Chapter Thirty
Nikolai
The knife is on the floor.
So are my chances of making out of this alive.
My hands are empty. And the only play I can see from here is the one I can't take because it would risk Hannah’s life.
I know it.
He knows I know it.
So I stand here, in a bare room with bare walls and nothing on the floor that helps me, and I look at the man who has been the architect of everything I’ve lost—my empire, my mother, the first four years of my daughter’s life—and I have nothing left to throw at him but my presence.
“Face it, mudak.” His voice is almost gentle. “You were always going to end up here. Nothing you did was ever going to change that.”
“Let her go.” I keep my voice flat. “It’s me you wanted. Here I am.”
Something shifts in his expression. Not surprise—he doesn’t do surprise—but a kind of satisfaction, the look of a man whose accounting has come out correct.
“You’re right,” he says. “It is.”
He takes the gun from Hannah’s temple.
The breath that leaves me is involuntary.
I watch him move the muzzle away from her head and feel the room recalibrate around that single fact—she’s not at gunpoint, she’s still in his grip but the weapon is no longer against her skull.
That is the only thing that matters. He can do whatever he wants to me. Whatever comes next, I can absorb it.
Aslanov levels the gun at my thigh and fires.
The impact drops me before the pain arrives—one moment standing, the next on the floor, the burn exploding outward from the entry point in a wave that whites out everything else.
I’ve been shot before. It doesn’t get easier.
My hand goes to my thigh by reflex, pressing against the wound, and the sound that tears out of me is not something I choose. I press my forehead toward the floor and breathe through it, jaw locked, forcing my vision clear.
Pizdets.
Then, from somewhere above me, small and certain and absolutely devastating:
“Daddy.”
It’s Hannah’s voice. The first time she’s said that word and meant me.
The pain in my thigh becomes the least significant thing in the room.
“It’s okay, Hannah.” I hold her gaze from the floor, pressing my hand against my thigh. “Everything is going to be okay.”
She nods at me, small and solemn, like she’s decided to believe it because I said it.
“Touching,” says Aslanov. “A man who lies to his daughter right up until the end.” He tilts his head. “Not exactly a legacy to be proud of.”
“And what’s yours, mudak?”
He doesn’t answer.
Instead, he shoots me in the arm.
The bicep. The impact spins me and I go down onto my side, the burn from my thigh and the burn from my arm compounding into something that narrows the whole world to a single point of white.
I hear myself make a sound. I press my good hand over the wound and breathe, and breathe, and wait for my vision to clear.
It does. Slowly.
Hannah comes back into focus first—her face, her eyes fixed on me with an expression no four-year-old should ever have to wear.
I think about Lauren.
I think about what I’ve done to her—dragging her back into the orbit of a life she never asked for, giving her something to hold onto and then lying here bleeding out on a concrete floor while our daughter watches.
She’ll grieve me again. She’ll have to explain it to Hannah again, and this time Hannah will be old enough to remember.
If she survives this.
Blyad.
Lauren should hate me for all this. Maybe she will.
The blood comes faster now, pooling dark on the floor beneath me, and I watch it with a strange detachment. I’ve put men in the ground and never thought much about what their last minutes felt like. I’m thinking about it now.
Lauren’s face appears in my mind again, the way it always does—not as I last saw her this morning, exhausted and terrified, but as she was the first time.
My estate. A lemon dress. The specific quality of her walking into a room like she hadn’t decided yet whether to own it or burn it down.
I knew then. Not what it would cost me—I wouldn’t have believed that—but that this woman was going to take me apart completely.
I was right about that.
I look at Hannah across the floor between us.
I was right about her too.
“Should I put you out of your misery,” Aslanov says, almost to himself, “or do you want to suffer a little longer?”
“Don’t hurt him!”
Hannah’s voice. He turns toward her and grabs her shoulder, pulling her back, and something in me that was already at its limit goes past it.
“It’s okay.” I catch her eyes from the floor and hold them. “You don’t have anything to worry about.” The words cost me something, but I mean them, and she needs to hear them. “I love you, kiddo.”
She doesn’t answer. She’s looking at Aslanov with an expression I recognize—Lauren’s expression, the one that comes just before she stops calculating and acts. She twists in his grip, once, twice, and then she drops her head, and does something you would never expect from a four-year-old.
She opens her mouth and bites down on his Aslanov’s wrist with everything she has.
The sound that tears out of Aslanov isn’t quite human as he pulls his arm back.
A temporary distraction.
That’s all I need.
I move before the pain has time to register its objection—off the floor, one functioning leg, one functioning arm, closing the distance on pure forward momentum.
The bullet wounds tear open with the effort, fresh blood running hot, but I don’t stop.
I hit the fucker with my shoulder first, driving him back, and then my fist finds his face.
His head snaps sideways, and for one moment, all twenty years of accumulated debt between us are in my knuckles and his jaw.
He staggers.
The gun drops.
He reaches out for Hannah as he goes back, and that removes the last of whatever restraint I had left.
I hit him again.
Even harder this time.
He goes down and I go with him, and what follows isn’t a fight anymore. It’s a reckoning.
My fist rises and falls and I feel things crack beneath it as I keep going—for my mother, a bullet and no funeral; for Lauren, four years of grief she was handed like it was her inheritance; for Hannah, bound and taped and terrified in a room full of armed men because this pizda decided she was useful.
I keep going until there’s blood on my hands that isn’t mine and his face is something he won’t recognize in a mirror. I keep ruining what’s left of his face, running on pure rage and adrenaline, the sound of my fist connecting is the only sound in the room.
I stop.
The room has gone quiet around us. Faint light bleeds in from the main room, enough to see by, not enough to soften what I’m looking at.
Aslanov is no longer recognizable. What’s left of his face catches the light in pieces—caved in, the bone structure gone, blood pooling in the hollows.
His chest still rises and falls, shallow and wet, but his eyes are open.
Somehow, through all of it, his eyes are still open, finding mine in the dark.
I pull my fist back for another pass.
“Stop!”
Hannah’s voice cuts through everything—the ringing in my ears, the tunnel vision, the four years of accumulated fury still moving through my arm.
I freeze.
She’s a few feet away, tears streaming down her face, watching me with an expression that reaches somewhere underneath all of it and pulls me back.
I look at my fist. The knuckles are stripped raw, skin hanging in tatters, the whole hand slick and red. I look at what’s beneath it.
I’ve been doing this in front of my four-year-old daughter.
I lower my arm.
I bring my mouth close to what remains of Aslanov’s ear. “You’re lucky she’s here,” I say quietly. “If she wasn’t, I’d gut you like a pig and make you eat it.”
His eyes stay on me.
Whatever he was, he doesn’t look like it anymore.
I strain to push myself upright and reach for Hannah, taking her hand in mine.
What follows is the hardest walk of my life—across the room, one useless leg dragging, the wounds on my thigh and arm bleeding freely now that the adrenaline has nothing left to burn.
I focus on Hannah’s hand in mine and keep dragging myself.
I make it four steps before my leg gives out entirely.
We go down together. I twist as I fall, taking the impact on my shoulder, keeping Hannah from hitting the floor. She lands against my chest and I lie there looking up at the ceiling, breathing, the pain from both wounds arriving all at once in a wave that whites out the edges of my vision.
The blood loss is serious. I can feel it in the way the room is moving—slow, heavy, like the floor is tilting by degrees. I press my hand against my thigh and it makes no difference.
The door opens.
A shape fills it. I reach for a weapon that isn’t there.
Hannah scrambles to her feet beside me. “Timur!”
He comes through the door at a crouch, Hannah already in his arms, her face buried in his neck. He looks down at me—takes in the leg, the arm, the floor—and doesn’t waste time on commentary.
“Come on, boss. We need to move you.”
“Da.” I manage.
He gets down beside me, gets an arm under mine, and starts working. Blood is running down his face from the cut above his eye but he’s moving cleanly, purposefully, which means he’s still functional somehow. Too bad I can’t say the same about myself.
“It’s over,” he says, reading the question before I can ask it. “We’ve done it, Niko.”
I let my head fall back for a moment and close my eyes.
We’ve done it.
Then I put my weight on Timur and start moving toward the door, toward Hannah, toward whatever comes next.