Chapter 29 – Iris
The shipping terminal smelled like oil and cold metal.
From the upper observation corridor, I could see everything through the reinforced glass. A long table sat in the center of the floor. Stacked containers formed a rough perimeter.
Ilya’s men moved in quiet pairs, covering the exits without making it look like a trap.
Ivan stood beside me, arms crossed, eyes on the floor below.
Ilya walked in first. Calm. Controlled, his expression blank and unreadable. Adrian Vale entered a minute later, two men at his back, coat still buttoned, posture easy. He shook Ilya’s hand like they were old partners repairing a small misunderstanding.
I watched him step fully into the light and something in my chest locked.
I knew that face.
Not from the files. From years ago.
Instantly, buried memories came flooding my mind.
I was sixteen. The house felt too quiet that night, the kind of quiet that made the clock in the hallway sound louder than it should.
I’d gone to bed early after arguing with my father about nothing important—curfew, school, the usual. Sometime after midnight I woke to voices downstairs. Not shouting. Low. Careful. I crept to the landing in my socks and looked down through the banister.
My father stood near the front door in his old sweater, one hand on the frame.
Another man was on the porch. Tall. Dark coat.
I couldn’t see his face clearly from that angle, but I saw the way he stood—still, patient, like he had all the time in the world.
They spoke for less than a minute. Then the man left.
My father locked the door and went back to his study.
In the morning, the police were in the house. They said it was a suicide. Gunshot. Study door locked from the inside. They were kind in the way adults are kind when they want a child to stop asking questions.
I told them about the man on the porch. I described the coat, the stillness, the late hour. They wrote nothing down. One of them patted my shoulder and said grief played tricks with memory.
I stopped talking about it after that. The funeral came and went. The house was sold. Life moved forward without any answers.
Standing above the terminal now, staring at Adrian Vale’s face under the industrial lights, the memory slammed into me completely. Same stillness. Same patience. The man who had stood on our porch the night before they found my father dead.
My father had never killed himself. This man had murdered him in cold blood and made it look like suicide.
Ivan noticed first. “Iris. What is it?”
I didn’t answer. My hand moved before the rest of me caught up. I pulled the gun from the holster at his hip and took off.
“Iris, wait!” He ran after me.
I shoved the door open and took the metal stairs down two at a time. Boots rang on the steel. Every head on the floor turned. Weapons shifted. Ilya’s men tensed. Vale’s men reached inside their coats.
“Vale!” I raised the gun with both hands. The barrel shook, but I kept it on him. “Gimme one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now!”
“Iris, what’re you doing?” Ilya stepped closer, his voice soft but tense.
“He killed my father!” I gripped the gun tightly.
Shock flickered in Ilya’s eyes.
Adrian Vale looked at me like he’d been expecting the interruption. A thin smile touched his mouth.
“There she is,” he said. “Henry’s girl. All grown up and still chasing ghosts.”
“Iris, put the gun down,” Ilya said cautiously. “Let me handle this.”
Vale laughed mockingly. “You’re just like your father. Soft. Emotional.”
“Shut up!” Ilya barked at him, furious.
Vale didn’t listen. “He didn’t have what it took to kill me when he had the chance. Neither do you. Look at your hands. You couldn’t pull that trigger if your life depended on it.”
I opened my mouth to answer.
Ilya snatched the gun from my hand in a flash and cocked the damn thing, then aimed it at Vale.
The man laughed hard. “Oh, you Tarasovs are so predictable, aren’t you?” His expression turned serious in an instant. “Did you honestly think that I didn’t know this was a trap?”
Suddenly, gunfire cut the air apart.
It came from the upper catwalks and the gaps between containers—short, controlled bursts. Nexum had come prepared.
Vale’s men were already in position, waiting for the signal. Tarasov enforcers answered immediately. Muzzle flashes lit the terminal in stuttering white. Someone shouted for cover. A crate near the table splintered.
Ilya reached me just before the second wave of shots found us. His arm locked around my waist, and he dragged me behind a stack of reinforced cargo barriers, shoving me down as rounds sparked off the metal overhead.
His body stayed between me and the open floor.
“Stay low,” he said against my ear. Then he was up again, firing around the edge of the barrier.
The fight turned close and ugly fast. Men moved between containers in short rushes. Ivan’s voice carried from the upper level, directing the security response, cutting off the exits one by one.
I saw Boris take a man down at the far end of the terminal with two clean shots. Yuri laid down covering fire from behind an overturned forklift.
Vale tried to run.
He broke for the loading-dock extraction route the moment the crossfire gave him space. Ilya saw it too.
He left the barrier, cut across the open ground under Ivan’s covering fire, and put down the two men screening Vale’s retreat. One shot. Two.
Then he was on Vale, driving him into the side of a container hard enough that the metal boomed.
Vale came up swinging. They went to the ground. Ilya took a cut across the forearm from a knife that came too fast, then broke Vale’s wrist against the concrete and tore the blade away.
Vale tried to scramble for a side door. Ilya caught him by the collar, hauled him back, and put him on his knees.
I pushed up from the barrier and moved closer, then grabbed a discarded gun from the floor.
The shooting elsewhere in the terminal was already dying down—Tarasov men cleaning up the last of the mercenaries, Ivan calling positions over the radio.
Vale spat blood and looked past Ilya to me.
“Why?” I demanded, aiming the gun at his forehead as though I had what it took to end his life. “Why did you kill him?”
“Your father got too close,” he said, voice rough. “Started asking the wrong people the wrong questions about money that wasn’t supposed to have a paper trail. We gave him a chance to walk away. He didn’t take it. So we closed the file. Quiet. Clean. The way these things are done.”
I held the gun to his head, my heart racing as I tried so hard to let my anger take control.
“You can’t do it, can you?” He chuckled. “You’re weak. Just like your old man…”
Ilya didn’t let him finish.
One shot. Center mass. Vale’s head snapped back, and his body dropped onto the concrete, motionless.
The terminal went quiet except for the ringing in my ears and the low crackle of a radio someone had left open.
Shell casings littered the floor. Blood pooled under Vale’s body and ran toward the drain channel cut into the concrete.
I stared at him, feeling the gun grow heavy in my hand. Then the weight lifted entirely. It hit the floor with a dull metallic sound.
My knees followed.
Everything I’d held back since I was sixteen came rushing up at once—the porch, the locked study, the police who hadn’t listened, the years spent wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing. I couldn’t breathe around it. My hands shook so badly I had to press them against the concrete.
Ilya found me there.
He dropped to a crouch in front of me, hands on my shoulders, then pulled me in when I couldn’t lift my head.
There was nothing cold in it. No calculation. He held me like the only thing that mattered was keeping me from coming apart in front of his men.
I sobbed against his chest. Ugly, raw sounds I couldn’t stop. He didn’t tell me to be quiet. He just kept one hand on the back of my head and the other locked around my shoulders, body still angled to shield me from the rest of the room.
“I’ve got you,” he said near my ear. “I’m not letting anything touch you again.” A breath. “Because I love you.”
The words landed in the middle of the shaking and somehow made it worse and better at the same time.
“What?” I raised my head and met his gaze. “What did you say?”
He wiped my tears with his thumb, eyes locked on mine. “I said I love you.”
I hesitated, lips quivering from all the emotions coursing through me. “You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.”
He cupped my face in his palm, refusing to look away. “I mean every word, Iris. I love you.”
Tears trickled down my cheeks again. This time, they didn’t come from a place of sadness. They came from a place of joy.
I held on tighter.
“I love you too,” I got out, voice wrecked.
He kissed me—brief, firm, tasting of salt and smoke—then pressed his forehead to mine and stayed there while the last of the adrenaline drained out of both of us.
Around us, men moved bodies and secured weapons. Ivan’s boots climbed down the metal stairs. None of it reached us for a long minute.
When I finally pulled back, my eyes burned, and my throat felt scraped raw.
Ilya’s forearm was still bleeding freely where the knife had caught him. He didn’t seem to notice.
He helped me to my feet, kept an arm around my waist, and walked me toward the exit while his men finished clearing the terminal.
Outside, the night air was cold and clean. I breathed it in and let him hold me upright.
The past had finally been dragged into the light and shot dead on a concrete floor. What remained was the man beside me and the fact that I was still standing.
That was enough for now.