My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. Through the small window in the door, I saw everything.
A young woman—maybe twenty, Asian features, terrified eyes—was strapped to an operating table. She was awake. Fully conscious. Tears streamed down her face as she struggledagainst the leather restraints. Her mouth moved around a gag, muffled pleas that didn't need translation.
A man in surgical scrubs and mask stood over her, arranging instruments on a steel tray. Scalpels. Retractors. Everything needed to open someone up and take what wasn't freely given. Three guards stood around the room's perimeter—Belyaev soldiers, all armed, all watching the girl like she was merchandise.
The smart move was to leave. Call Nikolai. Get backup. Document everything and let my brother handle it strategically, the way Pakhans did. That's what I'd been sent here to do—observe and report. Not engage. Not start a war over one girl I didn't know.
But she looked at me through that window. Our eyes met for half a second, and I saw everything in that look. The terror. The desperation. The complete understanding that she was about to be butchered while awake, and no one was coming to save her.
The monster in my chest didn't roar this time. It did something else—it focused. All that violence I carried, all that destruction I was built for, suddenly had purpose. Direction. For once, breaking things would save someone instead of just leaving wreckage.
My phone came out. One message to Maks: "Brighton Medical, Surgery 4, going in."
Then I turned it to silent, pulled my gun, and kicked the door hard enough to splinter the frame.
The first guard turned toward the sound, hand moving for his weapon. I shot him in the kneecap before his fingers reached the holster. He went down screaming, blood spreading across the white floor. The sound echoed off the walls, sharp and final.
"Girl leaves. Now." My voice came out steady, calm. The kind of calm that preceded catastrophic violence.
The man in scrubs—he had to be Dr. Brand, though the guards had called him something else—didn't run. Didn't panic. He just looked at me with dark eyes visible above the surgical mask, calculating. His hand moved slowly, deliberately, to a red button on the wall.
"You have no idea what you've just done," he said, voice muffled but clear as alarms began to wail throughout the building.
The other two guards opened fire.
I grabbed the operating table and yanked it toward me, using it as a rolling shield. The girl on it shrieked through her gag as bullets sparked off the metal base. I fired back one-handed, keeping the table moving toward the door. One guard took a round in the shoulder, spun into the wall. The other dove behind a supply cabinet.
The table hit the doorframe. I holstered my gun, pulled my knife, and sliced through the girl's restraints in two quick motions. She sat up, ripping the gag from her mouth, gasping.
"Run," I told her. "Now. Don't stop."
She scrambled off the table and bolted down the hallway, bare feet slapping on linoleum. Behind me, the guard I'd wounded in the shoulder was trying to reload one-handed. I put him down with a single shot.
Dr. Brand hadn't moved. He stood there in his sterile scrubs, watching me like I was a specimen he was studying.
"The Besharovs," he said. It wasn't a question. "Nikolai's dog, coming to play hero."
"I'm nobody's dog."
"No? Then what do you call someone who does tricks on command?" He tilted his head. "You've disrupted a very delicate operation. The people I work for don't forgive that kind of interference."
"Fuck you."
The guard behind the cabinet made his move, coming up shooting. I rolled left, feeling the heat of a bullet pass my ear. My return fire caught him center mass. He dropped, didn't get back up.
Brand still hadn't moved. "Do you know what you've cost us tonight? Three hundred thousand dollars. That girl's kidneys were already sold."
"Send them a refund."
More footsteps in the hallway—reinforcements responding to the alarm. Brand smiled behind his mask, the expression visible in the crinkle around his eyes.
"You're not leaving this building alive," he said. "I have twelve men between you and the exit."
"Only twelve?"
He actually laughed. "You think you're saving people? We'll just find another girl tomorrow. And another the day after. You can't stop this with violence."
"Maybe not," I admitted. "But I can stop you."
