Roman Chapter
The Petrov brothers fill the service corridor with two hundred kilos of Spetsnaz-trained muscle, and the emergency lights strobing red turn their matching buzz cuts into something bloody.
Nikolai and Pavel. Vadim bought their loyalty when their father died owing the brotherhood six million rubles, and they’ve been paying off that debt with broken bones and shallow graves ever since.
Their Glocks center on my chest for half a second before drifting to the woman pressed against my back.
My hand finds Anya’s waist through the midnight silk of her dress, and I pull her behind me. Her wrist brushes my hip, and she’s shaking.
The split on her cheekbone makes my vision red. The bruises on her throat make me want to burn the world.
“Going somewhere, boss?” Nikolai’s voice is too cheerful, the sound of a man who genuinely enjoys hurting people. “Midnight auction is about to start. Vadim wants the whole class present.”
“Vadim can wait.” My voice scrapes low against the rage sitting in my throat.
They don’t move. The smoke is getting thicker now, curling through the ventilation system, and the air tastes like salt and burning plastic. Luka’s thermite charges haven’t detonated yet, but Nerissa already smells wrong.
Pavel’s smile spreads wet and eager across his face. “Vadim wants the girl. Alive. You? He didn’t specify.” His gun shifts, the muzzle drawing a line of death toward the woman wearing my sapphires and the evidence of violence I couldn’t prevent.
Behind me, Anya stiffens. Her hand slides down her thigh, finding the Glock strapped above her knee on the opposite leg from where the USB drive is secured in her garter holster. She shifts her weight forward.
“Last chance,” I say, and my pulse is pounding against my ribs, but my hands are steady because they have to be. “Walk away. Tell Vadim you didn’t see us.”
“Can’t do that, boss.” Nikolai’s finger tightens on the trigger. “He pays better.”
Wrong fucking answer.
My hand is already moving when the world ends.
The yacht doesn’t shudder. It heaves.
The sound is God’s fist hitting steel, a concussive boom that vibrates up through the soles of my shoes and into my teeth and keeps going until my skull is ringing with it.
The floor lurches hard to the left, and gravity stops making sense, and somewhere below us, metal screams as structural beams tear themselves apart.
Luka didn’t just blow the auction room. He gutted the ship.
The brothers blink. Half a second of distraction, their eyes dropping to the floor, to the threat they can hear but can’t see.
I don’t look. I’ve been waiting for this.
Two rounds into Nikolai’s chest.
The suppressor turns the shots into heavy coughs, but the impact is absolute, two holes appearing in his tactical vest that bloom red faster than he can process what’s happening.
He drops, and he’s dead before he hits the tilting floor, before his brother can do anything except pivot toward the only leverage he has left.
My wife.
“No!” The roar tears out of me.
Pavel fires. Anya fires.
The click of her Glock jamming is the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
She racks the slide without hesitating, clears the round, fires again, and this time the shot tears through Pavel’s shoulder in a spray of red.
She hit him high, messy and ugly, but he’s running on adrenaline and hate now, and a bullet hole isn’t enough to stop him.
He lunges. His hand snaps a switchblade open. He grabs her wrist and yanks her forward so hard that the silk of her dress tears at the shoulder, and suddenly she’s in front of me instead of behind, and his hand is closing around her throat where the bruises from Dmitri’s fingers are still fresh.
“Anya!”
I launch myself at him, and the knife catches me across the ribs.
The pain is a searing line of fire that scrapes bone and steals the breath from my lungs, but I don’t stop because I can’t stop.
He’s got his hands on my life. His dirty fucking fingers are pressing into the same bruises my dead cousin left, and all I can see is red.
I grab his wrist and twist until the radius snaps.
The sound is a dry branch breaking, and his scream is high and wet, and his grip goes slack. Anya stumbles backward, gasping. The knife clatters to the floor, and blood is pouring down my side, but I don’t care.
I drive my knee into his stomach. The ribs give way under the impact. I do it again, and again, and I want him broken. I want him to understand what happens when you try to turn her into leverage.
I slam him backward into the wall, plaster cracking behind his skull.
“You marked her.” My voice comes out wrong, an animal growl. “Second man tonight who made that mistake.”
Krov za krov. Blood for blood.
My hand closes around his windpipe. I squeeze. His eyes bulge. He claws at my arm, but I don’t let go. The light goes out. I wait until he’s just meat.
I let him drop.
My hand is shaking when I pull it back, from the sheer feral need to do it again, to find every man on this ship who looked at her wrong and squeeze until they stop moving.
The tremor runs up my arm, and I clench my fist until my knuckles go white because I can’t let her see this.
I can’t let her know how close I am to losing control completely.
“Roman.”
Anya is pressed against the wall with her chest heaving and her swollen eye struggling to focus, and her throat mottled purple and yellow. She sees the monster.
And she doesn’t look away.
“You’re bleeding.” Her voice is breathless, wrecked from Dmitri’s hands and the screaming and the smoke filling her lungs.
I step toward her and ignore the fire eating through my side. I cup her face with bloody hands, needing to feel her skin, needing to verify she’s real and breathing and here.
Something cold moves through my chest when I look at her throat. The fingerprints are layered over fingerprints. Dmitri’s. Pavel’s. Evidence of every second I wasn’t fast enough.
“Did he hurt you?” The words come out strangled.
“No. I shot him.” She looks at Pavel’s body, then back at me, and something in her expression is different now. Harder. “My gun jammed and I cleared it, and I shot him.”
“You did perfectly, solnyshko.” I press my forehead against hers and breathe her in. “You were fucking perfect.”
The floor tilts again. Steeper this time. Fifteen degrees and climbing, and below us, water is rushing into compartments that are supposed to be sealed, and the Nerissa is dying faster than anyone planned.
“We have to move. Now.”
I grab her hand.
The deck hits us with wind and chaos. Cold air slaps my face, carrying the smell of burning fiberglass, and the yacht is listing hard to starboard with flames climbing the superstructure and painting the night orange.
Guards are running without direction. Buyers in tuxedos are fighting over lifeboats that won’t launch.
The ship screams as the hull tears open.
We claw our way up the deck. My side is screaming with every step, the wound pulling tight, but Anya’s grip is iron in mine, and I’m not letting go until we’re off this fucking ship.
I look up.
Vadim is on the upper deck, backlit by the flames, watching his empire burn with the same expression he wore when he told me to marry the chemist or lose everything I’d built. He’s not panicking. He’s not running. Because beyond him, on the helipad, rotors are already spinning.
His eyes find mine across fifty meters of smoke and destruction. He smiles.
It’s not a happy smile. It’s a promise. Run, little wolf. This isn’t over. I will find you. I will take her. I will make you watch.
“Fuck you, Vadim,” I spit, even though he can’t hear me over the roar of the fire and the screaming of the dying ship. “Na huy, suka.”
“Roman!” Anya tugs my arm. “The water!”
I tear my eyes away from my uncle as he turns and walks toward his helicopter, unhurried, untouchable. One day, I’m going to put a bullet between his eyes and watch him drop the way his mercenaries dropped tonight. But not now. Now I have to get her off this ship.
We reach the railing. The Black Sea churns below us, black and cold and six meters down. The jacket Luka insisted I wear is already half off my shoulders, the emergency CO2 bladder built into the lining still intact despite the blood soaking through my shirt.
“Can you swim?”
“Yes.” Anya looks down, and I see terror flash across her face before she buries it. “It’s high.”
“I know.” I strip the jacket off completely, and the movement tears at my wound, sends fresh hot blood down my flank, but I drape the jacket around her shoulders and pull her close. “Put this on. Now. Wrap your legs around me. Don’t let go.”
She climbs me, arms around my neck, thighs locked against my hips, and even now, bleeding and cornered, the weight of her body against mine makes my head swim.
Her chest is pressed flat against my chest, and her heart is pounding hard.
I can feel it through both our clothes. The USB drive is a hard rectangle against my hip.
I press my lips to her forehead, to the only part of her face that isn’t bruised or bleeding.
“Deep breath, Anya. We go on three.”
The ship groans, a terrifying shriek of metal surrendering to physics.
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
We jump.
The fall is weightless. The wind tears past my ears. And then—
The cold hits like a sledgehammer. The air leaves my lungs.
Salt water stings my wound, and for a second, I can’t think.
I can’t breathe, my grip on her loosening before I can stop it.
Her legs slip against my hips, and panic crashes through me harder than the cold because I’m losing her, I’m fucking losing her—
I grab her waist and pull her back against me so hard we both go under.
The jacket hisses. The bladder inflates. We rocket toward the surface and break through, gasping, spitting water, fighting to breathe.
“I’ve got you,” I choke out, and my arm is locked around her so tight it probably hurts, but I don’t care. “I’ve got you. Kick!”
The cold is already biting deep, tightening my muscles, making every movement cost twice what it should. I kick hard with one arm locked around her and the other cutting through the waves.
“Where’s the boat?” Anya’s voice is thin, shaking. “Roman, where’s the boat?”
I scan the darkness. Nothing. No lights. No engine. Just black water and distant flames and the sound of people dying on a ship that’s sliding toward the bottom of the sea.
“There.” I point with my free hand, and my fingers are already going numb. “Two hundred meters. East.”
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s there. Luka wouldn’t leave us. Swim, Anya. Fucking swim.”
We fight the sea. Every stroke is a battle. My side has gone numb now, which is bad, and the extraction boat is still too far away, and I can’t feel my legs anymore.
Then I hear it. The growl of an engine. A light cutting through the darkness, sweeping the water.
“Here!” I roar, and my voice cracks on the word. “Over here!”
The light finds us. The engine guns. Luka’s face appears. He grabs Anya first. Hauls her over. Then me. I hit the deck hard, coughing up half the Black Sea.
Wool blankets land on us. I pull Anya into me, wrap her up, bury my face in her wet, salty hair while she shivers so hard I can feel her teeth rattling. She’s convulsing against me.
“You have it?” My voice is ragged, barely human.
She presses her hand to her thigh where the garter holster sits beneath soaked silk. “Still there.”
“Good.”
I lean back against the bench and let the pain come. It’s been waiting, patient, and now it floods through my side with every heartbeat. Luka is saying something about safe houses and extraction protocols, but I can’t hear him over the ringing in my ears.
Fireworks explode overhead.
Odessa is celebrating the New Year. Red and gold bursts paint the sky, casting surreal light over the water, over the blood on the deck, over the woman curled against my chest.
In the distance, the Nerissa groans one last time and slips beneath the surface. The flames hiss out. Vadim’s flagship is gone.
I’m bleeding. I’m freezing. But I have her. I have the leverage. And the sea has the rest.
“You’re hurt bad,” Anya whispers, her fingers hovering over my blood-soaked shirt.
“I’m fine.” I pull her tighter against me until there’s no space between us, until I can feel every breath she takes. “The empire is at the bottom of the sea, solnyshko.”