Prologue
Shelby
Russia - Two Weeks Ago
The warehouse smells like rust and something else that makes my skin crawl, even before we breach the door.
Nikolai moves with the precision of a man who’s done this a thousand times.His team of Bratva operatives fans out around the perimeter, weapons ready, expressions blank.They’re professionals.Efficient.Cold.
I follow half a step behind, rifle raised, breathing controlled.I’ve been doing this for a while now—three months of surveillance, intelligence gathering, and tonight: extraction.If the intel is good, there will be kids inside.Kids who’ve been trafficked through Dracul’s operation.After my brothers and I killed the motherfucker, sending his black soul to hell, we thought his pedophile ring would be gone.
We were sorely wrong.
We underestimated these sick men.We never could have fathomed the lengths to which they would go to satisfy their heinous fantasies.
Now these kids need saving.
“Two teams, thirty seconds,” Nikolai whispers into comms.His accent is thick—Russian bleeding through the controlled English.“In and out.We find them, we take them, we disappear.”
“Copy,” I respond, keeping my voice steady.My hands are steady.Everything is steady.
It’s a lie.
But I am very good at lying to myself.
Nikolai nods to his breach team.They move with synchronized precision toward the loading dock.I position myself at the northeast corner, covering their six, scanning the roofline for snipers or lookouts.The night is cold and clear, stars visible above the industrial sprawl.Beautiful.Terrible.
The warehouse door explodes inward.
Gunfire erupts immediately—not expected, which means the intel was compromised, which means they were waiting for us.
A child’s scream cuts through the darkness.A girl, maybe seven, running toward the light, away from danger.
I lunge forward to grab her, but someone is screaming my name, grabbing my arm, pulling me backward.My muscles won’t obey.My eyes won’t focus.All I can see is the small figure and the approaching footsteps and…
The shot.The impact.The child crumpling.
“MOVE!”Nikolai’s voice slams through the comms, through the chaos.Still, I am frozen in place, watching Nikolai’s team return fire, as operatives move through the warehouse with lethal efficiency, and the nightmare repeats itself in a foreign country with the same ending.
Two kids.Dead.
A third child, a boy maybe ten years old, manages to slip past the gunfire and run toward the tree line.I watch him go.That’s the only mercy we’re getting tonight.At least one of them makes it out.
The operation takes forty-two seconds to go from controlled extraction to blood-soaked failure.
My freeze lasts maybe five seconds longer—an eternity in combat—before my body finally responds to the urgent command Nikolai’s been barking.Move.Move.MOVE.
A bullet catches me in the shoulder as I turn, punching through muscle and bone with a searing white-hot pain that barely registers against the static in my skull.
Nikolai surges by my side as if from thin air.He throws an arm around my waist, dragging me toward the extraction point.His second-in-command, bleeding out, worthless, frozen like a child, while kids actually died.What was I thinking?I should have known better than to volunteer for this.
“Stay with me,” Nikolai hisses, half-carrying me now as his team provides covering fire.“We’re going home.Not Boston.Not yet.We’re going to my safe house first.”
My vision grays at the edges.I try to focus on Nikolai’s face— determined, impossibly steady—but all I can see is the moment before the shooting started.The moment I was supposed to be ready.The moment I wasn’t.
The extraction vehicle, a sleek black SUV, is thirty meters away.Twenty.Ten.
We collapse into the back, Nikolai barking orders in rapid Russian.The car lurches forward, tires spinning on gravel.
