Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nikolai
I look at Hannah.
My sweet girl.
The tape is still across her mouth, the overhead light washing her out.
She’s watching me with eyes that are trying very hard to be brave and not quite managing it, and the effort of that—a four-year-old working that hard to hold herself together in a room full of armed men—does something to me I don’t have room to feel right now.
I look away before it shows.
My father was many things, most of them worth forgetting. But he knew how to survive rooms like this one, and his logic was simple: you fight for what you want or you die trying. And if you have a plan B, you use it before they take it from you.
Time for plan B.
“That’s enough stalling, Niko.” Aslanov’s voice has shed the last of its performance. Just the flat patience of a man who has already decided how this ends and is waiting for the formality to catch up. “Any last words?”
I look him in the eye. “You have a light?”
“A what?” Aslanov hitches a brow.
I don’t answer. I slowly reach into my pocket instead.
The movement draws every weapon in the room—Aslanov’s, his guards’, all of them tracking my hand with their guns as it emerges with a cigarette pack. I tap one loose, unhurried, like a man with nothing left to lose. In reality, I have everything to lose.
The silence in the room takes on a different quality.
Nobody moves.
Aslanov watches me with something that might be curiosity, or might just be contempt wearing curiosity’s face. Then he tilts his head toward the room.
“Dima. Give him a light.”
One of the guards crosses to me, lighter in hand. I take it without looking at him, bring the flame up, and draw until the end catches and glows. I hand the lighter back. Take my time about it.
Beside me, I feel Timur go absolutely still.
He knows. I’ve never smoked—not once, not even in the years when everyone around me did. He’s seen me wave off cigars in rooms considerably more comfortable than this one. The cigarette is not a cigarette and he understands that, and I feel him processing it without moving a muscle.
I take a long, slow drag and let the smoke out in front of me, watching it rise and flatten in the low light. The taste is foul—stale and chemical, nothing like the clean burn of a good cigar—but I hold Aslanov’s gaze across the plume of it and keep my face unhurried.
I need time.
Popov’s men need to be in position before the room changes.
One more breath.
I draw again, deep and deliberate, and let it out slowly. The smoke hangs between us.
Aslanov’s patience, which was always going to run out, finally runs out.
“Alright.” The word comes out quiet, almost tired. He raises the gun and brings the muzzle level with my head, and the room contracts around the gesture. “Enough of this shit.”
I look at him down the barrel and say nothing.
Three.
Two.
One.
That is when the doors come off their hinges.
Three directions simultaneously—the back entrance, the side corridor, a third point I’d clocked when they walked me in.
Popov’s men pour through all of them at once, and the room that was a controlled performance thirty seconds ago becomes something entirely different: loud, immediate, and without ceremony.
The room erupts into chaos.
Aslanov’s men retaliate fast, spinning toward Popov’s crew with weapons already drawn, the air cracking open with the first exchange of rapid gunfire.
Bodies find cover. Some drop to the floor.
Glass shatters somewhere to my left. The space that was controlled and theatrical thirty seconds ago has become something primal, all noise and motion, and the particular chaos of men who have decided to kill each other.
Popov moves through it like a man who has been waiting years for exactly this. He’s not shooting—he doesn’t need to. He takes the first man he reaches by the weapon arm, turns it, and the sound that follows is not a gunshot.
The man drops.
Popov steps over him without looking down.
His crew works the room with the ruthless efficiency of people for whom this is not extraordinary—firing clean and fast, no hesitation, no wasted movement.
Aslanov’s men have the numbers, but they didn’t have warning, and in the first critical seconds that counts for more than anything else.
Timur—hands freed by Popov’s men in the chaos—strips a Glock from the nearest body and comes up firing before he’s even fully upright. One shot. His target drops. He’s bleeding from the cut above his eye and moving like it costs him, but he’s moving.
I need a weapon and I need it fast.
The floor is cluttered with the dead and the dying, and I move through it low and fast, reading the room as I go.
Two of Aslanov’s men swing toward me simultaneously, both armed. I drop before the first shot leaves the barrel, feel the displaced air as it passes overhead. The second shot sparks off the concrete inches from my hand.
Timur puts a bullet in the first man. I come up off the floor and take the second one at close range—no gun, just hands, momentum, and the training that never leaves you—and he goes down hard.
I straighten. Scan.
Aslanov.
He’s at the far edge of the room, and the God complex is gone—what’s on his face now is something rawer and considerably more honest. Fear. His eyes are moving to the exits, calculating, the performance stripped away to pure survival instinct.
For one moment I have him.
Then he grabs Hannah.
He has her before I can close the distance—one arm across her chest, hauling her backward through the door to the rear room.
I’m already moving, vaulting a body, ducking under a shot that splinters the wall behind me.
Timur’s voice cuts through the noise: “Get her! I’ll cover!”
The back room is smaller, darker, the sounds of the firefight suddenly muffled by the walls that separate the two spaces. I come through it with a blade in my hand and close the remaining distance in three strides and then—
He swings Hannah around in front of him.
The gun comes up against her temple.
I stop.
Everything stops—my body, my breathing, the part of my brain that had a plan. It all goes completely still, and what’s left is the image I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget: Hannah, her bound hands, the steel pressed against the side of her small head.
She’s not fighting anymore.
She just looks at me, eyes blown wide with a terror that is entirely beyond anything a four-year-old should ever have to hold.
“Drop it.” Aslanov’s voice is steady. “Or I pull the trigger.”
The knife remains in my hand. Not that it changes anything—Aslanov knows that, and I know that.
I look at Hannah.
She meets my eyes and my fucking heart breaks into a million small pieces.
You failed her, mudak.
Again.
And again.
This time, there is no plan B. There is no play I can make from here that doesn’t risk her life. I’m looking at the one situation I spent four years trying to prevent, and it is exactly as bad as it can get.
The blade finally drops from my hand and hits the floor.
I don’t lunge. Don’t calculate. Don’t do anything except stand here and look at my daughter—really look at her, the way I haven’t let myself since I walked into this building, because looking meant feeling and feeling meant losing my edge.
I’ve lost it now.
There’s nothing else left to lose.