Petrosyan grins, teeth red. "You'll find out. When he takes what you love."
I lower the pipe with one arm and raise the gun with the other, my finger tightening on the trigger. But dead men don't lead to their handlers. Dead men don't dismantle networks. And whoever orchestrated this, whoever's been watching Fee, poisoning Moira, stealing shipments, manufacturing evidence, they're still out there.
"Boss." Alexei's voice cuts through my thoughts. "What should I do with this piece of shit?"
I study Petrosyan. The way he's holding himself against the container. The resignation in his eyes. He expects the bullet.Wants it, even. A quick death instead of what Ruslan does to people who know things.
Which means he knows things worth protecting with death.
"Ruslan's going to have a second session with this one, and this time, he's not going to hold back."
Petrosyan's eyes widen.
"Yuri. The shipment."
Static crackles before his voice comes through, flat and efficient as always. "Sitting exactly where it should be. The paperwork's altered but sloppy. Our guy rushed this one."
I know why he rushed it.
Fee.
The obsession I heard in those manufactured clues, the careful surveillance that tracked her movements, the intimate knowledge of her digital habits. This isn't about revenge or business. This is about wanting what's mine.
Yuri knows it, too. I can hear it in the micro-pause before he delivered his report, the slight edge that enters his voice when discussing threats to people he's claimed as part of his pack. He won't say it out loud because he respects the hierarchy, respects that Fee is mine to protect, mine to worry about, mine to kill for.
But he sees it.
"Fee?"
"I'm here." Her voice floods my earpiece, raw and shaking. "I'm fucking happy to hear your voice. I was terrified."
Something in my chest shifts, feeling like tectonic plates are realigning around a new center of gravity.
"I'm coming back to you. It's a promise, my Solnishko."
"You better." Fire underneath the shake now. "Be unkillable like you said you are, or I'll kill you myself."
The corner of my mouth twitches. There she is. My fierce little sun who doesn't cry when men try to murder her, who hacks assassin networks, and demands answers instead of protection.
"Yuri." I switch back to tactical, forcing my mind into the cold calculation that keeps people alive. "You're sure he's only hearing and seeing what we want?"
"Da." No hesitation. "Comms are blocked and scrambled. He's chasing shadows on a loop I fed his surveillance systems. As far as his monitoring shows, you're still stalking containers near sector three." Yuri's voice drops, which means he's about to deliver news I won't like. "Lorenzo left the hospital. Furious. Soon as he heard about Moira's supplements. Dimitri's tracking him, but that's an unpredictable variable now."
Fuck.
Lorenzo Carlucci on a vengeance rampage is the kind of chaos that gets civilians killed and territories burned. He doesn't think tactically when the family's threatened. He thinks Old Testament.
"Yuri, keep Dimitri on him. And Fee, I still have to take you out on that dinner date."
"Boss." Viktor's voice joins. "Warehouse is empty. No secondary positions. No backup. Just the Armenian."
"Good work, Viktor. Watch the perimeter."
"Boss, the inventory check. We didn't crack every crate, but we sampled random containers from each pallet. Serial numbers match the manifest. Nothing obviously missing or replaced."
"Understood. Keep eyes on the area."
"Da."
