything aches, from my skin, ribs, to the muscles that hold my fear in place. The drives at my belt knock against my hip with each step, their weight anchoring me harder than gravity.
“We need to stop,” Damian says, voice hoarse, breath uneven. He turns, checking me like he expects a missing limb to suddenly appear. “You inhaled too much smoke.”
“I’m fine,” I manage, a lie wrapped in bravado.
He steadies me when the ground beneath us slopes upward, his hand braced at my spine, heat seeping through my torn shirt. His touch is too careful, like he’s cataloging every wince.
We climb toward the narrower, colder upper tunnels, full of a kind of cold that makes bones feel like glass. Water drips from overhead pipes in a rhythm like a clock we’re running out of time for.
Above my breath, above our footsteps, my conscience whispers in my head. I hear it louder than anything else.
“The drives are intact,” I mutter. “We can’t leave without them.”
“We almost died down there.” His jaw flexes, tight with fear. “I’m getting you out first.”
“You can’t prioritize me over the evidence,” I snap.
He stops so suddenly my shoulder hits his back. He turns, green eyes dark and scraping over me like he’s memorizing what might get taken away next.
“I can,” he says softly. “And I will.”
The words hit harder than any falling rubble. An unnamable emotion pulses in my chest. The tunnel lights above us flicker, then hum ominously, glitching.
And every dusty and cracked screen embedded in the wall sparks alive in unison.
Damian moves in front of me instantly, gun raised. But this isn’t an attack.
It’s a broadcast.
Inessa’s face fills every monitor like an omen. The perfect hair, perfect posture, perfect mask appears before our very eyes, reflected in each screen. Her red mouth curves like she’s hosting a gala, not staging an execution.
This must be hell. I’m in hell.
“My brothers and sisters,” she begins, voice smooth enough to cut glass, “I bring you truth.”
Damian’s hand tightens around his gun. I feel his rage cooling into something sharper.
The screens split, creating a mosaic: Damian stands with his gun aimed. The dust doesn’t clear, making everything severely grainy, but anyone with a trained eye knows what he is aiming at—Anton Lebedev, standing there on trembling legs.
It doesn’t end there. Damian disappears from the frame as the camera angle changes but Anton falls to the floor like a boulder dropped into water. His knees hit the floor, then his whole body thuds painfully against the rubble. A moment later, dull blood appears all around his supine body.
Anton is still fucking alive, and on the run after trying to kill Damian and me. This is utter bullshit. But this frame-by-frame masterpiece of deception is so believable, if I were to see it and not live the reality I am in, I’d believe it too.
The lighting, the angle—I recognize the corridor. She pieced it together from our chaos in the lower tunnels, stitched lies into reality with a surgeon’s precision.
“What the—” I gasp, my mind not accepting the images. Damian doesn’t respond, eyes fixed on the screen of him pulling a trigger he never pulled.
Inessa’s voice glides on, almost playful.
“Damian Ignatov has executed Anton Lebedev in cold blood, and now he seeks to dismantle the Bratva that raised him.”
The lie comes together painfully smoothly.
“She’s declaring war,” I gape. “On us. On everyone. They’ll hunt you. All of them.”
“Hunt us,” he corrects quietly.
It’s frightening, how calm and still he is. Like the eye of a storm—centered only because everything around him has become chaos.
The footage ends. Her face fills the screens again, eyes bright with conquest.
“I am the architect now,” she declares, lifting a small data key as if it were a crown. “I hold the future of this organization. Follow me, or be erased with the past.”
The monitors die, plunging the tunnel back into a sickly half dark. Damian exhales like he’s been holding his breath through the entire broadcast.
I brace a hand against the wall, grounding myself in cold metal, in the bite of rust under my nails. My heart is sprinting ahead of me, and I’m not sure I can catch it.
But I know one thing with brutal clarity—running or staying quiet won’t save us. Only truth can. I press my palm to the drives at my hip, feeling their edges through the fabric.
“Damian,” I say, and my voice steadies into something colder, sharper. “We fight her with what she fears.”
He turns, gaze locking on mine. “Harper—”
“No. Listen.” I push off the wall, adrenaline pulling my spine straighter. “We upload Anton’s confession. The ledgers. His entire network of deals. All of it.”
“Harper—”
“Publicly,” I force out. “Not to the Bratva. Not to Iosif. To everyone.”
His silence is heavy but not dismissive. He’s weighing reality, and the consequences.
“She’ll retaliate,” he says finally. “She’ll burn every bridge we’ve ever stood on.”
“She already has.” I take a step closer. “But the truth is stronger than her theatrics.”
His eyes soften at the edges imperceptibly.
“You want to expose the entire Ignatov ledger?” he asks. “Global accounts, offshore routes—”
“Every deal your father touched,” I finish for him.
“My father built a cage,” he whispers roughly. “I’m done dying inside it.”
Water drips from the ceiling again, slower now, like the entire tunnel is holding its breath alongside us.
“We’ll need a live access point,” he says finally. “Something off-grid. Something she can’t overwrite.”
“There’s one,” I say. “In the old transit hub above us. Remember Anton’s emergency uplink? She’ll expect you to run.” I touch the drives again. “She won’t expect me to speak.”
Damian studies me like a man trying to understand the horizon while the storm advances behind him. He nods wearily, closing his eyes as he gathers his bearings. He steps closer, his hand rising and caressing my cheek. His thumb brushes away a smear of soot I didn’t realize was there.
“You don’t have to be the one to do this,” he murmurs.
“I don’t,” I answer. “But I want to.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Suits the background, no?” I try poorly at humor. “Survivors just keep moving.”
His expression is raw, somewhat a mirror of the thing breaking open inside me. Then he steps back, shoulders straightening with the kind of resolve that can topple kingdoms.
“Stay behind me,” he orders gently.
Like I ever will.
I stand beside him, our arms brushing. The drives at my hip no longer feel like a weight against my thigh but a guarantee of a future I could never imagine. We start moving up the long incline of the tunnel, the overhead lights flickering like they’re unsure whether to reveal us or hide us.
The air grows colder. The static in my headset crackles.
I know Inessa’s eyes are on the city above us now. She has probably overheard what Damian and I have discussed, and my gut warns me that it won’t be long before we are ambushed again.
Inessa won’t back down, but she doesn’t know who the fuck she’s up against.
We turn a corner and the tunnel opens into a narrow catwalk suspended above an old rail shaft, cables dangling like thick vines. Pipes hiss with steam as if warning us to turn back.
Kiro’s voice crackles faintly in my ear—static, breath, then the clipped precision that means he’s fighting to keep the line alive. The relief of hearing him again is short-lived because he delivers exactly what I had been fearing.
“Two turns ahead. Then up. Move fast, they’re closing.”
They’re closing. Damian and I share a glance, not needing a clarification on who they are.
Inessa’s men.
Damian leads, and I follow close enough that when he stops, my shoulder brushes his back. The tunnel walls around us narrow, then widen again without pattern, as if the underground itself is breathing unevenly. Dust rains from the ceiling in soft avalanches each time the earth shakes.
Every sound feels sharpened: my boots scraping stone, Damian’s exhale, the bounce of the drives tied against my thigh, like a rhythmic heartbeat.
We reach a split in the corridor. Damian angles left, trusting Kiro’s directions the way a drowning man trusts a rope.
“Two hostiles on your upper right,” Kiro warns choppily. “They’re setting up position.”
Without hesitation, Damian swings his arm back, pushing me to the wall.
“Stay low.”
I drop into a crouch just as muzzle flashes bloom overhead. Small suns burst to life in the dark as sparks shower us from the catwalk above, pattering against my hair and jacket like burning snow.
Damian fires upward, three quick shots that echo through my bones. The mercenary above screams, then something heavy slams onto the metal grate.
My lungs refuse to cooperate as Damian’s hand grabs mine, pulling me forward again. We sprint, the tunnel tilting upward as though the entire world is rearing back, trying to throw us off its spine.
The incline grows steeper. Stone shifts under our feet, grit sliding like treacherous sand.
“Right turn—go now!” Kiro barks in my ear.
Damian obeys a millisecond before the tunnel wall behind us erupts—chunks of rock exploding outward. Heat sears my back, my ears ringing with a shrill metallic whine.
I stumble, knees buckling.
Damian catches me mid-fall, arm wrapping tight around my waist. His breath brushes my temple frantically.
“You with me?” he murmurs.
“Yeah.” My voice trembles. “Let’s go.”
We run again, weaving through debris, over fallen pipes and fractured concrete slabs jutting like rotted teeth from the tunnel floor. The smoke is so thick in the air, it coats the back of my throat, bitter as unsaid truths.