Chapter 32
Nico
The Hunt
* * *
I answer.
"Sir, the safe house was hit. Twelve men.
Coordinated assault." The voice is professional, controlled, the delivery of a man trained to separate information from emotion.
"Two of our team are down. Mrs. Konstantinos negotiated to keep the remaining staff alive.
" A pause. "She went willingly. To protect us. "
The line stays open. I've stopped hearing.
For one full minute, I stand in the dark of a penthouse that I designed for solitude and achieved it, and the solitude is killing me.
One minute. Sixty seconds. In those seconds, I feel everything I've spent fifteen years learning not to feel.
Terror that tastes like copper at the back of my throat.
Rage with no target except the man in the mirror.
Guilt so total it fills my chest like concrete setting.
And love. Love so sharp it cuts through the concrete and the rage and the terror because love is the thing that survives when everything else is stripped away, and what's left of me without her is not a man but a weapon with no purpose.
I sent her away to protect her. Viktor found her anyway. The safe house. The contractors. The operational security. The mountain and the glass and the four armed strangers who called her ma'am. All of it insufficient. All of it my design.
I did this.
The phone rings again. Different number. Unknown.
"Nico Konstantinos." Viktor Reznikov's voice is pleasant. Conversational. The voice of a man who has just taken the most important thing in my world and wants me to know he's enjoying it. "I have something of yours."
"If you've hurt her—"
"She's fine. Cooperative, even. Negotiated terms before we left the safe house." A note of admiration that makes my blood curdle. "A meeting. You, me. I'll send coordinates. Tonight. Midnight. Come alone, she goes free. Bring anyone, she dies first."
"How do I know she's alive?"
Silence. Then her voice. Strained but steady. Furious and controlled and managing the crisis from inside it because she is Siobhan O'Brien and she was running threat assessments before Viktor Reznikov learned to hold a gun.
"I'm here. Don't do anything stupid."
The connection cuts. I press the phone against my forehead. Close my eyes.
She's alive. She's angry. She's negotiating from captivity. She told the contractors to stand down because saving their lives was more important than resistance and even as a hostage she's making the tactical calculations that the men with guns should be making.
I can't go alone. Viktor will execute me and then execute her because dead leverage is a message.
I can't bring an army. His men have orders, and she dies first. But Viktor doesn't account for one variable.
One possibility so extreme that no one in the Greek or Irish or Russian worlds would anticipate it.
His father.
5am. Encrypted line. I dial a number I've held for years and never used. The line of last resort. The connection to Dmitri Reznikov, the man who orchestrated my father's execution when I was seventeen years old. The man whose son now holds my wife.
The line connects on the third ring.
"Nico Konstantinos." The voice is old. Measured. Russian-accented English that sounds like patience weaponized. "Your father's son. I wondered when you'd call."
"Your son has my wife."
"I'm aware."
"He's out of control, Dmitri. His aggression has united every family on the East Coast. Greeks.
Irish. Romanos. If this war continues, it bleeds into your operations.
Your supply lines. Your political cover.
Everything you've spent forty years building loses value because your son can't stop burning. "
Silence. Long. The silence of a man who uses quiet the way other men use volume: as a weapon, as a negotiating position, as a reminder that the person who speaks first concedes ground.
"Let me kill your son. And this ends."
The silence extends. Then, "What you ask is considerable."
"Name your price."
I hear him breathing. Calculating. The mathematics of dynasty: what is a son worth against the cost of an unwinnable war? What is blood worth when the blood keeps spilling itself across other men's territory?
"One of your brothers will marry a woman of my choosing. A Russian woman. From a family that serves my interests."
My blood goes cold. I stand in my empty penthouse at 5am bargaining with my father's killer and the price he names is a brother's freedom.
"Which brother?"
"I haven't decided. But one of them. Non-negotiable."
I close my eyes. I'm about to do the thing Siobhan accused me of.
The exact thing. I'm about to decide someone's future without asking.
I'm about to take a brother and trade his choice for my wife's life the way her father traded her for an alliance, and I swore I was different and I am not different.
I am a man who loves someone more than he loves his own integrity, and the cost of that love is a debt that someone else will pay.
The irony is a blade and I feel every inch of it.
"And Viktor's reinforcements? His Bratva backup?"
"I'll consider withdrawing support." A pause that carries the weight of an empire's deliberation. "You'll have my answer when the time comes."
The line goes dead. No confirmation. No guarantee.
Dmitri might withdraw Viktor's soldiers and leave his son exposed in a factory with six men against an alliance that wants him dead.
Or he might not. The old man has played longer games than I can imagine, and this might be another move in a strategy I can't see.
I have to walk into that factory not knowing.
6am. Elysium basement. The map table. The blueprints.
The same configuration as the harbor raid except the woman I'm trying to save is not beside me checking a Beretta.
She's in a chair somewhere in a factory in Springfield and the distance between that chair and this table is the distance between everything I've done wrong and whatever I do next.
Lex. Cormac. Declan. Stavros. The men who geared up for the harbor raid minus Finn, who is recovering in Cambridge with nine fingers and a fury so concentrated Declan had to confiscate his car keys to keep him from driving here.
I lay it out. The factory. Viktor's demand. The Dmitri call, minus the specific price. I say Dmitri may withdraw reinforcements. I say "may."
I don't tell them about the marriage. Not yet. That debt belongs to a conversation I owe a brother face to face, not a briefing room at dawn.
Lex listens without expression. Cormac paces. Declan leans against the wall with his arms crossed and the Sig on his hip and murder in his posture.
"It's a trap," Lex says.
"I know."
"You could die," Cormac says.
"I know."
"So why are we doing it?"
I look at them. My brother. Her brothers. The men who have bled and lost and built something fragile between families that spent decades treating each other as convenient enemies. The alliance that started as strategy and became real somewhere between a wedding and a war.
"Because I love her. And I was too afraid to admit it until I sent her away.
I was too proud to treat her as a partner and too broken to trust what she offered.
I controlled her instead of trusting her and she was right about everything she said, and I can't undo that.
But I can get her back. And I'm not going to lose her because I was a coward. "
The room is quiet. Not the silence of men who have nothing to say. The silence of men recalibrating. Cormac stops pacing. He nods. Slow. The nod of a man who has watched a crime boss strip himself bare in a room full of soldiers and found the honesty more persuasive than any weapon.
Lex. My brother. The man who says nothing and sees everything and carries more inside his silence than most men carry in their loudest hour.
He meets my eyes with an expression I can't fully read: not anger, not accusation.
Understanding. The understanding of a man who has lived beside the cost of this world long enough to recognize when a new bill is being written.
He may not know the specifics. He knows something is coming.
"Then let's go get her back."
Weapons. Vehicles. Body armor. The choreography of men preparing for an operation that is either a rescue or a funeral.
I strap the Glock to my thigh, knowing I'll hand it to Lex before I walk through the factory door.
Viktor demanded unarmed. I'll comply. I'll walk into a room full of men who want to kill me with nothing but the words in my mouth and the hope that Dmitri Reznikov kept his word.
The plan is that I enter alone. Buy time.
The brothers and a combined Greek-Irish force position around the perimeter.
If Dmitri pulled Viktor's reinforcements, we breach on my signal.
If he didn't, if the Bratva backup is still in place, we're outgunned three to one and this becomes a night that ends differently.
The uncertainty is everything.
Engines start. Weapons check. The alliance moves south toward Springfield and a factory where a woman is tied to a chair working zip ties against metal and waiting for the man who exiled her to prove he's worth coming back to.
I don't know if I am. But I know I'll die trying.