Chapter 76Dead Center
Dead Center
Aslanov
The bodies are falling faster now. One by one. I give each of them a moment to understand what’s coming. I don’t rush. I don’t yell. They make it easy.
Because none of them fight.
They all beg.
One of them stumbles as he runs, tries to escape through a side corridor.
I shoot him in the back of the head.
He drops like a prayer cut short.
I turn to the next.
He tries to speak. I put a bullet in his knee first. He howls, then sobs. Then I silence him.
Not one of them earns a name.
Because names are for men.
And these? These were rats.
I see them for what they are now—quivering piles of silk and ego and fear. They lived behind thrones, behind whispers. Behind lies.
I drag them into the light. One by one. And I burn them.
Dimitri stands back.
He says nothing. Does nothing. He watches like a disciple witnessing divine wrath. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t need to. He earned this silence. This seat. This survival.
I never speak their names.
I never grant them last words.
The Bratva is not being punished. It is being buried.
And I am the dirt.
Ten dead. Then twelve. Then thirteen.
The truth is… I’m bored now.
There’s no art in it anymore. No thrill.
The fear in their eyes all started to look the same, wide, wet, pathetic. Their legacy, reduced to piss and tears on polished Italian leather.
I light a cigarette.
The flame flicks in the red-dark air. My hands are sticky. My shirt’s soaked at the collar, splattered down the sleeves. There’s blood on my neck, my throat. It smells like iron.
I drag the smoke in slowly.
Exhale even slower.
The nicotine doesn’t calm me. It centers me.
And that’s when I look at the only thing still squirming in the room.
Lorenzo.
He’s still alive.
Curled near the far wall like a half-dead animal, breathing shallow, rocking slightly.
His ruined hand is clutched to his chest like a treasure that might save him.
His suit, tailored, custom, clean when he walked in, is now soaked and shredded, stained across the front with blood that isn’t all his.
He’s been watching the bodies fall for the last hour.
And now he knows.
He’s next.
I walk toward him slowly. Not because I need to intimidate him, I’m past that.
This is routine now.
This is administration.
He flinches as I near. His legs try to move, but they don’t. His knees slide on the blood-slick floor, trembling.
I crouch in front of him, perfectly calm.
Take one last drag. Drop the cigarette beside him.
He doesn’t look at me.
So I force him to.
My hand grips his chin, rough, hard, and I yank his face upward. His eyes are glassy, dilated, the whites spiderwebbed with broken red.
I stare at him.
And I feel… nothing.
No hatred. No thrill. No closure.
Just inevitability.
“You’re the last,” I murmur. “And I saved the worst for last.”
I turn my head to Isabella.
She hasn’t looked away, she hasn’t blinked. She stands there like the final witness to a war the world will pretend never happened.
And I point to Lorenzo.
Then to her.
“Look at her,” I say, glancing down at him.
He doesn’t move.
“Look at her,” I repeat, voice flat, almost bored.
He turns his head with the stiffness of a puppet whose strings are wet.
And she looks back.
“Plead,” I tell him. “Beg her. Beg the girl you erased.”
He doesn’t.
So I fire a shot.
It rips past his calf, explodes into the floor next to him. He yelps, collapses further.
“Try again.”
Now he speaks.
“Please,” he gasps, crawling slightly toward her. “Isabella—I didn’t mean for this— I didn’t know you got abused. I was trying to protect the name, the business, you—I thought if I—”
“Louder.”
His voice breaks on the next word.
“Please,” he sobs, “please, I’m sorry—”
And that’s when I speak.
“Step closer.”
Isabella doesn’t move.
Her chest rises sharply. I see it, the breath she tries to hold, the way her fingers twitch slightly at her sides. Her knuckles go white. Her lips part, but no sound escapes. She doesn’t look away, but she doesn’t step forward either.
She’s scared, and I understand. Because she’s not looking at me right now. She’s looking at the thing she’s rarely seen before, not in books, not in case files, not in folders.
She’s looking at a man butcher a legacy.
Execute history.
And make the Devil look like a priest.
She swallows, the line of her throat trembling.
I don’t move. I don’t coax her. I don’t need to.
But I want her to hear it.
“This is the man who gave me fucking PTSD. This is the man who chained me in a bunker. Starved me. Denied me food, light, sleep. Made me piss in a corner. Fed me static and silence. This is the man who used me as leverage, and used you, Isabella , to get to me.”
Her face twists, not fully, but just enough.
Lorenzo snaps.
The way dying things always do, when they realize there is no hope left.
His head lifts, and his mouth twists into a snarl.
“You’re both fucking monsters,” he spits. “I burned your empire down, while you were rotting like the mutt you are.”
He turns on her now.
“And you?” he hisses, voice raw, desperate. “You’re nothing but a glorified whore. A red-haired brat with your father’s bastard’s name. You think standing behind him makes you royalty? You’re still the same little shit I buried away and gave a new name to.”
He breathes hard. Spits blood.
“You think you’re powerful now?” He laughs—a broken, wet sound. “You’re standing beside a corpse with a crown. When he dies, you’ll crawl back to whatever cage I left you in.”
The mask is off. The rot is showing. The cowardice is bloated and gasping.
He screams again, voice cracking:
“Your father would’ve burned you alive for what you let him turn you into. For crossing bloodlines, Bratva blood.” His gaze focused on my woman.
She steps forward, and the air shifts.
But with something heavier—truth . A truth so sharp it peels back the skin of every lie Lorenzo ever tried to wrap her in. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t shake. She simply speaks, and I watch every syllable land like a blade against his chest.
“You didn’t just erase me,” she says, her voice flat, scalpel-clean. “You gave me away.”
And in that moment, I don’t see the woman I built into fire. I see the girl who was forced to crawl through ash before she ever saw daylight. I see the child he buried. The bloodline he tried to carve out of history. And she’s still here.
He tries to speak. She cuts him down.
“You put me in a house with strangers, monsters. You didn’t save me. You fed me to them.”
I don’t move.
Because this isn’t my execution.
It’s hers.
“You knew,” she says, and the room stills like the walls are holding their breath.
“Because I remember. I remember your voice.”
She takes a step forward, and for a second, she isn’t Isabella.
She’s prophecy.
“When I was locked in that basement, without food, without light, I heard you. You came. Not to rescue me. But to measure how well they were breaking me.”
The silence grows teeth.
“You were there,” she says again, lower now. The kind of voice you use to speak to ghosts.
I feel it in my chest.
Not pity.
Rage.
Not for me.
But for what she’s finally tearing out of herself, and handing back to him.
She doesn’t give him space to plead.
She gives him the truth. The kind you don’t recover from.
“You didn’t protect me. You orchestrated me.”
My throat is dry, but I stay still. I could step in. I could end it. But I won’t. Because this? This is hers.
“You stole me from my family. From my name. From every part of me that should have had a choice.”
“I learned blood doesn’t matter.”
“Bloodlines don’t define who you are. Choices do.”
She steps closer, standing tall.
“I’m not Gambino blood.”
Her gaze cuts through him.
“And I never will be.”
She turns her head—just slightly—toward me.
“I’m Bratva blood.”
A breath.
A truth.
“ Karamazov blood .”
Isabella
And then I feel him behind me.
Aslanov.
His presence folds over me like shadow, but it isn’t cold. It’s steady. Unshakeable. It anchors me even now, with blood on his hands and a name on my lips that was never mine to begin with, but is now.
His mouth finds my ear. Close. Familiar. Low.
“Command me, Isabella.”
The same words. The same tone.
He spoke them to me once in a concrete bunker, before I had ever pulled a trigger. When he killed for me for the first time, he ordered me to look away back then. This time he won’t.
But before I can speak, before my breath becomes a verdict, there’s movement.
Lorenzo opens his mouth and croaks out the last coward’s question.
“Was it worth it?”
His voice scrapes through the silence like rusted metal.
I don’t answer. I don’t even blink.
But Aslanov does. His voice is right behind me. Calm. Final.
“Was what worth it?”
Lorenzo lifts his head with eyes wild and broken and still arrogant.
“Losing everything,” he snarls. “The Bratva. Your throne. Your name. All for her.”
The silence deepens.
“ Absolutely .”
Lorenzo protests, he tries to get up from the blood-soaked ground.
But the second he moves—
Three guns click into position.
Sawyer is the first to step forward, calm and cold, his weapon leveled at Lorenzo’s skull like it’s just another day at work.
Malik moves next, slow and sure, his rifle trained on Lorenzo’s chest, breath steady, finger resting lightly against the trigger.
And then Dimitri, the last survivor of the old code, lifts his gun with the precision of a man who knows this kill will mean something.
Three barrels. One body. No escape.
Lorenzo recoils like the word itself struck him.
And that’s when I know it’s over, all of it. I lift my chin. Aslanov waits, because I’m the one who decides how this ends.
And I do.
My voice cuts through the stillness like a blade honed on memory.
“Kill him.”
The moment I say it, I feel him behind me, closer than breath, heat blooming across my back like protection.
Then I feel his arms.
He wraps them around me slowly, carefully, with a reverence that doesn’t belong in a place like this. His chest brushes against my spine. His breath ghosts over my hair, his chin resting on top of my head.
His gun slides into my hands.
But he doesn’t let go.
He wraps his fingers over mine, both of us holding it now, just like in the woods, when he taught me how to shoot. When he braced my arms. Now I don’t need teaching.
We raise the gun together.
His hands wrapped over mine. His body is steady against my back. And his voice, low, warm, dark, whispers against my ear:
“Pull the trigger, solnyshko .”
And that’s when Lorenzo spits.
One last burst of venom through cracked lips.
“You’re still nothing, Isabella. A whore in a new crown.”
And I fire.
Dead center.