Reality hits in waves. First, the physical sensation—my hands still tingling with the memory of applied pressure, the precise moment when resistance ceased and life fled. Then, the emotional impact—shock, revulsion, and something darker that I don’t want to examine too closely.
I’ve never taken a life before.
Oh, I’ve been trained for it. I spent countless hours with Gio learning anatomy and technique, studying the mechanics of killing with the same analytical precision I bring to code. But training and reality are vastly different things.
Training doesn’t prepare you for how quiet death actually is. How anticlimactic. How the absence of life creates a vacuum that seems to suck sound and warmth from the surrounding space.
Training doesn’t prepare you for the way killing changes you—not dramatically, not with fanfare, but with the simple, irrevocable knowledge that you’re now someone who has crossed that final line but will do anything to protect those you love.
“Fuck,” Luca whispers, breaking the silence. “Rafa, are you?—”
“I’m fine,” I interrupt, though I’m not sure that’s true. My voice sounds strange, distant, like it’s coming from someone else.
“You just killed a man with your bare hands,” Gio observes with characteristic bluntness. “That’s not usually considered ‘fine’ by normal standards.”
“He threatened her.” The words come out flat, matter-of-fact. “He described what he planned to do to her. Detailed, specific threats against...” I stop, not trusting my voice to remain steady.
I turn to look at Kira, and her expression sends another wave of emotion crashing through me. She’s staring at me with something that might be awe, horror, or recognition—I can’t tell which, and the uncertainty worsens everything.
I turn to look at Kira.
She's staring at me with something that might be awe, horror, or recognition—I can't tell which, and the uncertainty makes everything worse. Her eyes move from Durov to my hands and back again, like she's trying to reconcile what she just witnessed with the version of me she thought she knew.
I should say something. Explain myself. Apologize, maybe, or at least perform the kind of remorse that would make this easier for her to absorb.
But I'm not sorry.
That's the part I'm still sitting with as Gio and Luca move quietly around the edges of the room, already calculating what needs to happen next. I'm not sorry Durov is dead. I'm notsorry I'm the one who did it. The only thing I feel, beneath the adrenaline and the strange cottony distance that follows violence, is a fierce, inarticulate relief that she's still breathing.
That's what scares me.
Not what I did. Not what it makes me.
But how easily I'd do it again.
CHAPTER 30
Kira
The first thingI hear is the silence.
Then the sound of a body hitting concrete.
Yegor doesn't fall the way people fall in films—dramatically, slowly, with time to register what's happening. He simply stops. One moment he's a threat, and the next he's weight, crumpling sideways out of the chair and onto the floor with a dull, graceless thud.
Rafa's hands are still raised when the world starts breathing again. Not holding a weapon. Just hands—fingers slightly spread, chest heaving, the cords of his forearms still taut with the effort of what he just did.
With his bare hands. For me.
We both stare at the body. Then at each other.
His eyes are wild, not with panic. Not even regret.
Possession.
The warehouse air feels electric, charged with something dangerous and inevitable. The aftermath of violence hangs between us like smoke, transforming everything—the space, the silence, us.
"You ever do something that fucking reckless again," he growls, voice raw, "I will put you over my knee before the Bratva or the Famiglia ever get the chance."
