Chapter 22 – Ilya
I was fast asleep when I heard it: the unmistakable sound of gunfire, loud and rapid. My eyes snapped open, and I sat up immediately, on high alert.
Bullets tore through the window, glass exploding inward. I rolled hard across the bed as rounds stitched the mattress where my head had been a second earlier.
Outside, something detonated—close enough to shake the walls and make the lights flicker. Screams cut through the night. My men. Intruders. Both.
I yanked the bedside drawer open, grabbed the pistol, racked the slide, and hit the floor. More rounds slammed into the wall above me.
I stayed low, crawled to the doorway, then pushed out into the hall in a low sprint, using the frame for cover as another burst chewed up the plaster behind me.
The hallway was chaotic. Staff ran in every direction—some armed, some not. I shouted for them to get back inside and lock the doors. A few listened. Most were already moving toward the sound of fighting downstairs.
Three figures in full tactical gear appeared at the far end of the corridor. Rifles up. Helmets. Night optics. One of them spoke, voice clear and flat over the noise.
“Find the girl.”
The accent wasn’t Russian.
I didn’t need more than that. The girl was Iris.
I opened fire first. The initial rounds forced them to scatter. One broke left and took the stairs hard, heading straight for the upper floor. The other two shot back at me, weaving between doorways as they advanced.
Bullets sparked off the walls. I dropped behind a heavy console table, came up, and put two shots into the closer man’s vest. He staggered with a grunt but kept coming.
I moved, closing the distance before he could reset. With lightning reflexes, I kicked the rifle out of his hands hard enough that it spun across the floor.
The second man swung his weapon toward me. I sidestepped from the attack, grabbed his wrist, and twisted hard. He screamed at the sickening crack of his broken arm.
I hauled him toward me before the pain would fully register. With one hand on his jaw and the other on the back of his head, I snapped his neck effortlessly.
He dropped to the ground. Dead.
The first man had recovered his rifle. I saw the muzzle swing toward me. My own gun had skidded away during the scramble. I rolled, scooped it off the floor, and fired twice.
He dodged the first bullet, but the second round took him clean through the head. He went down hard and didn’t move.
Downstairs, the fighting was still loud. My men were holding. Gunfire cracked in controlled bursts. Someone shouted “clear!” on the east wing. Another voice called for more magazines.
They were doing their jobs. I left them to it and took the stairs two at a time. My heart raced as I hoped to reach her room on time.
I was halfway down the upper hall when I heard her scream.
“Iris!”
I ran harder. The door to her room stood open. I hit it at full speed.
She was on the floor. The third man stood over her, rifle aimed at her chest.
I squeezed the trigger immediately, but my gun clicked empty. I tossed it aside and drove into him shoulder-first before he could fire.
We hit the floor in a tangle, his weapon skidding away. I climbed on top of him and struggled against his strength for a moment.
He was strong.
But I was stronger.
The first blow I hurled in his face dented the back of his skull into the marble floor. The second broke something in his nose. Blood sprayed across my knuckles and the floor. I kept hitting him. Mouth. Nose. Throat. Eyes. Anything that moved. The wet sound of it filled the room.
“Ilya!” Iris called out.
I was too busy dismantling the man’s face beyond recognition. He stopped moving soon after, but I kept hitting hard.
“Ilya—stop.” Her voice cut through finally.
I froze with my fist still raised when she held my hand mid-air.
“He’s dead.” She dropped beside me, her voice soft and tender. “You can stop now.”
The man under me wasn’t moving. His face was a mess of blood and broken bones. I looked at her, eyes scanning for any sign of injuries. “Are you hurt? Did he touch you?”
She shook her head, breathing hard, pale but steady. “I’m fine.”
I pushed off the body, wiped my hands on my pants, and hugged her tightly, still shaking from the fear of losing her. She threw her arms around me, her body trembling against mine.
The house was still full of noise—boots on stairs, short bursts of gunfire, men calling positions.
But the immediate threat in this room was finished.
I checked the body for any form of identification. There was none.
The gear was tactical, professional—the kind of equipment that didn’t come cheap and didn’t come from anyone who left a paper trail.
The rifle was suppressed. The clothing was nondescript. Even the boots were clean of anything that might track back to a specific region.
These weren’t Bratva operatives as I had thought. They were foreigners that someone had paid for silence and competence.
Who were they? Who had hired them? And most importantly, why were they after my wife?
I turned to her, and almost asked if she recognized the dead man. But at the last second, I decided now wasn’t the best time to have that conversation.
“Stay close,” I said, taking her hand and leading us out of the room.
The hall was clear now, and the shooting had stopped. Quietly, we moved downstairs, with me in front and her behind.
The kitchen was a mess of broken glass and spent casings. The couches in the living room had bullet holes in them; some were even flipped upside down.
One of the younger guards had taken a graze across the arm. Nothing serious. He was already being bandaged.
Iris left me to go attend to some of the wounded maids, helping to stitch their injuries.
Boris met me near the main hall, face set, radio still crackling with updates.
“The east wing is clear. South gardens clear. We’re checking the outer wall now. Two more bodies near the service entrance. Both foreign. No IDs.”
I let out a quiet exhale. “How many casualties did we record?”
“Thirteen.”
“Any deaths?”
“Fortunately, no.”
“Good.” I nodded. “Keep the perimeter locked until Ivan gets here. No one in or out.”
He nodded and moved off.
I walked the ground floor again, slower this time. Checking the points of entry. The gate systems had accepted the forged handshake without flagging it until it was already too late.
That meant someone had either bought the codes or reverse-engineered them from previous traffic. Either way, it pointed to resources and patience. Not a rushed job. Not a message meant to scare us. A real attempt.
Ivan arrived twenty minutes later with reinforcements. He moved through the wreckage of the lower floor with his usual cold precision. No wasted motion. No unnecessary questions until he had seen the evidence himself.
He crouched beside the body in the hallway outside the bedroom. Turned the man’s collar over. Examined the equipment strapped to his vest.
“This isn’t ours,” Ivan said, working through the gear methodically. “The encryption residue on this comm unit doesn’t match anything we use. Neither does the signal hardware at the gate.”
“Foreign. Yeah, I figured,” I said, arms across my chest.
“This was contract work.” He looked at me directly. “Someone paid serious money for a job like this.”
My thoughts exactly.
His eyes moved briefly toward the bedroom door, toward where Iris had almost been killed. “This attack wasn’t internal correction, Ilya. Whoever’s behind those ledgers has resources outside our organization entirely.”
“Someone powerful enough to hire people who don’t officially exist anywhere,” I said.
“Exactly.” He rose to his feet. “If you ask me, this is way above Yevgeni’s and Markov’s pay grade.”
“Maybe,” I answered. “But that doesn’t change the fact that they might know something we don’t.”
“Your men interrogated Yevgeni. Did he say anything useful?”
“No,” I replied. “He claims he doesn’t know anything about the missing funds. But my gut tells me he’s lying.”
“We need to tread carefully, brother,” he said. “There seem to be more players in this game than we know. Strong forces to be reckoned with.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Ivan wiped his hands on a cloth one of the guards handed him, his expression hardening.
“Ilya, someone outside the Bratva is hunting your wife,” he said. “And now they know exactly where to find her.”