So we move.
Dimitri is at my side through every step. He’s methodical, unflinching. He keeps count of the bribes, tallies the flipped men, ensures every disappearance leaves no trail. He says little, but his silence is steadying, a reminder that the work must be done without hesitation.
The first man dies in his sleep. A single shot through the temple, his body found at dawn by a mistress who didn’t know his real name. His death sparks whispers of enemies abroad, not mutiny within. The illusion holds.
Another is plucked off the street, dragged into the back of a van. He vanishes without sound or trace, his properties signed over within the week. Another is cornered in his office, stacks of bribe money piled on his desk when the bullet takes him. Eachstrike is precise, deliberate. The network shrinks, the rot bleeds out one vein at a time.
Vivienne watches.
I don’t hide it from her, not anymore. She sits in the car some nights, eyes fixed on the warehouse door until I come out. Other times, she stands just inside the room as the shot rings out, her face pale but steady, unblinking. She doesn’t turn away. She doesn’t ask me to stop.
Her silence tells me what words don’t: she understands.
Each man is a thread, and as we cut them, the Bratva shifts. The air grows sharper, cleaner. Fear lingers, yes—but it’s no longer mindless. It’s shaped, calculated. Deals once made in the shadows collapse, and loyalty re-forms around me. Not because I am my father’s son, but because they see I am not him.
Then comes the last name.
Gavriil Ivanovich. My father’s consigliere. The man who once guided my hand across ledgers, teaching me numbers before I understood what they meant. The man who poured vodka into my glass on my fifteenth birthday, who patted my shoulder when my knuckles bled after my first fight. The man I once believed loyal, wise, unshakable.
His betrayal cuts deepest. He knew. He saw the deals my father made, the strings Igor pulled. He signed his name alongside theirs, and he said nothing. He let me inherit not an empire, but a carcass.
We find him in his dacha outside Ryazan, a modest estate wrapped in snow and silence. He greets me with caution, but not fear. His eyes flick to Vivienne once, then back to me, and I see the calculation there—the thought that maybe I’ve come to reason, to bend, to ask him to stand at my side.
I don’t speak.
Neither does he.
The silence stretches, heavy with history. Memories press in: his hand steadying mine as a boy, his voice teaching me to listen, to weigh, to strike. I thought of him as a second father once.
Now he’s just another name on the list.
I raise my gun. His eyes don’t waver, though his chest rises slow with resignation. No words pass between us. There’s nothing left to say.
I pull the trigger.
The shot echoes through the room, sharp and final. He crumples where he stands, blood soaking into the rug his wife once chose, long before she left him for safer shores.
For a moment, the silence is unbearable. My arm trembles with the recoil, my jaw locked tight enough to crack. The betrayal burns deeper than the rest, hotter, sharper, because it’s not just his crime I’ve punished, it’s my own blindness.
Vivienne stands in the doorway, her face unreadable. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t move. I see it in her eyes: the recognition that this wound cut deeper than the others. That this was more than vengeance.
Dimitri steps forward, checks the body, nods once. Another name crossed off. Another piece of rot carved out.
I lower the gun slowly, my chest heaving.
The list is finished. The names are gone, but the work isn’t over.
The Bratva still stands, blood-soaked but alive. And now it belongs to me—not as my father’s son, not as Igor’s puppet, but as something new.
Vivienne’s gaze holds mine across the room. In her silence, I hear the truth: she knows what I’ve done. She knows what I’ve become.
I think she likes it.
The snow falls heavier by the time we finish. Gavriil’s body is gone, carried into the woods and buried in the frozen earth with no marker, no prayer. Dimitri oversees it with the same quiet efficiency he’s had since the first man fell, his face expressionless, his movements precise. I don’t watch the shovel break ground. I can’t. The image of Gavriil’s eyes, calm even as I raised my gun, is enough to follow me for years.
When it’s done, when the men scatter back to their vehicles, I lead Vivienne deeper into the dacha. She doesn’t ask where we’re going, doesn’t flinch when I unlock the cellar door and usher her down into the dark. She follows, her breath soft behind me, steady even now.
The air is thick with mildew and dust, but beneath it lies another scent: ink, paper, leather. I flick the light, and the bulbs hum weakly to life.
