Yakob
Three-oh-six in the morning, and the east wall goes quiet the way I knew it would.
I've watched this villa breathe for two nights. In. Out. Guards changing, dogs settling, cigarettes burning down to nothing in the dark. I know it’s rhythms better than the men who live inside it, and right now, in this narrow window between the three-a.m. check and the four-fifteen rotation, the villa is exhaling.
I move.
The vineyard rows swallow me the second I cross the tree line, low and fast, my boots finding the soft earth between the vines without sound.
I’m careful on every uneven patch of ground, every place a foot could catch and send me sprawling into noise I can't take back.
I don't make that mistake. I've never made that mistake.
The gap in the camera coverage opens up exactly where I marked it, a six-foot seam of blindness along the east wall where the vines grow too thick for the lens to see through. I slip into it and I'm inside the perimeter before the villa even knows I exist.
The first guard is smoking against the wall near the servants' passage, exactly on schedule, exactly where three nights of watching told me he'd be.
I close the distance in four silent steps and my hand is over his mouth before the cigarette hits the ground.
The knife does the rest, slicing through his neck deep enough to cut off his vocal cords.
He goes down without a sound beyond the soft exhale of a man who never gets to make another one.
I drag him into the shadow of the vines and keep moving.
The second guard is twenty feet away, at the base of the steps that lead into the building. He's younger, restless, the kind of bored that makes a man careless. He never sees me. He's dead before his knees understand they're not holding him up anymore.
I take the stairs two at a time, weapon low, breathing controlled, every sense pulled tight and forward.
This is the part of the job I've never needed anyone to explain to me.
The part where the plan stops being a plan and becomes a body doing what it's trained to do while the mind runs cold and clear above it, calculating angles, exits, threats.
Except my mind isn't cold tonight. It hasn't been cold since a photograph of a laughing woman crossed a desk in a study that smelled like whiskey and fear.
I push the thought down and keep moving.
A third man rounds the corner at the top of the steps, gun already rising, and I don't give him the chance to use it. The suppressed pistol coughs once and he folds against the wall, sliding down it in a slow smear of red that I step around without looking at.
The first cries go up. Startled and short.
Straniero.
Foreigner.
Someone found the first guard. I keep moving forward.
The hallway beyond is exactly as I imagined it. A dark stairwell leads down to the wine cellars and I press forward. As I reach the bottom, a man darts from the chair beyond the open door and runs straight into my knife, which I drive up and back through the soft skin above his Adam's apple.
I enter the room where the only light is coming from an oil lamp on a small, scarred table, and turn to face her.
She's pressed against the far wall, palms flat against it, and for one full second neither of us moves.
She's thinner than the photograph. Paler.
There's a bruise blooming along one cheekbone that wasn't in any picture I studied on the flight over, and her hair is matted with what might be dirt or might be dried blood.
None of that matters, because her eyes come up and find mine and they're green, the same impossible green as her mother's, and they're not empty.
They're not broken. They're furious and terrified and entirely, unmistakably alive.
The keys are off the table and in my hand before I’ve even had a chance to tell my body to move.
The door squeaks as it opens. Voices shout, all too close.
“Iris Orlova.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Come with me. Now.”
She doesn't ask who I am. She doesn't ask how I know her name. She's moving toward me before I finish the sentence, like she's been waiting her whole life for someone to say exactly those words.
I take her hand. It's small and cold and it grips mine like a drowning woman grips a rope.
“Stay behind me. Stay close. Don't stop moving unless I stop moving.”
She nods. She doesn't waste breath on questions.
We make it three steps into the hallway before the villa wakes up completely. Alarms sound, a constant wailing as all the lights switch on.
Another shout goes up somewhere above us, then another, and I know instantly that a lot of men are going to die tonight. And I don’t want to be one of them.
“Behind me,” I say again, and push her back against the wall with one arm while I put two rounds into the first man who comes around the corner.
It gets loud after that. Loud the way I planned for and hoped to avoid, loud the way every extraction threatens to go the second the clock runs out.
I clear the stairwell in a sequence of motion I don't have to think about, body first, mind following, each shot economical because ammunition is finite and the men keep coming.
I feel the bullet before I hear the shot that sends it.
A punch of heat and pressure low in my side, spinning me half a step off my line, and I absorb it the way I've absorbed worse in the past, breathing through it, keeping my feet, keeping the gun level.
Pain is data. Pain tells you where you're hurt, how badly and how much time you have before it starts to matter.
This one tells me I have time. At least enough to get the target out.
Iris makes a sound behind me, sharp and wordless, and her hand finds my arm, gripping hard enough to bruise.
“You've been shot.”
“I'm fine. Move.”
We come out into the courtyard and Salvatore Ramunno is standing there in a robe like a man who thinks his own house will protect him, flanked by two men with rifles raised and murder in their faces.
He's the one. I know him from the photographs, the surveillance, the intercepted calls, the man who decided the Orlov sister was worth more as a bargaining chip than as a living person with a family who loves her.
He looks at Iris the way a man looks at property he's about to lose, and I know now is the moment I have to act. Anything else will be too late.
I put both his men down before either of them thinks to pull the trigger.
Ramunno doesn't run. He's smart enough to know he won't make it, and stupid enough to think that standing his ground buys him something. It doesn't. Not with me.
I cross the courtyard and take his hand before he can lift it, and I don't ask him a single question, because I already have everything I need.
I press him back against the stone wall with a forearm across his throat, and I take the knife from my belt.
He struggles against me when I find the ring on his smallest finger, the heavy gold signet that marks him as a man who believed himself untouchable.
He screams once, high and short, before I clamp a hand over his mouth and finish it.
I pocket the finger with the ring still on it. A message, the kind men in this world understand better than words. This is what happens when you touch an Orlov. This is what's left of the man who tried.
I let him drop to the ground cradling his bloody hand. Then use my pistol to shoot him in the head.
Iris hasn't looked away. There are no more men standing between us and the gap in the wall, and the adrenaline that's been carrying me starts to ebb, taking my strength with it.
“We need to move,” I say, and my voice comes out thinner than it should.
“You're bleeding everywhere,” she says. “You can barely stand.”
“We have to get to the boat. Directly north of here.” I hand her my compass and she hold it to the moonlight and turns it until the needle lies directly over north.
I make it through the vineyard rows on will alone, one hand pressed to my side, the other still holding hers, because somewhere in the last four minutes I stopped being able to imagine letting go of it.
The world is starting to tilt at the edges, colors bleeding into each other the way they do when blood loss starts being a problem, and I focus on the only fixed point I have left, which is the small, fierce hand wrapped around mine, pulling me forward instead of waiting for me to lead.