39. Vadim
VADIM
For one second, nobody moves.
Petrov is on the ground between us, bleeding onto the concrete, and Iosef stands at the mouth of the lane with a gun in his hand and the same mild expression he wears when discussing ledgers, bank transfers and compound interest.
Sloane is behind me. I know exactly where she is because every part of me is aware of her now, even with a dead enemy at my feet and another one looking at me with calm disappointment.
Anton and Marek are too far behind the cars to get a good angle without risking Sloane. Iosef knows that.
For eleven years, I mistook calculation for loyalty.
“Iosef,” I say.
He sighs, as though I’ve inconvenienced him by surviving longer than expected. “I did hope Petrov would do it. It would have been tidier.”
Sloane’s breath catches behind me.
My hand stays low at my side, close enough to my second gun that I could reach for it, not close enough to survive if Iosef decides to pull the trigger first.
“You were the leak.”
Iosef’s mouth curves slightly. “One of them.”
I keep my eyes on Iosef. “The tracker in Sloane’s bag.”
“Yes.”
“The payment changes.”
“Yes.”
“The reports about Petrov.”
“Some of them.” A muscle moves in my jaw.
“You told me she knew him before she ever stepped onto my aircraft.”
“I told you what you needed to hear.”
Behind me, Sloane goes very still. I don’t look at her.
Iosef tilts his head. “You were never going to see clearly once she entered the equation. I had to make the picture simple enough for even a man in love to understand.”
I hear Sloane inhale.
Iosef hears it too. His gaze flicks to her and then returns to me. “How sweet. She didn’t know?”
“Keep your eyes on me.”
He smiles faintly. “They always are.”
I think of Camille running through the garden with blood on the knife, eyes wild, mouth trembling around an apology Sloane never understood.
“You recruited Camille.”
“I recruited Camille long before she understood what she was agreeing to.”
Sloane makes a small sound behind me, more grief than surprise.
Iosef shrugs. “She was useful. Lonely people usually are. She had debts, a brother in Marseille with a gambling problem, a mother in a care facility she couldn’t afford, and too much access to aircraft schedules.
I didn’t ask her to die for the cause at first. I asked for small things.
A door left open. A crew list forwarded.
A bag moved from one compartment to another. ”
My fingers curl once. “You had her hide the tracker.”
“She hid the tracker in the plane first,” he says. “Not in Sloane’s bag.”
That answer isn’t what I expect.
He sees it and looks pleased. “The tracker was first placed on the aircraft before Bucharest, inside a service panel that nobody on the crew would check. It was enough to give Petrov the landing window. After the shooting, I had Camille move the blame where it would be most useful.”
Sloane’s hand touches my back. Only for a second. Then it falls away.
Iosef continues, almost conversational. “She opened the seam in Sloane’s bag and placed the device there after you returned it to her. It wasn’t elegant, but everyone was panicking, Hale was dead, you were bleeding, and your men were looking outward for the threat instead of inward.”
“What about Hale?” I ask.
Iosef’s expression barely changes. “Unfortunately, Hale was just collateral.”
The attack on Sloane in the aircraft had not been part of Iosef’s plan. Hale was a vile man who found his own opportunity, and then Petrov’s men killed him because the tarmac didn’t care who deserved what once bullets started moving.
Collateral.
I want to break Iosef’s face for that word alone. But I wait. Because he’s talking, and men who talk usually want something more than death.
“Why?” I ask.
Iosef’s smile fades a little. “Because you made us small. For years I kept the numbers balanced while you played king. I cleaned your money, buried your losses, grew assets no one else even knew existed, and every man around you still looked through me as though I was a clerk who happened to sit close to power.”
“You were trusted.”
“I was used.”
“You were paid.”
“Money is not the same as authority.”
Unlike Petrov, this isn’t some twisted form of revenge.
“I offered Petrov information,” Iosef says. “Not everything. Never enough to make myself disposable. Just enough to weaken you and make him dependent. Petrov wanted revenge. I wanted the structure that would remain after both of you tore each other apart.”
“You thought you could inherit my house?”
“No.” He smiles again. “I thought I could build a better one from the pieces.”
Sloane’s voice comes from behind me, shaken but clear. “And Mila?”
Iosef’s eyes move to her. I hate that. I step slightly, blocking more of her from him.
“She was never meant to vanish,” he says. “That became inconvenient.”
“You told them I took her,” Sloane says.
“I encouraged the conclusion. You made it believable by running,” he says.
“And the attack at my house?” I ask.
“That wasn’t me, but my hunch is your sister did it,” he says. “Sneaky little thing, it was the perfect timing to get away. If Camille hadn’t gone psycho and tried to attack me after getting spooked, I might have stopped that.”
“You’re sick, and twisted,” Sloane says.
Iosef cocks his head. “Maybe, but you know what I’ve realized? I don’t need you, just as I don’t need Petrov. I’ll become a king by my own right.” He cocks his gun at me. “And I’ll do it by burying you and your precious little toy.”
Sloane moves behind me. I don’t let her pass. “Stay behind me,” I say.
“Vadim—”
“Stay behind me.”
Iosef sighs. “There it is again.”
His gun lifts a fraction. I move before he finishes the thought. Iosef’s finger tightens at the exact moment I get my body in front of hers, and the shot tears past my shoulder close enough for heat to skim through the fabric of my shirt.
Sloane cries out behind me, but I don’t look back. If I look back, I lose the half second I need.
I draw and fire once, forcing Iosef to step aside into the mouth of the warehouse corridor, and he moves with the quick, efficient calculation of a man who has already measured the space, the exits, the distances between rusted columns and broken machinery and the patch of open concrete where Sloane is exposed.
“Down,” I tell her.
She doesn’t argue. She lowers herself awkwardly, one hand on her stomach, the other braced against the concrete, and the sight of her trying to protect the child while a man I trusted for eleven years points a gun at her nearly empties my head of everything except murder.
“That’s the problem with love,” Iosef says, backing toward the open warehouse door. “It makes timing embarrassingly easy.”
“You think by killing me you’ll take my empire?” I rasp. “You can never be half the man I am, you’ll always be a coward who runs away with its tail between the legs at the first sign of trouble.”
Iosef looks enraged. Good, that’s exactly what I needed from him.
He fires again. I push Sloane behind one of the steel support pillars near the loading entrance and return fire as the bullet chips concrete from the wall beside us.
She grips the back of my shirt. “Vadim.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. I can’t move quickly.”
“I’m aware.”
“I know what you’re doing, Vadim,” Iosef says. “You’re buying time, but nobody is coming to save your ass today. I’ve got a gun, you don’t. Guess who wins?”
“Iosef,” I call, keeping one hand against Sloane’s side to hold her behind the pillar. “If you wanted me alone, you have me.”
“No,” he says. “If I wanted you alone, I would have killed her first.”
Sloane goes still. My entire body does the same.
His footsteps echo inside the warehouse, not retreating, not advancing straight at us, circling. “I wanted you compromised,” he continues. “I wanted you thinking with whatever piece of yourself she has ruined. That’s much better than alone. You’ll go down together. Poetic, isn’t it?”
Sloane whispers, “I’m sorry.”
I glance at her then. Her face is pale, her eyes too wide, and there’s a smear of dirt on her cheek from where she lowered herself to the ground.
“Don’t,” I say.
“But—”
“Not now.”
Her mouth closes.
I shift enough to look past the pillar.
Iosef fires from deeper inside the warehouse. The shot goes wide, meant to keep us pinned rather than kill. He wants me to come in.
Fine.
I look at Sloane. “When I move, you stay here.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Sloane.”
“He’s trying to draw you inside.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re going?”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s also necessary.”
Her eyes flash. “Vadim.”
I lean closer, my voice low enough that only she can hear it. “If he gets another angle on you, I can’t stop the shot from here.”
That ends the argument. Her hand slips from my shirt, but her fingers catch my wrist for one second before letting go.
“Don’t die,” she says. The words are angry.
That doesn’t make them matter less.
“I have no intention of giving him the satisfaction.”
Then I move. I cross the opening low, firing once toward the last place I saw the muzzle flash, and enter the warehouse before Iosef can get a direct line back to Sloane. The air inside smells of oil, damp concrete, and old metal.
Iosef fires from my left. I roll behind a low stack of pallets, feel splinters burst near my face, then fire back twice. One of my shots hits something metal with a violent ring.
Iosef isn’t laughing anymore. He’s still scared.
I keep moving, one step behind a rusted support, another around a fallen length of chain, until the angle between us changes enough that I’m closer to the entrance than he is.
He fires. The shot hits the wall behind me.
I roll behind the nearest steel column as another bullet sparks against the concrete where my knee had been half a second ago, then come up with my gun raised.
Iosef has already disappeared farther inside. I check the magazine by feel and move after him.
A shot comes from my left. I step behind the nearest column, return fire once, and hear him move before I see him.
“You know,” he calls from somewhere behind the old machinery, “you used to be more disciplined than this.”
“You used to be less talkative.”
“I have waited a long time to explain myself.”
“That was your mistake.”
I move again, not toward his voice, but toward the route that keeps me between him and the loading entrance where Sloane is waiting. If he wants to reach her, he has to cross me first.
Another shot cracks through the warehouse and hits the column beside my shoulder.
I pause behind a rusted metal table and listen. Outside, Sloane shifts. A small sound. Pain or effort, not fear.
I hate that I know the difference.
Iosef hears it too. His voice comes lower now, pleased. “She shouldn’t be standing. Seven months, perhaps more, after weeks of stress, too little sleep, too little food. You noticed all of that, yes?”
My hand tightens around the gun. “She’s not part of this.”
“She has been part of this from the beginning.”
“No,” I say. “You put her there.”
He laughs softly. “I placed a few pieces. She moved beautifully on her own.”
I step out and fire toward the sound of his voice. He answers from a different place, and the bullet passes near my ribs before burying itself in the wall behind me.
Too close.
He’s moving through the inner row, using the columns better than I expected. I cross into the next aisle before he can trap me against the open floor, and for one second I see him through the gap between two machines.
We fire at the same time. His bullet tears through fabric at my side and burns a line across my skin. Mine hits his upper arm.
His gun drops from his hand and clatters across the floor. I move before he can reach it, but he doesn’t go for the gun.
He goes for the knife at his belt instead.
I catch his wrist with my left hand and slam it against the side of a steel frame. Once. Twice. On the third strike, something gives beneath my grip and his fingers open. The knife falls.
I drive my fist into his stomach. He folds, but he’s not helpless. His other hand goes for my throat, and he tries to use his weight to drag me sideways, toward a jagged length of torn metal sticking from the machinery behind me.
I let him think it works. Then I turn with him and put him into it instead. He hits the frame shoulder-first and makes a sound that is almost a scream.
But even an injured animal lashes out.
His knee comes up into my injured side, and pain tears through me hard enough to loosen my grip. He twists away, going not for the fallen gun across the floor but for the small pistol strapped at his ankle.
I catch his wrist too late to stop him from getting his fingers around it.
He drags the weapon up with shaking hands, and this time he doesn’t aim at me.
He aims past me. Toward the entrance.
Toward Sloane.
There’s no more talking. I break his wrist against the column, and the pistol drops. He gasps, eyes wide now, finally afraid because he understands he has reached the end of what cleverness can buy.
I shove my gun beneath his jaw.
“Vadim,” he chokes. “If you kill me, you may never know who else helped.”
I look at him. For eleven years, this man sat beside me and smiled quietly while he measured the places to cut. He used Camille’s fear, Petrov’s grief, Sloane’s innocence, Mila’s trauma, and my love, and even now he thinks information makes him valuable enough to spare.
“No,” I say. “I will find them without you.”
Then I pull the trigger.
His body jerks once, and then it’s done.
For a few seconds, I stand over him, breathing hard, blood soaking into my shirt at my side, the warehouse ringing with the echo of the shot.