Of course, he does.
Moonlight and dock lights flash once along the blade. He comes at me quickly, cutting in close with the confidence of a man who has spent half his life in violence. I avoid the first strike, catch his wrist on the second, and feel the blade graze along my sleeve instead of entering my flesh. He twists sharply, trying to break my hold, and I drive my forehead into his nose.
Cartilage gives with a wet crunch, and blood pours at once. He stumbles back two steps, but he doesn’t drop the knife.
He comes again, lower this time, the blade angled toward my stomach. I catch his wrist with both hands and force it outward while his free hand crashes into my throat. The blow closes my airway for one ugly second, enough for him to wrench partially loose. The knife cuts across my side, hot and immediate, though shallow. I answer by slamming his hand against a steel beam once, twice, until the blade clatters onto the pavement between us.
We both dive for it. I reach it first.
Viktor catches my wrist before I can bring it up and drives his shoulder into my chest hard enough to send both of us crashing to the ground. Concrete tears through the skin on my knuckles. The knife skids away into darkness beneath a truck.
His hand closes around my throat. The pressure is immediate and brutal. I grab his forearm with one hand and hammer the other into the side of his neck. He tightens his grip instead of loosening it, his face close enough now that I can see blood running from his broken nose across his mouth and chin.
“You could have walked away,” he grinds out.
I force air through my throat and drive my thumb hard into the ruined cartilage of his nose. He jerks back with a curse, and that’s enough. I roll, throw him off, and get to my feet first.
He rises, slower now, one hand braced briefly on his thigh before he straightens again. Blood stains the front of his shirt. His breathing has changed. The damage is being done.
Still, he smiles. “I trained you,” he remarks, voice roughened now by blood and exertion.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and taste iron again. “My father finished it.”
The reaction is immediate. I see it in the way his eyes harden.
He lunges, and this time the fight loses whatever shape it still had. We crash into the side of the truck hard enough to dent the metal. His fist hammers into my ribs, directly over the cut on my side, and pain tears through me bright and vicious. I grab the back of his neck and slam his face into the window until glass splinters beneath the impact. He claws for my arm, trying to turn us, trying to reach the weapon I know he keeps somewhere else on him because a man like Viktor never carries only one.
My hand finds it first. A second knife at the back of his belt. I pull it free.
Viktor drives both hands into my wrist, forcing the blade off line as we struggle against the truck. The muscles in my arm burn with the effort. Snow melts on both of us, cold against heat and blood and breath. He knees me again, and my vision darkens at the edges for half a second.
Then he makes his mistake. He glances toward my side, toward the place he already cut, and in that glance, I see what he still believes. That pain can make me hesitate. That Rowan and our child make me softer. That protecting a future leaves less room for violence.
He never understood my father, and he never understood me. The future is the reason I don’t hesitate.
I wrench my wrist free, trap his arm against my body, and drive the knife across his throat in one fast, clean movement. Warm blood spills over my hand at once.
Viktor freezes. His eyes lock onto mine, wide now not with fear, but with disbelief. He lifts one hand to his throat as if he can hold his life inside. Blood runs through his fingers, down the front of his shirt, onto the snow-dark pavement below.
I step back and let him look at me. He sinks to his knees first. Then lower.
Around us, no one moves. My men remain where I left them. His men do the same, held in place by the truth that ended this fight before either side touched a weapon.
Viktor tries to speak once. Nothing comes except blood. He falls forward onto the concrete and doesn’t rise again.
The lot is silent except for the water at the docks and my own breathing, rough in my chest and white in the freezing air. I look down at the man who murdered my father, who set Ivan loose on my empire, who arranged the alley attack that should have ended me, and who touched Rowan’s life as if she were merely leverage.
At last, it’s finished.
I let the knife fall from my hand. It lands beside him with a muted metallic sound. When I lift my head, Viktor’s men are already backing away. No one reaches for a weapon. No one tries to avenge him. They know what he was. Men like that create loyalty only while they’re breathing.
Mikel approaches first, his eyes moving over the blood on my shirt and the cut at my side before dropping briefly to Viktor’s body.
“It’s done,” he murmurs.
“Yes.” The word leaves my mouth on a rough breath.
Mikel glances once toward the harbor and then back at me. “The threat to the family is over.”
