Chapter 22 – Roman
The sun is sinking low by the time we reach the outskirts of Dallas, the orange wash of dusk stretching across the highway. The convoy moves in silence—three matte-black SUVs, engines humming low. Beside me, Dimitri loads his rifle, humming off-key like we’re not driving straight into a warzone.
“This is it,” I say, eyes fixed on the GPS blinking on the dash. “Chang’s warehouse. Intel says it’s one of his biggest depots. He’s got men moving cargo, and according to our tip, he’s there himself.”
Luka’s voice crackles over the comms from the lead car. “We guess they’re about fifteen, maybe twenty. Could be more.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I reply. “We move fast. No one gets out unless I say so.”
Dimitri grins, checking his weapon. “And the main prize?”
“David Chang stays alive,” I say sharply. “If anyone finds him before I do, you bring him to me. Breathing.”
The words hang heavy in the air. No one argues.
The warehouse looms up ahead, all steel and shadows, the kind of place that reeks of money and blood. We park a few hundred meters out, engines off, the only sounds the click of safeties coming off and the wind whispering through the dry grass.
I step out first. The air tastes of dust and oil. Every sense in my body is electric.
“Positions,” I order.
Dimitri signals the others, his expression suddenly serious. The men fan out, moving low and quiet through the dark. The faint buzz of the security lights flickers against the side of the building as we close in.
I can feel it—something coiled, dangerous, waiting inside.
“Let’s end this,” I mutter, and motion for Luka to breach.
He nods once, raises his fist—three, two, one—The explosion of movement is instant.
The door crashes open, gunfire lights the air, and the night erupts into chaos.
Instead of finding Chang, we find it stripped bare, a decoy left to waste our time.
Empty pallets, a few cigarette butts, and the bitter tang of diesel in the air—that’s all. The forklifts are gone, manifests torn from their hooks. Someone scrubbed this place clean the way a surgeon scrubs a wound. The lights hum like a lie.
“Decoy,” Luka says, crouching to study a fresh tire gouge in the dirt. He points at a skid mark where a crate used to sit. “They moved product out fast. Less than twelve hours.”
Dimitri kicks at a rusted drum and swears. “Someone wanted us here.”
I run my glove along a wooden pallet and find a smear of industrial grease. It tells me what I already feel in my gut: they cleared the site on purpose. A trap to pull us away—or a smoke screen while something bigger moves elsewhere.
“Check the DVR,” I order. “Looped footage or blackout window?”
Luka’s tablet blinks. “Looped. CCTV blackout from nineteen hundred to twenty-oh-two. They patched it clean.”
“Traffic cams,” I say. “Toll booths. We pull every plate that hit the highway out of here in the last four hours.”
Dimitri’s jaw sets. He kneels and picks up a scrap of torn synthetic from a fence—navy industrial fabric, snagged on a shard of rebar. He stuffs it into his pocket and meets my eyes. “They left bait. Someone clever enough to stage a decoy and scrub the feeds.”
As Dimitri and Luka circle the space, tossing theories back and forth, I stand still and think.
This was too neat. Too organized. Too clean.
I trusted Oleg’s intel—the coordinates, the timing, everything—and it brought me here. I should’ve verified. Cross-checked. But I was desperate to strike first, to finally corner David. Lukin warned me not to rush. He was right.
But what if this isn’t about me?
A cold realization slides through me like ice water. What if this was a ploy to get me out of the house?
To get to Elara.
My pulse spikes. I can almost feel her name vibrate in my chest. I put every possible security measure in place—men stationed at the perimeter, alarms, motion sensors, coded locks—but still….
I don’t trust anyone. Not fully. Not anymore.
Especially not when it comes to her.
Just as I’m about to tell the men to retreat and head back to New York, Luka’s phone rings.
He answers without hesitation, pressing it to his ear—and I can tell immediately from his face that something’s wrong. His expression drains of color. The muscle in his jaw locks tight.
The call lasts less than thirty seconds, but it feels like a lifetime.
As soon as he lowers the phone, I’m on him.
“What is it?” I demand.
He hesitates for a fraction of a second, and that’s all it takes for my stomach to twist.
“It’s Elara,” he says finally, voice rough. “She’s gone. Kidnapped by Chang’s men. They breached the estate and took her…. We don’t know where.”
The world goes silent. Then it explodes.
My fist connects with the wall, and the sound is a dull, terrible crack. Pain blooms up my arm—hot, sharp—and when I pull my hand back, I look down to see a thread of blood running between the knuckles. For a second, the world narrows to red and the taste of iron at the back of my throat.
Luka’s on me in a blink, grip on my shoulder, voice clipped: “Roman—”
I push him off. Hard. Not because I want to strike him, but because the motion feels necessary—a shove to clear the air, to make room for the animal inside me. He stumbles, catches himself, and there’s a tightness in his face I don’t like. My hands are shaking, and I don’t care.
“Don’t touch me,” I say, and the roar in my voice strips the room bare. Every man snaps to attention; silence drops like a blade. I can feel their eyes on me—hungry, steady, waiting for the order they were born to carry out.
“Calm down, Roman,” Dimitri says, voice easy but sharp. He thinks he’s defusing me. He doesn’t know the temperature of this fire.
“Calm down?” I spit the words back. “You want me to calm down after they take what’s mine?
After they drag her through whatever hell David’s cooked up?
” My hands curl until my nails bite into my palms. The hurt is a new thing—not for me, for her.
That focus makes the rest of the world small and ridiculous.
“You’ll never know what it means to love someone like that.”
The words come out harsher than I planned. They land in the van and ricochet off metal and muscle. Dimitri blanches, then gives a short, humorless laugh. “Ouch,” he says, but there’s no mockery in it—only the recognition that I’ve crossed a line most of them wouldn’t touch.
I don’t apologize. I don’t want to apologize. Strategy is dead for me; this is no longer a chessboard move. This is personal. This is the part of me that answers to blood and bone. My pulse hammers behind my eyes; every breath tastes like steel.
“I want his death on my hands. That’s the only way I’ll breathe easy.”
Dimitri sighs. “Alright,” he says, softer. “We do it your way.”
An hour later, we’re on the jet, engines a low animal thrum under my feet. I don’t sleep. I call men, reroute squads, put everyone I can spare on a single instruction: find ELARA.
My thumbs jab commands into the secure line like hammer strikes.
The Rusnak network hums to life through my device—cars mobilize, safe houses go dark, thermal teams lift off.
I order a city-wide lockdown where we have reach: every neighborhood, every dock, every known Chang node gets swept.
If they try to move her through their usual channels, we’ll choke them out.
Dimitri sits across from me, phone to his ear, talking to Lev and Lukin in clipped sentences I barely hear.
He feeds them what we have—last ping, decoy warehouse, the merc caught with Chang’s insignia.
They parse it like chess players. “Cut off exits to Jersey and the port,” Lev says.
“Push press buffers so Chang can’t drum up more sympathy.
” Lukin wants to hit the brokers’ accounts first. I approve everything and then tell them to prepare for all outcomes.
Luka pulls a tablet toward me. “We pulled the camera sweeps. There’s one jump—a white van—left Manhattan twenty minutes after the decoy hit. Last sighting near an industrial strip in Queens.” He taps coordinates. “We’re pinging plates, fueling intercepts now.”
My stomach knots and then steels. No more mistakes. “Run perimeter and PR containment. Have men hold reserves for rapid extraction if we get the call. No heroics. Fast in, faster out. Bring her back alive.”
Dimitri’s grin is a quick flash. “We’ll bring her home, Roman.”
The plane drops through clouds; New York grows closer, a scatter of lights.
I let myself imagine the moment I find her—the feel of her in my arms, the way she breathes when she thinks she’s safe.
That image is a blade and a balm both. I force it down and turn to work: maps, street cams, phone triangulations.
If Chang thought he could bait me away from home and get to Elara, he guessed wrong.
As soon as I arrive at the estate hours later, I fly up the stairs two at a time, breath tearing in my chest like a thing I can’t control.
The house is wrong—too quiet, the kind of quiet that holds its breath before something breaks.
My hand finds the doorknob, cold and suddenly foreign. I shove the door open.
Glass crunches under my boot. The window is a jagged grin; curtains shredded, the frame splintered outward as if someone had clawed their way through.
A thin ribbon of red dots the sill, bright and ridiculous against the pale plaster.
It runs in a frantic line across the floor, a cartographer’s map of panic.
I go to the glass on instinct first, fingers hovering above the smear like I could wipe it away and rewind the world.
The blood is hers—the scent sharp, metallic, impossibly intimate.
It sits on the glass in a smear where a hand met pane and slid, as if someone had tried to stop themselves from falling. My knees give.
I sink to them without meaning to, the room tilting. The bed is a rough square of dented sheets, the pillow still warmed where she pressed her cheek. Just days ago, we lay there together.
Memory claws through me—her laugh on the terrace, the way she wrapped herself into sleep against me, the way she told me she wanted to protect me too. Her telling me she loves me.
“Goddamn you,” I whisper to the quiet, to the glass, to whoever tore her away. My voice is small and ridiculous. It doesn’t hold the size of what sits in my chest.
Rage arrives like a live thing. It makes my hands shake until the knuckles on my right hand split open on the windowsill glass; blood mingles with hers, and for a second, I can’t tell which stain is mine.
The pain is real and glorious—a thing I can name.
It anchors nothing except the fact that she’s gone.
I stand. The room is suddenly too small for the fury crawling up my throat. I draw in air until my ribs ache, and I speak it loud enough that the house itself seems to flinch.
“I will burn the world before I let him keep her.”
The vow lands in the rafters and stays there, as solid and terrible as an oath. I move, already becoming the thing I say I will be: precise, brutal, unstoppable.
I will find Elara, even if it’s the last thing I do.