“Your turn to bleed,” he says. “You have no idea… what’s coming.”
His hand falls from my coat. Lights out.
“We’re done here,” I say.
We leave the bar behind. Fear needs places to sit and talk; it carries our message better than any courier. My men peel out and move into the streets. They all have their orders.
The cold stings my cheeks and my breath ghosts. Alex rolls his shoulders. We walk the thin ribbon of dirty snow that passes for a sidewalk in Brighton Beach at midnight.
“He was stalling,” Alex says.
“Absolutely.”
“If we hit Siren’s Steps, we hit carefully.”
“Yes.”
Alex’s phone buzzes. He pulls it from his pocket, the color in his face draining a shade. When he turns the screen toward me, the world narrows to a hard point. Cassandra. Cheap tape across her wrists, gray cloth gag stuffed into her mouth. Concrete room, single bulb. Chin raised despite it all. Eyes steady like she’s decided what she’ll give and what she won’t. Her ribbon is gone, and I feel the absence like a missing limb.
Surrender the pakhan seat. Bratva votes a new leader. Your girl for your crown.
“Tracked?” I ask.
“Burner. The link is an image host with a dead-end redirect. They know what they’re doing.”
“They always do until they don’t.”
We keep walking because motion feels like control. Across the street, Orlov steps out from the shadow of a bodega’s lowered grate.
“Back and side covered,” he says. “We’ve got tails if we want them.”
I nod once. “We don’t. Not tonight.”
Alex’s phone remains in his hand. The words beneath the photo vibrate in my chest cavity like a second heart.Surrender the seat. My crown for the girl.The choice is a child’s math presented like calculus. They want spectacle. They want medragged into a room to watch me kneel. They want to watch me beg.
“Orlov,” I say, “wake the house. Everybody. Ghost phones only. No chatter. Block-by-block pull on Durov’s transit nodes—streets, slips, garages, anything that moves.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Alex.”
“We need location,” he says. “We need proof of life beyond one frame. We need to assume Siren’s Steps is a decoy and still be ready if it isn’t.”
“We will be.”
He searches my face like he’s trying to figure out which version of me has the wheel. The one who runs the empire cleanly, or the one who kills.
“They’re forcing your hand,” he says.
“They think so.”
“What’s the reply?”
I take the phone. I send an answer that is neither rage nor surrender, because those are the two things they’re ready for.
Then I answer Alex, speaking into the cold night.
“I’m coming.”
