I nodded. We’d been planning this since the moment I learned the truth about Cassandra, about what Vance had been forcing her to do. Rafael knew. He’d known for longer than I wanted to think about. The old bastard had been three steps ahead of all of us, letting me walk into the darkness so I could see for myself. It was the kind of thing he did—created situations where you had no choice but to understand the weight of your own decisions.
But I was done with games. I was done with waiting.
Kirill’s fingers danced across the keyboard, composing a message that looked desperate. Hungry. The kind of thing a man would send if he wanted to trade his soul for leverage.I know how you can destroy Kamarovs. I have intel that will make your revenge the peace of your life.
The words felt like poison on the digital page. Bait. But good bait. Vance wouldn’t be able to resist.
We waited. Three hours passed like broken glass under my skin. Kirill brought vodka. We didn’t talk. There was nothing left to say—we both knew what came next. My best friend sat across from me with those sharp blue eyes that saw everything, and we existed in the comfortable silence of men who’d fought beside each other enough times that words became unnecessary.
I thought about my brother Damir. About my parents, who didn’t know their youngest son was about to walk into a trap they’d kill me for entering. About Rafael, who’d sent me to Chicago as punishment for something I didn’t understand at the time. All of it made sense now. The temporary assignment. The way things had aligned. He was testing me. Preparing me for this.
Then Vance responded.
An address. A location. Instructions to come alone if I wanted to keep my family breathing.
I laughed. It sounded like gravel in a blender.
“Don’t do this,” Kirill said, and his voice carried the weight of genuine concern now. Not fear for himself, but fear for me. He knew what was waiting at that address. He knew because he was the one who’d found Vance’s network signature, who’d traced the shadow of his obsession back to its source. “You walk in there alone, you might not walk out. And then what? What happens to her?”
“If I don’t make it,” I told him, staring at the coordinates on the screen, my jaw so tight it felt like it might crack, “you raise my child. In the Bratva. Strong. You make sure Cassandra never forgets what he cost her.”
Kirill’s jaw clenched. He knew I wasn’t asking for permission. I was stating facts. I was laying out contingencies like a man who’d already accepted that he might not survive the night.
“And if you do make it?” he asked quietly.
“Then I burn everything he built.”
I left his place as the sun was setting, painting the Chicago sky in shades of amber and blood. My Glock sat heavy at my hip as I drove toward the address, my mind running through scenarios. I’d been trained for this—trained in combat, in strategy, in the art of staying alive when everything wanted you dead. But none of the training prepared me for this specific flavor of rage, this particular kind of desperation that came from knowing someone had been using the person I loved as a weapon.
The abandoned building outside Chicago looked like something forgotten by time. Broken windows. Rusted metal. Chain-link fences with gaps you could drive through. The kindof place where men came to disappear. Where secrets got buried under concrete and rust.
I parked two blocks away and moved through the shadows like I was born there, like the darkness had always been my natural habitat. My hands were steady. My breathing was controlled. This was the part I was good at—the approach, the reconnaissance, the moment before violence became inevitable.
When I stepped through the door, I realized immediately that I’d walked into a trap. The realization should have terrified me. Instead, it clarified everything.
Armed men emerged from the darkness like they’d been spawned from it. Six of them. Maybe seven. I stopped counting because counting suggested I was still thinking strategically, and strategy had no place in what was about to happen. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, taking in the layout of the warehouse—the shipping containers stacked haphazardly, the catwalk overhead, the emergency exits that were probably blocked.
Vance descended from above like a devil, taking his time, his designer suit almost glowing in the dim light. He moved with the confidence of a man who’d orchestrated this moment so perfectly he didn’t even need to rush through it.
“You came,” he said, and there was something almost mournful in his voice. Almost human. “I wasn’t sure you would. I thought maybe the wife would keep you home, safe in your little domestic fantasy. But no. You came anyway.”
“Where is she?” My voice came out cold. Measured. Lethal.
“She’s exactly where she’s always been, Kamarov. Playing house. Playing family. Playing like she’s not the instrument I crafted to destroy everything you are.” Vance stepped closer, and in the weak light filtering through the broken windows, I could see his eyes. Green and empty and sick with years of cultivated rage. “I’ve been patient. So patient. Waiting for theright moment to make her useful. And she was. God, was she useful.”
The words hit like body blows. Each one a punch aimed at the soft places inside me. He’d been watching her grow up. Stalking her. Waiting. The thought made something primal wake up inside my chest, something that didn’t think or calculate—it just destroyed.
“Her father was supposed to learn what it felt like to lose everything,” Vance continued, pacing like he was giving a sermon. “I wanted him to watch as I took away his daughter. I wanted him to understand the weight of what he’d done to me. But he died before I could finish with him. So I settled for the girl. Turns out she was even more useful than he would have been.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, though I already knew. Men like Vance needed confession. They needed the person they were destroying to understand the architecture of their hatred. They needed to feel justified before they pulled the trigger.
“Because you need to understand what you’re defending,” he said. “You need to know that every moment you’ve spent with her, every kiss, every promise, every time you whispered that you loved her—she was already mine. She was my tool. My weapon. And the best part?” He smiled, and it was the smile of a man who’d gone too far down a dark road to ever find his way back. “She’ll never stop wondering if any of it was real.”
The words were designed to wound, and they did. They cut deep. But they also clarified something in me. This man had spent years building his revenge on a foundation of lies. He’d convinced himself that Cassandra was always his, that she was never capable of genuine feeling. He was so consumed by his own need for vengeance that he couldn’t even recognize what real love looked like anymore.
And that was when I knew I was going to kill him.
“But things got complicated,” Vance continued. “She fell in love. Or maybe you’re just that good at pretending to love her. Either way, she stopped being useful. She started warning Rafael about my operations. She became a liability instead of an asset. So now you’re here, and I’m going to end this the way I should have ended it years ago.”
