Chapter 31
Arkady
The warehouse smells like damp. Three men are already inside when we walk through the side door, which tells me Kosta’s timing was deliberate. We weren’t early. We were exactly on time, and the men who were early had to wait for us. That’s not an accident.
I take them in fast. Two standing, one sitting on an upturned crate.
The standing ones are muscle, the kind that comes with a specific build and a specific blankness behind the eyes.
The one on the crate is the principal. Mid-fifties.
Heavyset. A face that’s been broken and reset at least twice, the nose sitting slightly off-centre.
He’s wearing a waxed jacket and boots that have seen heavy use.
His hands are loose on his knees, which either means he’s relaxed or he’s very good at looking it.
His name is Gregor Vance. He hasn’t looked at Alina yet. Most men look. Even the ones who are trying not to look, and the trying-not-to is its own tell. Gregor hasn’t registered her existence, which means either he doesn’t care, or it’s an act.
“Saranov,” he says. Not a greeting. A confirmation.
“Vance.”
He doesn’t stand. I don’t offer my hand. We’re past the part where any of that means anything.
“You brought someone,” he says.
“My wife.”
He looks at her then. One sweep, top to bottom, the same assessment I’ve seen a hundred men run on a hundred women in rooms like this. Then he looks back at me. “Condolences on your father.”
“Thank you.”
“And congratulations.” The word is flat. Not insincere, exactly. Just stripped of anything that isn’t functional. He’s a man who has survived long enough in this world to have stripped language down to its load-bearing walls.
“Appreciated,” I say, and leave it at that.
Alina is standing slightly to my left, hands loose at her sides. She’s doing the same thing she did last night, which is looking like she isn’t doing anything at all, but in fact, she is taking in every single thing. That is why she is here. I need to know what she sees.
Gregor folds his hands across his knee. “The consignment.”
“Walk me through it.”
He nods to the muscle on his left, who crosses to a long table against the far wall and pulls back a tarpaulin. Beneath it, cases. Six of them, military-grade polymer, matte black, each with a numbered lock.
“Eastern European manufacture,” Gregor says. “Untraceable routing through three border crossings. Clean paperwork on each stage.”
“Open one.”
The muscle unlocks the nearest case and lifts the lid.
Inside, nested in foam, a row of compact automatic rifles.
Well-maintained. No visible wear on the mechanisms. I cross to the table and pick one up, check the action, check the feed mechanism.
The weight is right. The tolerances are clean.
Someone has maintained these recently, not years of storage neglect, but active maintenance.
That tells me something about where they’ve been sitting and who’s been looking after them.
I set it back in the foam and move to the next case. Gregor doesn’t rush me. He sits on his crate with the patience of a man who has done this enough times to know that rushing an inspection is how you lose a buyer.
The second case holds handguns. Compact, reliable, the kind of sidearm that doesn’t announce itself.
The third holds ammunition, boxed and labelled in Cyrillic.
The fourth is heavier. I unlock it myself and find what I expected.
Suppressors, cleaning kits, additional magazines, and the infrastructure that makes the hardware useful rather than decorative.
I close the lid and step back.
“Timeline,” I say.
“Tonight. One window. If you don’t move it tonight, I can’t hold it beyond forty-eight hours before it becomes a problem for both of us.”
“Price stands?”
“Price stands.”
I turn to Alina without making it obvious I’m turning. She’s looking at him.
Not at the guns. At Gregor.
She’s been looking at him since we walked through the door, doing it the way she does everything, like it costs her nothing.
Her hands are still loose. Her face is still neutral.
But her weight has shifted fractionally onto her back foot, which means she’s clocked something she doesn’t like and is putting distance between herself and it without making it visible.
She has sensed something is off, and that’s exactly why I brought her into this viper’s pit.
“Pass,” I say and step back.
“What?” Gregor snaps. He stands up from the crate. His guys straighten on both sides. “We had an agreement.”
“We had a conversation,” I say. “Not the same thing.”
“Saranov.” His voice drops. “This consignment has moved through three countries to get here. You don’t walk away from that without a reason.”
“I don’t need to give you a reason.”
The guy on his right takes a step forward. Dima takes one too, and the geometry of the room shifts in a way that everyone in it can feel. The guy stops.
Gregor’s jaw sets. “Your father never walked away from a deal without giving a reason.”
“My father isn’t here.”
My hand twitches, ready to draw. This was a risk I had to take, but I won’t let her get hurt.
A guy who was previously hidden from view moves into the frame behind Alina and grabs her in a chokehold. She squeaks as I draw my gun and hold it to the man’s head who is touching my wife. Dima and Kosta move into action as Gregor and his men draw.
“Let her go, and I don’t blow your head off,” I say to the idiot choking Alina. The idiot doesn’t let her go. He tightens his arm instead, which tells me everything I need to know about his intelligence and his life expectancy.
Alina makes a small, controlled sound, not panic, not helplessness, but the specific compressed quality of a woman who is extremely pissed off and running calculations.
Her hands come up to the arm across her throat.
Not to claw at it. To grip it. She’s managing her airway, buying herself seconds, staying functional. Belov’s blood, right there.
“Three seconds,” I say. My voice is flat. The gun is steady. I’m not shaking, not performing. I mean every syllable. “Three.”
Gregor has his weapon up, pointed at my chest. His two visible men are on Dima and Kosta, respectively. The room has become a diagram of consequences, every line running through someone’s skull.
“Two.”
“Stand down,” Gregor says to his man, and the word stand has barely left his mouth before I finish.
“One.”
Nothing happens. My finger presses the trigger, but the shot that cracks out isn’t from me.
The man holding Alina grunts and releases her, stumbling back, a hole blown through his foot.
A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. “Khoroshaya devochka.”
“You know it,” she pants and levels the small gun she had hidden somewhere on her. I knew she’d bring it. I knew she would prove herself to be her father’s daughter. To be my wife. “Touch me again, arsehole, and I’ll blow your head off,” she adds, gripping the gun tighter as she points it at him.
“Alina,” I say, and she looks at me, her eyes wild. “Duck.”
Instinctively, she drops to a crouch as I fire over her head at Gregor’s guy, who decided to risk his life for stepping forward without permission.
The shot takes him in the shoulder and spins him sideways into the table. The nearest case clatters off the edge and hits the concrete with a sound like a gunshot of its own. He goes down hard and stays down.
Dima and Kosta are firing off shots as I duck and run towards Alina, gripping her arm and forcing her to move behind a crate.
“Are you okay?” I ask, my fingers on her throat.
Her breath is laboured. “Did you just set me up?”
“No, but I am fucking glad you’re carrying.
Stay here and shoot anything that isn’t one of us.
” I move out and fire off two shots as this negotiation has turned into an all-out war.
I want to know what Alina saw, but it’s enough for me to call this off.
Gregor has gone to ground behind the crate on the far side of the room.
One of his men is down, the shoulder shot taking him out of the fight.
The other is trading rounds with Dima, using the long table as cover, which means the guns are getting shot up, which is probably karmic justice for a deal that was rotten from the start.
I put two rounds into the crate Gregor is hiding behind, not to hit him, to move him.
He shifts left, and I fire. The shot catches him in the arm.
Not the kill shot I was aiming for, but enough.
He goes down sideways, weapon skittering across the concrete, and I put myself between him and any chance of recovery.
The room goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet after gunfire. Not silent. The ringing in my ears fills every corner. I don’t turn yet. I finish the sweep first. Left wall clear. Table clear. The door we came through is clear.
“Dima,” I call.
“Here.” His voice is flat and functional, which means he’s upright and operational, which is all I need to know.
“Kosta,”
“Here.”
“Alina.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbles.
I smile.
Gregor is on the floor, dead.
“Any left?” I ask.
“All out,” Dima states.
“Pack up the boxes, find the keys to one of those trucks and move out.”
“You’re stealing them?” Alina asks, moving out of her shelter towards me.
“Liberating them before someone else does,” I state.
“Liberating.”
“Tell me why you thought this was a bad deal?”
Her blue eyes meet mine, and she breathes in, knowing I’ve put her on the spot, but she has to answer me.