I arrive at the breach just as the first wave of attackers meets our defensive line. It's chaos—close quarters, hand-to-hand in places, the kind of brutal fighting that separates survivors from corpses.
I throw myself into it.
Knife in one hand, pistol in the other. An attacker lunges at me; I sidestep, open his throat, move on. Another raises his weapon; I put two rounds in his chest before he can fire. A third comes at me from behind; I spin, block his strike, drive my knife into his eye socket.
Blood everywhere. On my hands, my face, my clothes. The copper smell fills my nostrils, familiar as breathing. I've lived with this smell since I was fifteen years old. Since I stood over my parents' bodies and swore to become something terrible enough to survive in this world.
"Push them back!" I roar. "Don't let them through!"
We fight for what feels like hours but is probably only minutes. The breach becomes a killing ground, bodies piling up until we're climbing over the dead to reach the living. I losecount of how many men I kill—five, six, maybe more. They blur together, faces I won't remember, lives ended by my hands.
One of them gets close enough to slash my arm before I put him down. The cut is shallow, barely a scratch, but it reminds me that I'm mortal. That even I can bleed. That somewhere in the basement of this house, there's a woman waiting for me to come back alive.
But slowly, agonizingly, we push them back.
The east gate holds. Barely.
I lean against the ruined wall, catching my breath, surveying the carnage. Half a dozen of my men are down—dead or wounded, I can't tell yet. Twice as many attackers lie scattered across the courtyard, their blood soaking into the gravel.
This is what victory looks like in my world. Corpses and ruin and the knowledge that more is coming.
"Status report," I demand through the radio. "All teams."
The responses come in one by one. South wall holding. East gate secured. North wall—
"North wall is breached," Alexei's voice cuts through. "They're through the drainage tunnel. Fighting in the gardens."
"Internal security holding," Lenkov adds from the command center. "No penetration of the main house yet."
Yet. The word hangs in the air like a threat.
The north wall. The drainage tunnel. The weakness I identified days ago, the one we fortified but couldn't fully seal.
I'm already moving.
The north wall is the real fight.
They breach the drainage tunnel around two in the morning. A dozen men pour through before we can seal it, and suddenly the fighting is inside the perimeter. I watch on my tactical display as icons scatter—my guards engaging in the gardens, among my mother's overgrown hedges and forgotten fountains.
The garden is mine. I know every path, every shadow, every hiding spot. I used to play here as a child, before the world taught me that play was a luxury I couldn't afford. Now I use that knowledge for something else entirely.
I move through the darkness like a ghost, my weapon ready, my senses tuned to every sound and movement. The gunfire is sporadic now—short bursts, then silence. My men are hunting the invaders. So am I.
The night air is thick with smoke and the smell of cordite. Somewhere to my left, a man screams and then goes silent. Somewhere ahead, I hear the sharp crack of a rifle and the thud of a body hitting the ground. The garden has become a maze of death, and I navigate it by instinct.
I find them near the greenhouse.
Three of Sergei's men, pinned down behind a stone bench, exchanging fire with my guards. They don't see me coming. They don't see anything—not until I'm on them, my knife opening the first one's throat before he can turn.
The second one gets his gun up. I deflect it, put two bullets in his chest. The third tries to run. I shoot him in the back.
No hesitation. No remorse. This is what I am. What I've always been.
I move through the garden, clearing threats, coordinating with my teams through the radio. Two more attackers emerge from behind a hedge—I drop them both before they can raise their weapons. Another tries to ambush me from the shadows of the old fountain. I hear him coming, spin, and put three rounds in his center mass.
The breach is contained within twenty minutes. The attackers who made it through the tunnel are dead or dying.
I stand over the last one—young, barely older than Bianca, bleeding out on the grass. He looks up at me with fading eyes, his mouth moving like he's trying to say something. A plea for mercy, maybe. Or a curse.
