Chapter 2
VIKTOR
I hear him before I see him.
Boots pounding wet pavement. Breath tearing out of him in ragged bursts. Panic has a sound all its own. High, thin, desperate. The sound of a man who already knows how this ends and runs anyway.
I turn the corner at an easy pace.
No need to rush.
Rain slicks the narrow alley in silver, washing the city in neon blur and cold shine.
Somewhere behind me, one of my men mutters into his earpiece, but I barely listen.
My attention stays fixed on the bastard stumbling ahead of me, clutching one side like he thinks pressure on the wound will save him.
It won’t.
He glances back. That’s his mistake.
For a second he slows, really looks at me, and I watch understanding hit him like a blade sliding under the ribs. Not because I’m armed. Not because of the blood already drying over my knuckles.
I’m his death. And he knows it.
Men expect age to soften other men. They look at the silver at my temples and imagine decline. Stiff joints. Diminished appetite. The easing of some animal edge.
They are always so disappointed.
I feel magnificent tonight. The rain has soaked through my shirt, turned the white cotton transparent over my chest, pasted the fabric to the hard lines of muscle that haven’t left me and never will.
My suit jacket is gone, somewhere behind me, abandoned when this stopped being a conversation and started being exercise.
My sleeves are rolled to my forearms. My pulse is smooth.
My breathing is even. Heat rides under my skin like a private current.
Forty-eight has never felt like old age.
It feels like refinement. Like strength stripped of waste. Like knowing exactly what I’m capable of and no longer needing to prove it to anyone. Like a body honed hard enough to endure, and fed well enough to look sinful doing it.
I was dangerous at thirty. At forty-eight, I am efficient.
The bastard crashes into a stack of dented trash bins, swears, pushes off, keeps going. Sloppy now. Limping harder. Blood loss and fear are making him stupid.
“Stop running,” I call after him. My voice carries low and calm through the alley.
He doesn’t listen.
They rarely do.
I sigh once and lengthen my stride. The wet pavement slides under my shoes, but my footing never falters. My body moves exactly the way it was trained to move, all smooth control and measured force.
I catch up fast enough to hear him whimper when he realizes I’m beside him. Then I drive him face-first into the brick wall.
The sound is ugly.
So is the grunt he makes when I wrench his arm high behind his back and pin him there with one hand between his shoulders.
He thrashes once. I press harder.
He goes still.
“That,” I murmur near his ear, “was embarrassing for you.”
His cheek is flattened against wet brick. Blood and rain run together down the wall.
“Please,” he gasps.
I smile, though he can’t see it.
There is something deeply pathetic about a man who grows teeth when he thinks he has leverage and turns soft the second he loses it.
I take my time before I speak. My palm is firm over the back of his neck now, fingers spread, holding him exactly where I want him. He shakes beneath my hand.
I could break him easily. That is not vanity, merely fact. I train every day. I eat clean. I sleep when I can, fuck when I want, fight when I must, and I have never allowed myself the softness other men mistake for comfort.
“Do you know,” I say mildly, “what the problem with men like you is?”
He makes a broken sound that might be a no.
“You mistake civility for weakness.” I tighten my grip just enough to make him cry out.
Behind me, Yuri says, “Pakhan.”
One word. A warning. A reminder that we’re in public-adjacent space and should wrap this up.
I ignore him.
The man’s pulse jumps frantically beneath my hand. I can feel it in the damp heat of his skin, in the terror vibrating through him. He smells like sweat, alley water, and bad decisions.
“I gave you a chance to explain,” I continue. “Then I gave you a chance to pay. Then I gave you a chance to walk away with your hands intact.” I lean closer. “You chose this.”
He sobs.
I’m not moved.
Rain runs down my face, over my mouth, down the column of my throat. My shirt clings harder to my skin, outlining every line of me. The alley light catches the gleam of my watch, the shape of my shoulders, the flex of my forearm where I hold him in place like it costs me nothing.
It doesn’t.
That is the truth of it.
This costs me nothing. The chase was the most interesting part of my evening so far, and even that barely qualified as effort.
My phone vibrates in the inside pocket of my discarded jacket, somewhere behind us. One of the men must hear it too, because Yuri glances back toward where we came from.
“Take him,” I say.
At once, they move in.
I release the bastard and step back as my men seize him, forcing him to his knees in the filthy water. He starts pleading again, louder this time, his voice cracking on every other word. I look down at him with cool disinterest.
Men imagine monsters as wild things. Feral. Uncontrolled. Foaming at the mouth.
They never expect the real ones to be composed.
I roll my shoulders once, working out the lingering tension, and tip my head back to let the rain hit my face.
My shirt is ruined. My trousers are splashed dark to the knee.
My hair, normally combed back with precision, has fallen loose enough that a damp strand brushes my forehead.
In another life, I might look disreputable.
In this one, I look like exactly what I am. A man too old to be called beautiful and too striking to be called anything else.
Yuri retrieves my jacket and holds it out. I take it, slide one arm in, then the other, and the fabric settles over me like a throne reclaimed.
“Bring the car around,” I tell him.
He nods and steps away.
I glance once more at the man kneeling in the rain, broken and shaking between my soldiers, then turn toward the mouth of the alley.
The city glows beyond it in smeared gold and red, headlights bleeding through the weather, rain slicking every surface into something treacherous and bright.
My pulse is steady again. My breathing has long since settled.
I’m already thinking ahead, already stripping this evening down to its next useful parts.
My son’s wedding. A change of shirt. A drink, perhaps.
Calls to return. A list of names I may yet decide to bury.
Then the night cracks open.
The sound is wrong at first, and for one disorienting second, I don’t understand it.
Then my legs go out from under me.
I hit the pavement with a heavy thud, one hand barely catching me before my shoulder smashes into the ground.
Pain tears hot and bright across my side, fast enough to steal the breath from my lungs.
Rainwater splashes up cold against my face.
The alley tilts sickeningly, brick and shadow and neon breaking apart into jagged pieces.
Gunshot.
The realization comes a beat late. Someone has taken a shot at me.
Voices erupt all at once.
“Pakhan!”
“Down!”
A second shot cracks through the alley, then a third, then the answering roar of my men returning fire. Boots pound over wet pavement. Someone shouts in Russian. Someone else is screaming. But all of it sounds strangely far away.
My head swims. Rain hits my face in cool, relentless drops. It trickles into my eyes, over my mouth, down the side of my neck. I taste blood, though I can’t tell if it’s mine.
I blink hard and try to push myself up.
The world sways.
Then I see her.
At first I think she’s a trick of the rain, some fever-bright hallucination dragged loose by pain and memory. A woman stands above me, just beyond the blur of water and alley light, looking down at me with the faintest smile curving her mouth.
Soft. Golden. Impossible.
My breath catches.
Her face is haloed by the rain, features blurred at the edges, but I know that face. I know the shape of it. The dark eyes. The lush mouth. The kind of beauty that doesn’t strike all at once like lightning, but ruins a man slowly, then all at once, once he has been foolish enough to look twice.
Seven months vanish in an instant.
Airplane cabin lights. Storm clouds beyond the windows.
Her body opening under my hands. Her sweet little cries swallowed against my throat while the world shook around us.
Her.
My angel.
I lost her before dawn. Woke to a cold seat and an empty row and the taste of her still on my tongue.
And now she’s here, in the rain, looking down at me like she has stepped out of some half-remembered dream I’ve fed myself too many times in the dark.
I try to speak, and her face wavers. The alley lurches again.
“Sir!”
The vision breaks apart as hands reach for me. Yuri is suddenly there, dropping to one knee in the water beside me, one hand already pressing my shoulder, the other reaching for the gun at his back as more shouting explodes toward the street.
“Where?” he barks.
I drag in a breath that burns. “Side.”
He curses viciously.
Another shot rings out, farther now. Footsteps thunder away, one set chasing, another circling back.
“She’s gone,” I hear myself say.
Yuri looks at me like I’ve started speaking in tongues. “Who?”
But I cannot answer, because the rain has washed the place where she stood clean. There is no one there now. No soft smile. No impossible face. Nothing but wet pavement gleaming beneath the alley light.
Was she there at all?
My jaw tightens. I know what I saw.
Hands slide beneath me, lifting carefully.
Pain slices again across my ribs, sharp enough to clear some of the fog from my skull.
I hiss through my teeth and look down as they move me, my palm instinctively pressing to my side.
When I pull it away, there’s blood there.
Dark in the rain. Not as much as there should be.
“Easy,” Yuri says.