A sick, triumphant smile curves his lips.
“You want her?” he asks softly. “Drop the weapon, Mrs. Rusnak.”
My heart slams against my ribs. My hands tremble around the weight of my gun.
He tilts his head, amused. “What will it be?”
My fingers loosen.
My knees shake.
I begin to lower the weapon.
My mother whimpers.
Deveraux’s smile widens.
And then—
A shift in the air.
A shadow glides behind him, silent as a phantom.
Dimitri.
He moves like death taught him personally—no sound, no warning, just cold precision. I don’t breathe. Deveraux doesn’t even know he’s no longer in control.
One shot.
Close-range.
Perfectly placed.
The bullet hits before Deveraux can flinch.
He crumples like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
The echo booms through the vault like thunder, rolling, final.
I collapse beside my mother, sobbing—raw, shaking, unable to stop. “Mama…. Mama….”
Dimitri kneels opposite me, fingers steady as he checks her pulse.
A beat.
Another.
Then his shoulders fall, just slightly, in the closest thing to relief I’ve ever seen on him.
“She’s safe,” he murmurs, voice quiet, rough. His hand comes to my back, grounding me. “It’s over.”
Chapter 25 – Dimitri
The extraction is brutal. Adrenaline pulses through me like electricity as we slip out of Zurich, Deveraux’s encrypted drives secured, Vivian’s mother under medical care. The city falls away beneath the jet’s engines, lights blinking out like distant stars.
Yet my instincts—sharp as ever—refuse to rest. Something is off.
The Kovals are…silent. Too silent. Not a trace of pursuit, not a single attempt to intercept. No chatter, no warning, no interference. It’s as if they’d vanished entirely.
