22. Damir
DAMIR
Dmitri’s second man reaches inside his coat, and Nikolai moves before the weapon fully appears.
The gun hits the floor with a hard crack a second later, kicked loose from a broken grip while the man screams through clenched teeth and drops to one knee beside a collapsed rack of coats.
Glass scatters under someone’s shoes. One of the saleswomen cries out from behind the counter.
Marina grabs Sofia and pulls her back behind the fallen rack, and I register that she’s there, behind cover, before Dmitri makes the mistake of stepping toward me again.
He’s still limping, though pride keeps him upright. Pain should teach him something, even if intelligence never will.
“You brought her here like a prize,” Dmitri spits, his face pale and damp with sweat. “You think putting a ring on her makes this anything but pathetic?”
I move toward him. He takes one step back before he can stop himself.
Everyone sees it.
His mouth twists with rage because he knows everyone sees it too.
“Careful,” I say.
He laughs too loudly, the sound strained around pain and fear. “Careful? You are the one who should be careful. Men are talking, Volodin. They are laughing at you. The great Damir Volodin stealing a girl from the altar because his cock got the better of him.”
The room goes dangerously quiet. Even Nikolai stills for half a second.
Dmitri sees it and mistakes restraint for weakness, because men like him always confuse the two until the moment they are choking on the difference.
I step closer. One of his remaining guards shifts toward me, and Lev catches him by the back of the neck before he can get more than a foot forward.
The guard swings blindly, elbow catching Lev in the ribs, but Lev absorbs it with a grunt and drives the man face-first into a mirrored display case.
The mirror cracks in a silver spiderweb behind his head.
Dmitri flinches.
“You should have stayed in your clinic,” I tell him.
“You should have stayed away from what was mine.”
“Sofia was never yours.”
His face hardens in a way that tells me the truth still humiliates him more than the bullet in his leg.
“She would have been,” he says. “She would have learned.”
I hit him. My fist catches him across the jaw, and Dmitri stumbles sideways into a table full of folded silk scarves, scattering them across the polished floor as he grabs for balance.
He tries to recover quickly, tries to make it look like the limp didn’t almost take him down, but his injured leg buckles and the pain tears a sound from him that he turns into a curse too late.
“Don’t talk about my wife,” I say.
He wipes blood from the corner of his mouth and smiles as though he has achieved something. “Your wife. Listen to yourself. Does she know what happened to the last one?”
I see Nikolai move from the corner of my eye. Toward the left side of the gallery, where the second Sokolov man is trying to reach the fallen gun with two broken fingers and more determination than sense.
“Nikolai,” I say without looking away from Dmitri.
A shot cracks through the room before Nikolai reaches him.
The bullet hits the ceiling, shattering one of the recessed lights overhead.
Sparks rain down over the display area, and the staff scream again as my men force them lower behind the counter.
Nikolai’s return shot is quieter in my mind somehow, cleaner, because it does what it’s supposed to do.
The Sokolov man jerks back against the floor, clutching his shoulder, the gun sliding away beneath a clothing rack.
Now the room is truly chaos.
My men spread across the gallery, securing the front doors and forcing Dmitri’s people toward the center where there’s nowhere useful to run.
Dmitri’s last guard pulls a blade from his sleeve and slashes at Lev, catching fabric and skin along his forearm, but Lev doesn’t give him space to cut twice.
He steps inside the reach of the knife, hooks the man’s wrist, and breaks his arm against the edge of a marble display block with a sound that makes one of the saleswomen sob into her hands.
Dmitri turns away from the violence. Coward.
I see the decision form in his body before he moves: the glance toward the staff corridor, the shift of weight off the bad leg, the frantic calculation of a man who came to be seen and now wants very badly to disappear.
I go after him. He shoves a mannequin into my path as he lurches toward the side hallway, and it falls hard against a glass table, breaking into glittering pieces underfoot.
I step through the mess without slowing, my eyes on the back of his head as he throws open the staff door and disappears into the corridor beyond.
Behind me, Nikolai shouts orders, but I don’t need to hear them as I take off after him.
The staff corridor is narrow, painted white, lined with supply cabinets and delivery schedules pinned neatly to a corkboard.
Dmitri is halfway down it, moving faster than he should be able to, one hand braced against the wall as his wounded leg drags behind him.
He glances back and sees me. There is only fear there.
“Damir,” he says, as if my name is a negotiation.
I raise my gun.
He grabs the nearest person, a young male employee in a black uniform who has chosen the worst possible place to freeze, and yanks him backward between us.
“Don’t,” Dmitri snaps.
The boy goes white.
I stop.
Dmitri’s arm locks across his throat, and his other hand fumbles under his coat, searching for a weapon that’s either gone or stuck. His breathing is ragged. Sweat slides down his temple. He’s pressing too much weight on the injured leg, and every second costs him.
“You are making things worse for yourself,” I say.
He bares his teeth. “You stole my bride.”
“I improved her prospects.”
“You think this is funny?”
“No.”
My finger rests lightly along the trigger guard.
Dmitri shifts backward, dragging the boy with him, and I move with him step for step, keeping the angle clean enough that if he exposes even two inches of skull away from the hostage, I will take them.
“You can’t kill me here,” Dmitri says.
“You keep saying things that are untrue.”
“You kill me, and my family comes for me.”
“I don’t give a fuck. They will bow to the Pakhan, as shall you.”
His face twists. He jerks the boy backward another step, trying to reach the rear door at the end of the corridor. The boy chokes, eyes wide and wet, fingers clawing at Dmitri’s sleeve. Dmitri adjusts his grip to keep control, and in that half second, his wounded leg gives.
Only slightly. Enough.
I shoot him in the shoulder. The bullet spins him sideways, and the boy drops to the floor, coughing hard.
Dmitri hits the wall, screams, and fires blindly from the small pistol he finally manages to pull free.
The shot goes wide, punching through a cabinet full of garment bags.
He fires again, and this one comes close enough that I feel the air move past my ear.
I close the distance before he can aim a third time.
My hand closes around his wrist and slams it against the wall.
The pistol drops. He tries to hit me with his left hand, but there is no strength in the swing, only panic and humiliation.
I catch him by the throat and drive him back against the door at the end of the corridor.
The impact rattles the frame.
Dmitri’s eyes bulge. He claws at my wrist.
“You severely overestimated yourself, boy,” I say.
His face reddens. He tries to speak.
I loosen my grip just enough.
“You will not come anywhere near my wife,” I say. “If she hears your voice again, I will take your tongue first and decide what to do with the rest of you after.”
He swallows against my hand. Hatred burns through the fear. “You think she wants you?” he rasps.
I slam him into the door again. He cries out.
Then something strikes the corridor door from the outside, and I turn my head a fraction.
Dmitri uses the only chance he has. He drives his thumb into the cut on my arm, right where the stitches sit beneath my sleeve. Pain flashes hot and immediate. My grip loosens for less than a second, but less than a second is all a coward needs when he has prepared an exit.
The rear door bursts open from outside. Two men I don’t recognize grab Dmitri under the arms and yank him through.
I fire once, catching one in the side, but they keep moving. A black car waits in the alley, engine running, back door open. Dmitri is shoved inside so fast his bad leg catches on the frame and he screams loud enough for the sound to bounce off the brick walls.
I fire at the tires. One round hits metal. Another hits glass.
The car jerks forward before I can get a clean angle, and one of the men fires back from the passenger window. The shot punches into the doorframe beside my shoulder, spraying splinters into my coat.
I step out into the alley and fire again.
Too late. The car swerves around a delivery van and disappears onto the street.
For a few seconds, I stand in the alley with my gun raised, listening to the engine fade and feeling blood warm against my sleeve where Dmitri’s thumb tore something open.
Then I turn back. The boy is still on the floor in the corridor, coughing but alive. One of my guards reaches him as I enter, and I gesture for him to be moved away from the door.
“Find the car,” I say.
The guard nods and runs.
By the time I return to the gallery, the room is under control.
Dmitri’s men are down. One dead, two wounded, one restrained with his broken arm taped behind his back because Lev has a practical streak I appreciate.
The staff are shaken but alive. Katya sits behind the counter with Marina beside her, both women pale.
My eyes move past her. Behind the fallen rack. Near the fitting rooms. Toward the side corridor.
No Sofia.
At first, my mind rejects the information. “She’s not here,” I say. “Where is she?”
No one answers fast enough.
Marina stands. “She was behind me.”
I look at her.
Her voice shakes. “I had her arm. When the gun went off, I pulled her behind the rack. Then Dmitri ran and everyone moved. I thought she was still there.”
“You thought.”
Her face goes white.
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to.
The men in the room become still in a way that tells me they know exactly how close we all are to something irreversible.
I turn to Nikolai. “Seal the building.”
“Already sealing it.”
“Mikhail?”
“Two minutes out,” Nikolai says.
“Make it one.”
I walk toward the side corridor, stepping over glass, blood, and torn fabric.
My wounded arm throbs beneath my sleeve, but pain is irrelevant now.
The corridor is empty. The service door at the end is closed.
There’s a scuff on the floor near the handle, black against polished stone, as if someone’s heel dragged hard.
My mouth goes dry.
I open the door. A narrow passage stretches beyond it, lit by harsh white lights. Storage rooms on the left. Service elevator at the far end. Rear exit beyond that. For one hopeful second, I thought she was hiding there. Sofia is nothing if not resourceful, but no, she isn’t here either.
Mikhail turns to the manager, who is trembling beside the counter. “CCTV.”
She points upstairs with one shaking hand. “Security room. Second floor. Back staircase.”
We move. The security room is small, overheated, and unorganized. A frightened guard sits in front of a bank of monitors, and Mikhail removes him from the chair by the shoulder before the man finishes saying he does not know what happened.
Nikolai takes the controls.
“Gallery feeds first,” I say.
He pulls them up. We watch the fight from above. Dmitri entering. His men drawing. Nikolai breaking one man’s hand. Me following Dmitri into the staff corridor. Marina dragging Sofia behind the fallen rack.
Then the camera angle loses her behind the coats.
“Next,” I say.
Nikolai switches to the side corridor. The feed shows the empty hallway for three seconds. Then Sofia hurriedly enters, one hand against the wall, hair loose, head turning back toward the gallery as if she’s checking whether anyone has followed. She reaches the service door.
Before she can open it, a man comes out from the storage room beside her. He clamps a hand over her mouth and grabs her around the waist.
A second man appears immediately, catching her when she kicks backward. She fights hard enough that one of them jerks in pain, and for a second she nearly twists free. Then the first man locks an arm around her throat and drags her into the storage room.
My hand closes around the back of the chair. The metal bends under my grip.
“Storage room feed,” I say.
“There isn’t one,” the security guard whispers.
Mikhail looks at him, and the man shuts up.
Nikolai switches to the service passage beyond the storage room.
The door opens. The two men drag Sofia out between them.
Her feet hit the floor twice. She kicks, claws at the wall, tries to hook her fingers around a metal shelf, but they tear her hand free and pull her toward the service elevator. And that’s where we lose her trail.
“Find my wife,” I say. “Tear the city down if you have to.”