I stared at the empty screen, blood dripping down my back, frost on my lashes, and for the first time I whispered the question out loud:
"Where are you?"
The shadows in the corner answered with a single, cold breath:
Waiting.
15
DROGO
The jet touched down at a private airstrip in New Jersey just after dawn. Gray sky stretched overhead like bruised skin. Cold wind off the Hudson cut through my jacket the moment I stepped onto the tarmac.
Another black SUV was waiting. Same silent driver type—this one with a faint scar across his throat and eyes that didn't blink. Not once. Not when I got in, not when he started the engine, not when we pulled onto the highway heading toward Manhattan.
We drove into the city as it woke around us. Traffic building in slow waves. Lights flickering off in skyscrapers as office workers arrived to replace the night cleaners. I watched the skyline approach through the tinted windows, steel and glass rising like blades against the pale morning sky.
The building was one of those glass towers on Billionaires' Row—anonymous, expensive, impossible to trace unless you knew exactly where to look. The kind of place where oligarchs and crime bosses and tech billionaires lived side by side without ever acknowledging each other's existence.
Penthouse. Top three floors.
The elevator opened directly into the apartment—no hallway, no buffer, just straight into his world.
Dark wood floors polished to a mirror shine. Floor-to-ceiling windows on every wall—Central Park spread out below like a green carpet meant for ants, not people. Thefurniture was heavy, leather, old European style. Nothing flashy. No gold toilets or tiger skin rugs or the kind of gaudy shit you'd expect from new money trying to prove something. Just quiet wealth. The kind that didn't need to shout because everyone already knew.
Two guards stood by the door. Big men with Russian features—broad shoulders, flat eyes, hands that stayed very still at their sides. No visible guns, but I felt them anyway. Holstered under jackets, maybe ankle pieces as backup. Ready.
And there he was.
Klaus Müller.
Sitting in a high-backed leather chair facing the windows, an oxygen tank humming quietly beside him like a loyal dog waiting for scraps. He was thin now—cancer eating him from the inside out, hollowing him the way it always did—but still tall. Still straight-backed. Refusing to let death make him small.
Silver hair cropped military-short. Face all sharp Germanic bones under pale skin pulled tight like parchment. The kind of face that looked cruel even in repose.
He didn't turn when I entered. Didn't acknowledge me at all for several long seconds.
"Sit," he said finally in English, his accent thick but perfect—German precision wrapped around American vowels. "We have much to discuss."
I stayed standing.
He turned then, slowly, like a king acknowledging a subject who'd dared approach the throne.
Eyes like mine. Cold blue. Flat. Empty of anything resembling warmth or mercy. The same eyes I'd hated inevery mirror since I was old enough to understand what they meant—where they came from, what blood ran behind them.
He wore a white linen shirt, open at the collar despite the cold. And there they were.
The stars.
Eight-pointed. Faded black ink but still clear on each collarbone. Bratva stars. High rank. Authority earned not through money or connections but through blood and violence and years in Russian prisons I never wanted to know the names of.
Lower on his chest—cathedral domes. Small, intricate. One for each long sentence served, maybe. Or for each territory controlled. I didn't know the code well enough to read them all, but I knew enough to understand what I was looking at.
A man who'd lived by one rule his entire life: power, or death.
He saw me looking. Saw my eyes trace the ink on his skin.
"Old habits," he said, touching one star lightly with yellowed fingers. "Reminders of who I was. Who I still am, even like this." He gestured vaguely at the oxygen tank. "You'll get yours if you're smart. Earn them properly."
