“The drives are intact,” I mutter. “We can’t leave without them.”
“We almost died down there.” His jaw flexes, tight with fear. “I’m getting you out first.”
“You can’t prioritize me over the evidence,” I snap.
He stops so suddenly my shoulder hits his back. He turns, green eyes dark and scraping over me like he’s memorizing what might get taken away next.
“I can,” he says softly. “And I will.”
The words hit harder than any falling rubble. An unnamable emotion pulses in my chest. The tunnel lights above us flicker, then hum ominously, glitching.
And every dusty and cracked screen embedded in the wall sparks alive in unison.
Damian moves in front of me instantly, gun raised. But this isn’t an attack.
It’s a broadcast.
Inessa’s face fills every monitor like an omen. The perfect hair, perfect posture, perfect mask appears before our very eyes, reflected in each screen. Her red mouth curves like she’s hosting a gala, not staging an execution.
This must be hell. I’m in hell.
“My brothers and sisters,” she begins, voice smooth enough to cut glass, “I bring you truth.”
Damian’s hand tightens around his gun. I feel his rage cooling into something sharper.
The screens split, creating a mosaic: Damian stands with his gun aimed. The dust doesn’t clear, making everything severely grainy, but anyone with a trained eye knows what he is aiming at—Anton Lebedev, standing there on trembling legs.
It doesn’t end there. Damian disappears from the frame as the camera angle changes but Anton falls to the floor likea boulder dropped into water. His knees hit the floor, then his whole body thuds painfully against the rubble. A moment later, dull blood appears all around his supine body.
Anton is still fuckingalive, and on the run after trying to kill Damian and me. This is utterbullshit. But this frame-by-frame masterpiece of deception is so believable, if I were to see it and not live the reality I am in, I’d believe it too.
The lighting, the angle—I recognize the corridor. She pieced it together from our chaos in the lower tunnels, stitched lies into reality with a surgeon’s precision.
“What the—” I gasp, my mind not accepting the images. Damian doesn’t respond, eyes fixed on the screen of him pulling a trigger he never pulled.
Inessa’s voice glides on, almost playful.
“Damian Ignatov has executed Anton Lebedev in cold blood, and now he seeks to dismantle the Bratva that raised him.”
The lie comes together painfully smoothly.
“She’s declaring war,” I gape. “On us. On everyone. They’ll hunt you. All of them.”
“Huntus,” he corrects quietly.
It’s frightening, how calm and still he is. Like the eye of a storm—centered only because everything around him has become chaos.
The footage ends. Her face fills the screens again, eyes bright with conquest.
“I am the architect now,”she declares, lifting a small data key as if it were a crown.“I hold the future of this organization. Follow me, or be erased with the past.”
The monitors die, plunging the tunnel back into a sickly half dark. Damian exhales like he’s been holding his breath through the entire broadcast.
I brace a hand against the wall, grounding myself in cold metal, in the bite of rust under my nails. My heart is sprinting ahead of me, and I’m not sure I can catch it.
But I know one thing with brutal clarity—running or staying quiet won’t save us. Only truth can. I press my palm to the drives at my hip, feeling their edges through the fabric.
“Damian,” I say, and my voice steadies into something colder, sharper. “We fight her with what she fears.”
