Deliberate.
Spaced.
The particular rhythm of someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
I should stay down. He'd told me to stay down. Every rational part of my brain knew that looking up was stupid, dangerous, the kind of thing that got people killed in movies and probably in real life too.
But I couldn't. I had to see. I had to know.
I raised my head just enough to look through the cracked windshield.
Maksim was fighting a man.
No. Not fighting. That word was too civilized for what I was witnessing. He wasdismantlingthe man, taking him apart with brutal efficiency, each movement precise and economical. There was no wasted motion. No hesitation. Just violence, clean and cold and absolutely devastating.
The man was bigger than Maksim. Taller, broader, the kind of physical presence that should have been an advantage. It didn't matter. Maksim moved around him like water around stone, finding gaps, exploiting weaknesses, turning the man's size against him.
A second attacker lay motionless on the pavement. I hadn't seen him fall. Hadn't heard anything that sounded like a body hitting concrete. He was just there, crumpled like a marionette with cut strings, and I couldn't tell if he was unconscious or dead.
And Maksim's face.
God, his face.
Completely blank. No anger. No fear. No satisfaction or disgust or anything at all. Just emptiness. The particular vacancy of someone who had done this so many times that it required no more emotional engagement than brushing teeth.
The man he was fighting spat something in Russian. Blood and words together, spraying from split lips. Whatever he said, it didn't slow Maksim down. Didn't even register on that terrible blank face.
Maksim's hands moved.
There was a sound.
Wet. Final. Wrong.
The kind of sound that would live in my nightmares for the rest of my life. The sound of something essential being broken.
The man crumpled. He didn't get up.
My vision went grey at the edges. The world narrowed to a tunnel, then a pinpoint, then almost nothing at all. I was going to vomit. I was going to faint. I was going to—
This is who he is.
The thought arrived with devastating clarity, cutting through the fog of shock.
The man who'd crouched down to let Ghost assess him. The man who'd caught me when I fell. The man whose voice had made me feel safe across five months of careful distance. That man had just killed two people with his hands and a gun and that terrible, empty efficiency.
Both things were true. Both things existed in the same person.
I couldn't reconcile them. Couldn't make them fit together in my head. My brain kept trying to separate Lis from Maksim from the monster standing in the street with blood on his knuckles, but they were all the same man. They'd always been the same man.
I just hadn't wanted to see it.
Ghost was pressing against my back, whimpering. The sound was pitiful. Human, almost. The cry of a creature who couldn't understand why the world had suddenly become so violent.
I knew the feeling.
Maksim was walking back toward the car now. His stride was unhurried. Calm. Like he'd just finished a business meeting, not ended two lives. His shirt had blood on it—a spray pattern across the chest, a smear on his sleeve. His hands were red in the streetlight.
And his face. Still blank. Still empty.
