Chapter 19 STEPHANO
The night is illuminated by fire, the air filled with explosions, screams, and gunshots, audible even over the rotors that stir up the dust on the rooftop; more explosions thud in the distance, our people lighting the south fence and motor pool so that every eye points the wrong way.
My rope hisses through the descender. Ten meters.
Eight. Oksana’s voice cuts clean through the noise in my ear, "Sniper, six o’clock. Take him."
A muzzle flashes below, at the ground level; some asshole was taking aim at me. Our sniper took him out. And Oksana… I grin like an idiot. I shouldn’t have room for a smile, but I do. That woman. Most amazing person I’ve ever met. I might have to marry her for real—God help us both.
Crack. Another man on the ground folds before he can find my chest. A man named Edgar hits the roof first, soft feet, hard focus.
I drop the last few feet and roll into a crouch.
The tar smells like burned sugar and sun ghosts; hot grit grinds into my palms. Edgar is already at the charge, holding a brick of putty, timer already inserted, wires tucked.
"Set," he breathes.
"Light it," I answer.
We give it five, four—breath held—three, two—open mouth.
The roof jumps. A circle of tin and wood becomes a screaming hole. Heat and dust surge up like a shout from the building’s throat. I drop through, knowing Edgar and the other man have my back.
I land hard on the ground, aiming my gun in a quick circle, taking in my surroundings.
The room looks like what you’d find in a typical hospital: stark white, monitors beeping, a bed.
Cabinets on the wall, long counterspace.
The sharp tang of antiseptic stings my eyes and nose, and a sour, acrid stench makes my stomach roil.
A nurse screams. I shoulder her aside, not hard enough to cause her any harm, just hard enough to move the world where I need it.
There is nobody else in the room besides her and whoever is lying on the bed.
"Clear," I shout up, and Edgar and the other guy slide down after me, boots kissing tile.
Two quick steps, and I’m at the bedside, while the men secure the nurse with the efficient, clinical motions of men who have done this a hundred times.
The room narrows to the bed and the bright, unforgiving lights.
Everything else—rotors, shouting, the base—slides away to a hum at the edge of the world.
He is a ghost wrapped in hospital linen. Tubes hook into him like the fingers of a stranger; tape crusts a sick, pale brown where it shouldn’t; gauze bulges, fresh and tidy, over the wound on his abdomen. For a beat, I don’t even breathe. Then I do, and the sound is too loud.
It’s him. Older. Scarred by time in ways photos don’t show.
His cheeks are thinner, his skin is pulled a fraction tighter, but the face, the angle of that jaw, the way the mouth holds a memory of mischief…
I would recognize Nico anywhere. I’ve been carrying that smile in the hollows of my ribs for three years.
He’s unconscious—drugs or shock, I can’t tell yet—but alive. His chest rises and falls, steady like a metronome. The stomach bandage is clean and wrapped tight; whoever dressed it did so with hands that knew how not to make a mess. Dark hair clings to his forehead in wet ropes.
For a second, I see us as kids again, fighting over nothing, laughing like we were invincible.
He had that grin that said we’d live forever.
I reach out before my head consults my heart.
My hand hovers, then settles on his shoulder.
The skin is warmer than I expected. My fingers find the tension in his back and rest there as if I could will him whole by touch.
Memories slide under my palm: stolen beers on a rooftop, the scrape of knuckles, the time I pushed him into a fight he was too young for and saved his face afterward.
That grin. That wrongness that felt like home.
"Nico." My voice is a thing I don’t recognize. It’s smaller than it should be. It comes out more like an apology than a greeting.
He doesn’t answer. The monitor keeps up its thin, steady beeping, a heartbeat made into sound, a promise spelled out in electricity. Relief hits me so hard it steals my breath. My knees go loose, light, like the floor tilts under me.
He’s here.
He’s breathing.
He’s not a ghost or a rumor or a fucking photograph anymore.
For a moment, all I can do is stare. Three years of fear and anger and hope collapse into one violent rush behind my ribs, and I have to put a hand on the bed to steady myself.
Nico.
My brother.
A laugh tries to break in my chest—ugly, shaky—and I crush it down before it escapes.
I don’t get to break. Not here. Not now.
Then the guilt comes, sliding in under the relief, cold as a blade.
Years between us, stacked like unpaid debts.
Years I wasn’t there. Years where he was pain and silence, and I was alive.
I’ve thought of him in fragments, rumors, grainy photos, lines in a ledger that didn’t make sense.
Now he’s right in front of me.
A man. A body. A breath.
Alive, but too still. Fragile in a way Nico never was.
My throat burns. I press my palm to the side of the mattress so I don’t reach for him, don’t shake him, don’t demand he wake up and tell me where the hell he’s been.
"Christ, little brother," I whisper, barely able to get the words out. "Look at you."
And for the first time in three years, I let myself feel it: He came home. I didn’t lose him.
Ettoro’s voice is in my ear again, practical and clipped. The other two men have opened the door for him. "We move him on my mark. The bird is ready."
I swallow. The plan returns, cold and necessary, but beneath it something else wakes: a promise I didn’t know I still had the right to make. I press my forehead to Nico's temple for the smallest instant, an old protection, a stupid superstition, then straighten.
"There’s work to do," I tell him, and the words are for both of us. My brother breathes on, slow and stubborn.
"Fuck," I say, and it’s not a curse; it’s a prayer that forgot how to be hopeful. "It’s really you."
Nico doesn’t wake. The monitor does the talking, thin beeps like an apology. My hand finds his shoulder and fits there perfectly.
"Conti," Ettoro warns, eyes at the door, "we need to move."
"I know." I swallow the burn in my throat and force my head to work. "Oxygen, saline—keep the drip. Pressure bag in the med pack when the bird is ready. We move him flat, no jostling. Bring the nurse."
Then, from out of nowhere, her voice cuts in, cool as ice over a knife, "HQ breached. Call Grigori."
The words don’t match the tone. The tone says traffic report; the words tear the floor out from under me.
For a heartbeat, the room narrows to a tunnel: Oksana alone at the hotel, door blown inward, rifles aimed.
My lungs forget their job; heat punches my spine cold.
I have a thought I shouldn’t have in a place like this.
We were kissing an hour ago, and my brother was dying, and now she might be—
No. No.
"Stay with me," I say, not sure if I’m telling Nico, Oksana, or myself. I jam the earpiece tighter. "Ettoro, get him ready."
He’s already on it, taking the brakes off the bed Nico is on and rolling it underneath where the ceiling used to be. I wince when the bed stutters over broken metal from the roof, but that can't be helped.
"Oksana," I say into the mic, and my voice is too steady for the way my hands want to shake. "Say again."
Static cracks. Far off, our south team pops another charge; the building answers with a shudder. There is nothing from Oksana's end. Fuck.
The calm slides under my ribs and sets up a fight with the part of me already moving. I look at Nico—gray skin, the stubborn flicker in his pulse—and I want two bodies, one of them to go with him and the other to go after Oksana.
"Ettoro," I say, throat tight.
"On it, call Grigori." Ettoro is already securing ropes to the gurney Nico is strapped to. The nurse is still pressed to the wall, and the two men with her hold her still. She’s the reason Nico is still warm. "Grab the portable monitor," I tell them. "Unclip it. We’re moving him."
She glances at the door, back at me. "If you pull him now—"
"He dies if we don’t," I say. "He might die if we do. Those are the choices."
Ettoro secures the ropes. "I've got this," he snarls at me.
I get it: make the fucking call.
The room is a siren, monitors whining, rotors chewing the roof, Ettoro yelling orders. I thumb my phone and hit the number I swore I’d never use unless the floor fell out.
"Arsenyev," a voice answers like a drawn wire.
"No time to explain," I say. "Oksana was taken. She said to call you."
"Blyat." The curse lands heavy; I hear him moving, not wasting time—footfalls on old wood, a door, the minute echo of a high-ceilinged hall. "What happened?"
"I don’t know," I grind out. Nico’s weight is still on my hands; his breath is a metronome I’m trying to match. "We’re extracting my brother. She was on comms, working the terminals. She said, Call Grigori, and then… nothing."
Silence on the line, then the sharp staccato of keys, metallic, fast. He’s already in a system, opening doors I had no clue were there.
"She has a tracker," he informs me.
Of course she does. Of course, she didn’t tell me. I'll have to make a body sweep; she probably tagged me, too.
In the back, the winch screams; the litter jerks up through the opened roof, and my brother, Nico, is swallowed through the hole. The nurse is next, pleading, "No, por favor, no—" as Ettoro straps her in like salvation is a harness, not a choice. The rotors' blasts grit across my teeth.
"You're only about an hour's drive from her," Grigori confirms my suspicion about my tracker. Damn that woman. "I’m sending you her location." A beat. "And Conti—if anything happens to her…"