Chapter Vadim
Vadim
Hatred was far easier to express than to acknowledge loss.
My father was old. It was his time—the kind of end that had been available to him for years and had finally arrived in the form of a parcel in a foyer. I could work with that. I had been working with that.
My child never got the opportunity to breathe outside air.
The trauma of the impact. The seatbelt. Things that happened in a fraction of a second that couldn’t be undone by any amount of money or retaliation or men sent to Chechnya. His tiny lifeless body, cold and bruised by forceps—the only way to deliver him once her body began to fail.
I had been told it was a boy.
I had been right.
The men responsible had tried to walk away from it. Tau crawled out of the wreckage and shot their ankles out before they got far. Radovan recounted cutting Iskra from the car—his voice flat and careful in the way of someone editing what they had seen before they said it.
Reinforcements came.
Too little. Too late.
I lost my picture in the blast. I kept the one from her car.
She lay struggling to breathe while her body went into labour. Tau, Tikhon and Radovan stayed with her. Bogdan, Ruslan, Konstantin and Aleksandr joined me in extracting Tolam’s location from his captain.
We left the soldier alive.
We would be back for all of them.
The order I had given that caused this retaliation—eliminate every male in Tolam’s bloodline. There was no negotiation after he had tried to do the same to mine. After he went into hiding I thought that was the end of the matter.
Then he took my heir from me.
A hand came down on my shoulder.
I shook it off.
“Move out,” I said, the thought of spilling blood the only thing that felt clean right now.
I glanced back.
Konstantin. He looked older than he had a few days ago—the ageing that happens when something shifts and doesn’t shift back. He was the only enforcer on this job. Every man standing with me had worked through the ranks to be here.
It was time my brother took on more.
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“I’ll be the lookout,” Ruslan said, drawing a few chuckles from the men around him.
“Ah, my brother has gone soft in his new position,” Aleksandr said, as he and Bogdan dragged the cement cover off the opening.
“Dirt can be washed off,” Konstantin drawled, strapping his third holster to his leg.
The network of tunnels beneath the city was not common knowledge. They hadn’t been used since the Cold War—built for a different kind of threat, by men who understood that the most useful infrastructure was the kind no one knew existed.
Tolam had too much information and had proved too elusive for too long. Someone was feeding him intel. A rat in my midst—patient, careful, close enough to know things they shouldn’t.
I intended to find out who.
The torchlight carved a pathway down the steps ahead of us. I had memorised the route — every turn, every junction, every point where the ceiling dipped low enough to catch an unprepared man across the skull.
The smell hit first. Damp rot and sewage from the pipes running alongside us, the river held back by sealed walls but finding its way through regardless—thin rivulets tracking down the concrete in dark lines. I ignored it and moved.
No one spoke. We marched in silence, boots careful on the wet floor.
I was already building the list of what I intended to do to him. I moved faster, ducking my head where the cement dipped, the torch sweeping the tunnel ahead.
Then—the soft orange glow. Further down, where the dark thinned.
I raised my hand. The column stopped. The torch went off.
We inched forward and heard two voices. The tunnel widened as it split into three directions.
This was their base.
“I need him alive,” I murmured. The truck. The huge truck driven into Iskra’s car with the specific intention of destroying what was inside it. Had the vehicle not been bomb and bulletproof everyone in that car would have been dead. I needed to look him in the eye before the end.
We went in fast.
I knew Tolam the moment I saw him—by the anger and the hatred in his eyes.
The mirror of what I had been carrying for weeks.
He reached for his weapon and I moved before the thought completed, driving his hand upward as the gun discharged into the ceiling.
The crack of it was deafening in the enclosed space.
I put my fist into his kidneys.
He hissed.
I hit the same spot again before he could recover.
“You’ll be pissing blood, mudak,” I growled as he crumpled.
My men were already disarming the second man. Konstantin moved in with the zip ties.
I retrieved the torch and turned to the walls.
Maps. Pinned across the entire surface, marked at almost every key location. I scanned them carefully. Valentin’s location was absent—only three people knew it, for exactly this reason, and that had held.
Then I saw the photographs.
Iskra getting into a car. Tau and Radovan flanking her—close enough to make a direct shot almost impossible. Which explained the truck. A moving wall rather than a bullet.
Myself leaving the office.
My brother and father visible through the iron bars at the house.
Ruslan coming out of the club.
They had been watching everything. Everyone. For a long time.
“Take it all,” I said.
“You’re going to die,” Tolam hissed from the floor.
I looked down at him.
I smiled.
He had absolutely no idea what was coming.