Chapter 12
Dubai, present day
Viktor
Revenant headquarters had a rhythm. Once you were in its guts long enough, you could feel it in the walls.
The air systems pulsed on a timer. The doors hummed when their locks cycled.
The guards moved in patterns, the same twelve count of footsteps in the corridor, the same hoarse cough from the heavy one at the end of the wing, the same bored laugh from the runner that paced the halls faster than anyone else.
They thought they’d contained me after the last incident with the spring and the improvised chokehold.
They’d assigned new guards, initiated a new protocol for dealing with me, and even put a new camera in my cell.
No more maintenance panel either; they’d bolted a solid slab of metal over it and welded it just to make a point.
Very dramatic. A little flattering, actually.
They didn’t realize that time was the only tool I actually needed.
I sat on the edge of the cot, posture relaxed, bare feet on cold concrete, the picture of a man who’d accepted his fate. Inside, every nerve was keyed to a ticking countdown only I could hear.
Twenty-three minutes until shift change.
The late-afternoon swap was always sloppier. Men were tired. They were already thinking about food. Whoever designed the schedule seemed to like symmetry more than security. It meant the overlap between outgoing and incoming pairs left one blind spot…
Thirty seconds when no one was looking directly at my door.
Thirty seconds for someone else was nothing.
For me, it was a lifetime.
The key was getting the door open in those thirty seconds. And for that, all I needed was access to the guard who delivered my food. Not his keys. Not his gun. Just his hand.
He was older. The kind of man who’d seen enough to grow careless.
He slid the tray through the slot at the bottom of the door three times a day, the smell of bland protein and overcooked rice drifting into the cell like a sad joke.
Once, on the second day he was assigned to me, his fingers came too far inside.
Just two knuckles too far. Enough for me to grab them if I wanted to.
I didn’t though. The timing wasn’t right then.
My plan now was simple: catch the old man’s wrist when he slid the tray in, hurt him just enough to make him react, let him open the door a crack to come in and teach me a lesson, then take him down fast and quiet. Then I’d replace him in the hallway.
Crude, yes. But effective. Violence usually is.
Footsteps started at the far end of the corridor—three sets. Two light, one heavier.
That was wrong.
Usually, it was only two.
Fuck.
My shoulders tensed.
The door lock buzzed. Not the soft, short buzz of the tray slot. The longer, deeper one of a full magnetic release. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
The door opened.
The commander stepped inside, flanked by two guards.
“Well,” I muttered. “You’ve ruined my whole afternoon.”
He wore an impeccable suit as always—tailored gray, crisp white shirt, tie knotted with irritating meticulousness.
“Took a lot to deal with your creativity, I hear,” he grumbled.
“You left me very little to work with,” I said. “I did my best with limited materials though.”
He smiled thinly. “We considered removing the bed entirely.”
“You should have. I can do a lot of damage with four corners and bad intentions.”
One of the guards stiffened, his grasp tightening on his weapon.
The commander flicked a glance at him and the man stilled. Then he turned back to me.
“You know why I’m here, Mr. Dragunov.”
“I was hoping it was a social call.”
He ignored that. “We’re almost done playing,” he said. “Almost.”
“That’s what my last date said.”
The commander stood there, hands clasped behind his back like he was about to lecture me for missing curfew instead of imprisoning me in a concrete box. His expression was calm, but his eyes hadn’t stopped calculating ever since he walked into the room.
“We both understand where this is going,” he said. “So let me save us time.”
“Please do,” I replied. “I’ve been quite thoroughly bored.”
“We have them, you know. All of them. The Markovs were… difficult. Miss Kara Lennox as well. But they’re all here and quite well contained.”
“You want me to cry?” I asked. “You’ll need better material.”
His jaw flexed once. “And then there’s Miss Katerina Volkov. A pity we didn’t get to keep her.”
I stilled. Only for a moment, but he saw it.
“Ah,” he observed. “Interesting reaction.”
“Not really,” I said. “I assumed she’d escape the moment she got bored.”
He pressed on. “Tell us where she’s going and what she has planned. Tell me, and maybe we’ll let the rest of them live long enough for negotiations.”
“You want me to help you hunt her down because you’re tired,” I said.
“I’m offering you a deal,” he corrected. “Information in exchange for mercy.”
“I don’t believe in your mercy.”
“You should believe in our alternatives.”
“I’ve seen them,” I replied. “They’re imaginative. I’ll give you that. But you’re forgetting something important.”
“And what is that?”
“I’m a Dragunov.” I leaned back on my hands. “And we Dragunovs don’t break just because you’ve got a schedule.”
His eyes narrowed. I grinned back at him.
“You will,” he said softly. “Everyone does.”
“You know what my older brother is capable of,” I pointed out. “Are you sure you want to bet on that?”
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of the knowledge that my brother’s reputation preceded him. And that knowledge was causing cracks in his composure.
I liked that.
“Andrei is out there too,” I added. “You probably think the youngest Dragunov is the soft one. He’s not. None of us are, really.”
His jaw ticked once.
“And if you kill me,” I promised, “they will never stop coming for your head.”
He didn’t like that.
He stepped forward, guards tightening around him, watching every twitch of my hands.
“Let me be clear,” he explained in a condescending tone. “Your brothers may care about you, but when men care, they make mistakes.”
I held his gaze. “You’d know more about mistakes than I would.”
He ignored the jab. “Your people are trapped here. Except our Ms. Volkov. A shame, really. She had potential.”
“If you touched her—”
He waved a dismissive hand. “Relax. We didn’t touch her.”
I gritted my teeth.
He studied my reaction like a hawk. “Of course, Ms. Volkov being gone doesn’t help all of your friends downstairs. Ms. Lennox. The Markovs. They are surprisingly resilient, but not invincible.”
The cell felt smaller.
He waited for me to crack.
I didn’t.
“You think threatening them will make me talk?” I asked.
“I think it will remind you that this isn’t about you,” he said. “You are simply a pressure point to us.”
“Then press.”
“Oh, we will,” he whispered ominously.
Before I could reply, the lights in the corridor flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then a horrendous, pulsing alarm rolled through the concrete, not the soft yellow warning I’d learned to ignore, but what I immediately guessed was a full red alert.
The commander froze.
One guard pressed a hand to his earpiece. “Sir. Breach in sublevel three. North access.”
My smile widened with glee.
Well, that was interesting…
I would bet good money that my younger brother was the culprit. Maybe it was Katya. Maybe it was the two of them working together.
The commander barked orders. “Lock it down. All wings. Seal the stairwells. Nothing and no one enters or exits.”
The alarm blared through the hallway, painting the commander’s face in pulses of red. He tried to hide it, but I saw his jaw flex. Someone had gotten into Revenant headquarters. That alone was enough to make any man in this building sweat.
He turned back to me, eyes cold. “Whatever you think this is, don’t get hopeful. We will find whoever broke in. And when we do, they’ll join your friends downstairs and very much regret visiting us without an invitation.”
He stepped out, and the guards followed. Then the door slammed shut with a heavy magnetic thud.
The sirens didn’t stop.
Red emergency lights pulsed through the crack under my door, painting the floor in a stuttering wash of color. Somewhere down the hall, someone shouted. Somewhere else, a door slammed. The entire wing was waking up in all the wrong ways.
Good.
It meant my window had just opened.
They would forget about me for the moment.
Or, more specifically, they were more worried about the people coming in than the problem they already had locked up.
That was their first mistake. The second mistake was structural—fail-safes and overrides tied into a system now tripping over itself.
When the main grid glitched, the magnetic locks defaulted for a half-second into a standby state.
Half a second is nothing.
If you’re slow.
If you’re me, though, it was plenty of time to begin my escape.
I counted the siren pulses. One. Two. Three. Watched the red light flicker along the seams of the door. On the fifth pulse, the light dimmed for a fraction of a heartbeat as some engineer somewhere toggled the system over to backup power.
That was my moment.
The lock buzzed and I was already moving. I yanked the door at the exact moment the magnetic hold went from full strength to weak.
It gave.
Not by much. A centimeter. Maybe two.
I yanked it again. Harder.
The door flew open with a vicious metallic screech. I stumbled forward into the corridor, momentum stealing my balance, bare feet catching on polished concrete.
And then I was out.
Alarms shrieked up and down the hallway, drowning out everything else. Red lights flashed overheard. Somewhere down the hall, a disembodied voice was giving orders I couldn’t hear clearly over the siren’s wail.
I sucked in a breath that didn’t taste like stale bleach and recycled air and sighed with relief.
“About time,” I muttered as I shut the door behind me.
Suddenly, boot steps pounded from the far end of the corridor. One pair. Running hard.