Emilia
Finding Troskoy takes exactly eighteen hours.
Eighteen hours of silence and bloodhound patience. Of watching the city from behind tinted glass while Konstantin and Leonid’s men sweep through every rat hole and burned-out shell Troskoy might have crawled into.
When the message comes, we’ve got him, I almost don’t believe it.
He’s holed up in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city. Rusted girders. Broken windows. The last breath of a dying empire. A handful of his men still linger there, clinging to loyalty like a curse. Desperate. Cornered. Dangerous.
Perfect.
We park half a mile out, where the frost still clings to the grass and the air smells like smoke and metal. Konstantin dials Leonid, puts him on speaker.
“He’s all yours,” Konstantin says, voice steady as ever. “Just do me a favor?”
Leonid’s voice comes through low and sharp. “What’s that?”
“Make it hurt.”
A pause. Then a short, humorless laugh. “Oh, I intend to.”
I can almost see Leonid’s grin through the phone, the flicker of violence in his eyes.
Konstantin ends the call and slips the phone back into his coat. He doesn’t look at me right away. Just watches the faint lights in the distance where Leonid’s men are already closing in, moving like shadows, precise and silent.
“They’ll be quick,” he says.
I nod, but my pulse is roaring. “Good.”
We stand there together, the wind pulling at my hair, the city blinking faintly behind us like an indifferent god. When the first muffled shots echo through the air, I flinch. Not because I regret it, but because it’s finally over. The sound doesn’t last long.
Konstantin’s hand finds mine. His skin is rough, the grip unyielding. Not gentle, but grounding.
“Don’t look,” he murmurs. “You’ve seen enough.”
He’s right. We don’t stay to watch the end. We don’t need to.
Troskoy’s screams, or maybe just the memory of them, fade into the night. A final punctuation mark on a chapter that has bled too long.
As we turn back toward the car, my legs feel weightless. Hollow. Like the revenge has emptied me out instead of filling me.
“What happens now?” I ask.
Konstantin glances at me, eyes unreadable in the dark. “Now we live with what’s left.”
His answer shouldn’t sound like hope. But somehow, it does.
We drive away in silence, headlights carving through the fog, leaving behind nothing but ghosts and ashes.
Artur Troskoy’s story is over.
And ours, whatever we’re becoming, is just beginning.