Maksim
The first shot takes the light over the table. Glass bursts down across the papers, and every man around the table moves for what he came here ready to do.
I move for Elena.
My hand catches the back of her chair and yanks it sideways hard enough that the legs scream across the floor.
She drops with it, one arm wrapped over her stomach, the pen still in her fist. She keeps the signed pages under her forearm and rolls with the fall before I put my body between her and the first line of fire.
“Down,” I say.
“I am down.” Her eyes are impossibly large as they stare into mine.
“Stay down,” I tell her and get up.
“Busy,” she snaps and starts shoving the signed stack toward Leonid.
A bullet tears through the table edge where her hand was a second before.
My gun is already up.
The man who fired from Karpov’s side catches two rounds in the chest and goes back into the wall. Dima drops the one by the freight elevator. Ilya fires toward the stairwell, and the man there falls before he gets his second foot planted.
Karpov doesn’t shoot first. He steps back, using other men to make space, hand inside his jacket, eyes already moving toward the exit.
Coward.
“Elena,” Leonid says behind the table, voice tight, laptop pulled against his chest. “Pages.”
She shoves them under the table gap. “Take them.”
He grabs the stack, ducks as another shot cracks through the water glass in front of him, and curses in Russian with feeling.
Moretti is shouting now, one hand raised, the other reaching for his man. He came to buy access and found out too late that access can shoot back. Mancini crawls behind his chair, phone in hand, trying to call someone who won’t reach in time.
I put a round through the phone. He screams and drops it.
“No calls,” I tell him.
Another man rushes from the dim edge with a knife because bullets have become difficult and stupid men always return to steel when their plans break.
I catch his wrist, drive it down into the table, and break the elbow with my forearm before I put him on the floor.
He reaches for my ankle. I shoot him once and step over him.
The fight sorts the loyalties fast. My men hold the exits. Moretti’s men are trying to pull their bosses back. Karpov’s men are trying to open a path through the side wall and make the whole thing look like a rescue gone bad.
Sergei stands where the light blew above him, one hand braced on the table. His face has gone pale, and his mouth stays half open.
The sentence man has no sentences left.
Elena is under the table with Leonid, her dress dark against the floor and her hair fallen around her face. Blood marks one sleeve, not hers unless someone is already dead. Her eyes meet mine once through the table legs.
She’s scared, and she’s still working.
“Leonid,” I bark.
“Scanning,” he snaps back.
A bullet bites into Leonid’s laptop case, and he jerks hard but keeps crawling. I fire through the gap under the table, and the man near the wall drops with his gun still in his hand.
Dima shouts from the elevator doors, “Two more outside.”
“Hold the lift.”
He plants himself in the opening and fires into the corridor.
I catch Elena by the back of her coat and drag her hard against my side. She comes with the chair half under her, one hand clamped over the signed pages.
“Folder,” she snaps.
Leonid shoves the stack into his laptop case and hooks the strap over his shoulder, bleeding from one knuckle as he crawls after her.
“Ilya. Service door.”
Ilya hears me from the stairwell because he’s still inside the room, covering the far exit with one of my men. He backs three steps, fires once into the stair, then shoulders the side service door open.
“Clear.”
“Take them.”
Elena looks at me once, furious and white-faced, and I shove her toward Ilya before she can turn stubborn on me.
Leonid goes after her with the case tight to his ribs.
Ilya pulls them through the service door into the side dispatch office off the back corridor, his man backing in with his gun up.
The door shuts almost all the way, leaving a narrow crack so they can still see into the main room. Ilya holds the threshold.
I turn and find Karpov. He has reached the wall, and he keeps Moretti in front of him with one hand fisted in the back of the man’s jacket. His gun is out. Sweat runs from his temple into his collar, and the careful face he wore for months is gone.
He calls over the gunfire, “This could’ve been clean.”
I put one round into the wall beside his head.
He flinches.
“Keep talking,” I say. “I know where your mouth is.”
“I served your house,” he says, rage thick in his throat, “before she ever sat at your table.”
“You opened my house,” I say and fire past Moretti’s shoulder into the man behind Karpov.
Karpov winces, shoves Moretti sideways, and ducks behind a stack of equipment cases near the wall.
Moretti stiffens. “What are you doing?”
“Surviving,” Karpov says.
“You’re done,” I say and shove the table hard with one hand.
The heavy center section shifts just enough to throw Moretti’s balance. Dima fires from the elevator side. I move on the same beat. Karpov shoots. Pain burns across my ribs, shallow, hot, useless. I hit him before he gets another shot.
We go into the wall together. He brings the gun up between us, and I slam his wrist against the steel support until the weapon drops. He gets a knee into my thigh. I headbutt him. His nose breaks. He reaches for the knife at his belt, and I catch his hand before he clears it.
“You were useful,” I say into his face.
He bares bloody teeth. “You got soft.”
I drive him back into the wall again. “No.”
Then I punch him in the throat.
He folds enough for me to take the knife from his own belt and shove it under his ribs. His eyes go wide from pain, but I keep my hand on the handle and push until he stops fighting the blade and starts fighting for breath.
“You mistook her for weakness,” I say. “That was your last mistake.”
He tries to speak. I don’t let him. I pull the blade free and put him down at my feet. Karpov hits the floor, suit ruined, one hand opening and closing on nothing. He looks smaller than he did standing off-center, pretending to understand power better than the man who owns it.
The service door hangs open by two inches, just enough for me to see into the side dispatch office. Elena is on the floor beside Leonid, dress pulled around her knees, hair loose around her face, one finger on the screen while Leonid works with the laptop balanced on an overturned crate.
A Moretti man crawls under the broken side of the table, low enough to slip past my first line of sight. His gun turns toward the service door. I see him before Ilya does. Elena lifts her head. She freezes with one hand over her stomach and the pen still locked in her fist.
I don’t have the angle I want, but I take the one I have. The shot hits him high in the shoulder before his finger settles, and he drops hard with his gun skidding across the floor.
Elena doesn’t move for one second. Then she reaches with her heel, kicks the gun away from the door, and pushes the next page toward Leonid.
“Scan it,” she says, and her voice shakes once before it steadies.
Leonid looks at her.
She taps the page with the pen. “Now.”
He gets moving.
Men shout, glass crunches underfoot, and another shot punches into the wall.
Papers slide through blood and water. Pens roll under chairs.
One of the capped pens from Sergei’s neat stack lies near my shoe, cracked in half.
The documents Elena signed are spreading through the system one page at a time while men die trying to stop the future from being filed.
Dima pushes two bodies away from the elevator doors and reloads. Ilya drags Moretti’s gunman off the stairs and kicks the weapon out of reach. Moretti is on his knees now, one hand pressed to his side, eyes fixed on Karpov’s body.
“You killed your own man,” he says.
“He stopped being mine when he opened my doors,” I say.
Sergei laughs then, a short, cracked sound. “You think this is victory?”
I open my mouth, but Elena reaches my side first. There is blood on one sleeve and a thin cut across her forearm where the light burst over the table. “No,” she says before I can. “This is the part before it.”
Leonid turns the screen toward her, then toward me. “Filed. Revocations accepted. Ownership confirmations pending. Succession block entered.”
Sergei’s face goes slack. He looks at Elena, and for once, he has nothing ready.
I put my arm around her waist, and she lets some of her weight come against me. Her body shakes against my side, but her chin stays up.
“You’re hurt,” she says, looking at my side.
“So are you.”
“I’m standing.” She gives me one stubborn look.
“With help.”
Her mouth twists, and for one second, in the middle of all this, she almost looks like herself. I keep her behind me and face the room.
“Drop every weapon.”
The remaining Moretti men look at their boss. The older man nods once, jaw tight, and guns hit the floor one by one.
Dima moves in fast and kicks them out of reach before he collects them. Ilya locks down the stair.
Sergei is the last man upright without blood on him. He looks at the documents still sitting in front of Elena’s empty chair. His pen lies across the first line where he wanted her name.
“Elena,” he says.
She steps out from behind me before I can catch her fully. I close my hand around her wrist, and she looks down at my grip before she looks up at me.
“I won’t go far.”
Every instinct in me says to pull her back.
I let go.
She walks to the table, slowly and carefully, then picks up his pen. Her fingers close around the barrel, and Sergei’s face changes before the plastic cracks. She snaps it in half and drops both pieces onto his documents.