Chapter 21
The Blood Tax
Two years had passed since Voronov's death.
Viktor had spent them building—not an empire, but something quieter.
A life. Now, at thirty, he stood in the same cavernous space where he had killed his first man at sixteen, and the blood on the concrete had finally faded to a stain that even the rain could not wash away.
Summer was dying when Viktor stood in the warehouse on the Moskva's industrial bank. The air was thick with the smell of diesel and the rot of the river.
The dacha was no longer safe.
Viktor knew it before they turned onto the forest road. The birch trees stood too still. No birds. No wind. Just the silver hush of autumn waiting for the first true frost, and something else—a subtraction, an absence of the small, living sounds that had always greeted him here.
He had brought only Konstantin. No guards. No guns. He had wanted to say goodbye to the place the way his grandmother would have wanted—with a broom, not a battalion.
He did not get what he wanted.
The door was ajar. Inside, the hearth was cold, but the air smelled of cigarette smoke and foreign cologne. On the kitchen table, a single black rose lay across his grandmother's Bible, its thorns pressing into the leather cover deep enough to scar the word Gospel.
"Ambush," Konstantin said quietly. He had drawn a knife. His body had shifted into a posture Viktor recognized from decades ago: the coiled readiness of a man who had spent his life expecting betrayal behind every door.
"Back door," Konstantin said. "Now."
They never reached it.
Three men came through the windows. Glass shattered like ice breaking on a river in March. Viktor had time to register one face—Vasiliev's nephew, the one with the burned ear—before the first blade flashed in the dim light.
What followed was not a fight. It was a requiem.
Viktor killed the first man with a poker from the hearth. The second man he threw through the remains of the window. But the third—the nephew—had been waiting behind the stove.
His hunting knife was already in motion when Viktor turned, a silver arc aimed at Viktor's throat. Konstantin moved—not fast, not gracefully, but with the terrible inevitability of a landslide. He stepped into the blade's path. His body absorbed the impact with a sound like a boot sinking into mud.
The knife buried itself to the hilt in Konstantin's side.
The nephew grinned. He twisted the handle.
Konstantin did not scream. He grabbed the nephew's hair with both hands and drove his forehead into the man's nose. Once. The cartilage crunched. Twice. The man staggered back, blinded, and fled into the forest.
Viktor caught Konstantin as he fell.
"Hold on," Viktor said, his hands pressing against the wound. "Hold on, you old bastard. You don't get to die in my grandmother's kitchen."
Konstantin laughed. It turned into a cough that sprayed red across Viktor's collar.
"Not... the kitchen," he wheezed. "Wanted...
to die in a kitchen. With... grandchildren.
Warm bread." His gaze found Viktor's, and in it Viktor saw something he had never seen in thirty years of service—not fear, but a terrible, belated wonder.
"I killed... so many. In kitchens. In bedrooms. Never thought... I'd want one for myself."
"You'll have it," Viktor said, lifting him. "If you die today, the frost wins. And I am done letting the frost win."
? ? ?
The private clinic existed in a liminal space between the legitimate world and the shadow one. Viktor sat in the corridor, his hands still stained with Konstantin's blood, until the surgeon emerged.
"The knife missed the liver by two centimeters," the surgeon said. "He will live. He will not fight again. There will be pain. Permanent, if he is lucky."
Viktor nodded.
? ? ?