Chapter Forty
Arkady
The guard by the service entrance dies without making a sound.
I come up behind him while he’s still fumbling with his cigarette, one arm around his throat, the other locking the choke in place before I twist and crack. He drops in eight seconds. The body slumps against the wall, and I lower it to the ground carefully. Not out of mercy. Out of silence.
His radio crackles. Someone on the other end asking a question in Russian. Vlad, ty tam?
I unclip the radio, press the button, and grunt once. Noncommittal. The kind of sound a bored man makes when he doesn’t want to talk.
Static. Then nothing.
Move.
The service entrance is unlocked. The same lock Gavriil never upgraded because he trusts stone walls more than he trusts technology.
A flaw. His generation of Bratva men believed in physical barriers.
My generation knows that every wall has a door, and every door has a man standing behind it who can be put down.
I slip inside. The corridor smells like floor wax and old cigar smoke. And rot. The slow decay of a house where terrible things happen behind closed doors.
My earpiece clicks twice. Stefan.
I tap the mic once. In position.
Two more clicks. Acknowledged.
The layout unfolds in my head, every room, every stairwell, every blind corner memorized from the meetings we’ve held. Left past the pantry takes me to the kitchen. Right leads to the east corridor and then into the main living area. Upstairs, the bedrooms. Gavriil’s office is on the ground floor.
Where are you, zaychik?
My grip shifts on the Makarov. The metal is warm from my body heat, from the grip that hasn’t loosened since I dropped over the wall. I breathe. Count. Force the images back and stop myself from running through this house screaming her name and tearing the building apart.
Not yet. Not yet.
Soon.
I clear the service corridor in under a minute. Two doors, both closed. I press my ear to each one. Empty. Both empty. The kitchen is dark, nobody cooking for the old man tonight, it seems.
At the junction where the east corridor meets the main hallway, I stop. Flatten my back against the plaster. The main hall stretches out in both directions, lined with oil paintings hung above carpet thick enough to muffle everything except a gunshot.
Two guards. Positioned at the far end, flanking the double doors to Gavriil’s office.
Young. Chechen, by the look of them, the soldiers Oleg Kadyrov supplied.
They stand with their weapons across their chests, loose-limbed and careless, the stance of men who’ve been holding position too long and let boredom eat through their training.
I tap the mic three times. Two tangos. Main hall. Need distraction.
Stefan’s voice threads into my ear. “Thirty seconds. North window.”
I count.
At twenty-two, the alarm trips. Not the full house system—Mikhail killed that twenty minutes ago—but a single motion sensor on the north perimeter that Stefan’s been holding in reserve.
The high-pitched whine cuts through the house, and both guards react exactly as I predicted.
Heads turning. Weapons coming up. One of them reaching for his radio.
I’m already moving.
The first guard sees me three steps too late. I close the distance before he can bring the rifle around, driving my left hand into his throat while my right strips the weapon from his grip. He goes down gasping, choking on a crushed windpipe, and I’m past him before he hits the carpet.
The second guard is faster. He gets the barrel halfway up before I fire—a single round from the Makarov, suppressed, the sound no louder than a hardback book dropped on a table.
The bullet catches him in the shoulder and spins him into the wall.
He’s reaching for his sidearm when I slam the butt of his own rifle into his temple.
He crumples.
I stand over them, breathing through my mouth, the cordite smell mixing with that goddamn floor wax. Two down. The clock in my head has been running since I came over the wall—seven minutes, twelve seconds—and every second is another second Mirabel spends in this house.
My earpiece opens. Yanis’s voice, controlled but breathing hard. “We’re at the wall. Full team. Mikhail has the cameras looped—we’re ghosts. What’s your position?”
“Main hallway. Two guards neutralized. I’m outside the office.”
“Hold.” The authority in his voice leaves no room for argument, and it reminds me that my brother was commanding field units while I was still learning which end of a Kalashnikov the bullets came from. “We’re breaching now. Northeast entrance. Give us ninety seconds.”
“I don’t have ninety seconds.”
“Arkady.” My name, spoken with that specific Yanis tone—part warning, part love. “Ninety seconds. We clear the ground floor together. No solo heroics. Please, bratok.”
Blyad.
I want to argue. Want to kick through those double doors and put every round in my magazine into my father’s chest and find Mirabel and carry her out of this fucking mausoleum and never look back.
But Yanis is right. He’s always right about this part—the discipline, the restraint, the difference between a rescue and a massacre.
“Ninety seconds,” I say.
“Copy.”
I use the time to reload. Check the corridor behind me—clear. Check the guards—still down, still breathing. Barely.
At seventy seconds, I hear them. Not the sounds themselves—Stefan and the team are too good for that—but a shift in the house’s atmosphere, silence changing as multiple bodies move through confined space with purpose. An occupied silence, replacing the hollow kind.
At eighty-five seconds, Stefan rounds the corner from the east wing, rifle up, Aleksei on his six. His face carries the expression I’ve seen a hundred times before on ops—blank, focused as he moves with an ease that makes you forget he’s built like a shipping container.
Behind them, Leo. Andrei. Then two more of my men whose names I barely register because the clock in my head is still running and every tick is a tick that Mirabel—
Stop. Do the job, mudak. Get her back.
Yanis appears from the opposite corridor. He’s in black, sidearm drawn, and the look he gives me says everything words would waste time on. I’m here. Let’s end this.
“Status?” Stefan murmurs.
“Office is the target. Gavriil’s inside—confirmed by thermal before Mikhail jammed signals.” I gesture toward the double doors. “At least three more guards between us and him. Possibly more in the rooms off the south wing.”
“Mirabel?”
I hold myself steady at the mention of her name. “Thermal showed two signatures in the south sitting room. One seated, one standing. Could be her and a guard.”
Stefan nods once. “Andrei, Aleksei… you take the south wing. Find her. Get her out. Everyone else, we hit the office.”
“Da,” the twins respond, almost in unison. They peel off without another word.
I watch them go, and something in my chest releases a fraction.
Enough to breathe. The twins will find her.
They’ll be careful. They know what she means to me—not because I’ve told them, but because men who’ve spent their careers observing people for a living don’t need to be told when their boss is in love.
Come on, zaychik. Hold on a little longer.
“Move,” I say.
We stack up on the office doors. Stefan left, Yanis right, me center. Leo and the others fanning out to cover the corridor behind us.
I meet Yanis’s eyes. He gives me the slightest nod.
I kick the doors open.
The office explodes into motion.
Three of my father’s mercenaries inside—two by the windows, one beside the desk. All armed. All turning toward the sound, hands going to weapons.
Stefan is through the door before it finishes swinging, rifle up, two rounds into the first guard’s chest. The man folds. Clean. Fast. Stefan doesn’t look at the body. He’s already transitioning to the second target, barrel tracking across the room in a smooth arc.
Yanis takes the guard by the desk—two shots, close range, the suppressed cough of the pistol swallowed by the room’s heavy curtains. The guard stumbles back into a bookshelf, pulling leather-bound volumes down with him as he slides to the floor.
The third guard raises his weapon—a Kalashnikov, the barrel swinging toward Stefan’s exposed flank. I fire twice. The first round takes him in the chest. The second follows before the recoil finishes, and he’s history.
Three seconds. Three guards. Three bodies on my father’s Persian rug.
And there, behind the mahogany desk that’s been the seat of his empire for thirty years, sits Gavriil Laurov.
He hasn’t moved.
My father sits the same way he’s always sat—spine straight, hands on the armrests, chin elevated at an angle that communicates superiority regardless of circumstance.
He’s wearing a suit, dove-gray, the tie loosened at his collar.
A crystal tumbler sits beside his right hand, half-full of something amber.
As if he’s been waiting for us. As if he heard the gunfire and the shouting and decided that standing was beneath him.
“Well,” he says. “My sons. Together. How touching.”
I level the Makarov at his forehead. The distance is eight feet. At eight feet, I couldn’t miss if I tried. The front sight sits steady on the bridge of his nose, the same nose I inherited, the same bone structure that looks back at me from mirrors and makes me sick.
“Where is she?” My voice sounds foreign even to me. Thin. Stretched taut.
Gavriil’s eyes move between us—me, Yanis, Stefan, the bodies on his floor. Calculating. Always calculating. Even now, even with a gun pointed at his skull, the old bastard is running probabilities.
“She’s safe,” he says. “For the moment.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“She’s in the sitting room. Unharmed.” A pause calibrated to maximum effect. “Mostly.”
Mostly.