The movement draws every weapon in the room—Aslanov’s, his guards’, all of them tracking my hand with their guns as it emerges with a cigarette pack. I tap one loose, unhurried, like a man with nothing left to lose. In reality, I have everything to lose.
The silence in the room takes on a different quality.
Nobody moves.
Aslanov watches me with something that might be curiosity, or might just be contempt wearing curiosity’s face. Then he tilts his head toward the room.
“Dima. Give him a light.”
One of the guards crosses to me, lighter in hand. I take it without looking at him, bring the flame up, and draw until the end catches and glows. I hand the lighter back. Take my time about it.
Beside me, I feel Timur go absolutely still.
He knows. I’ve never smoked—not once, not even in the years when everyone around me did. He’s seen me wave off cigars in rooms considerably more comfortable than this one. The cigarette is not a cigarette and he understands that, and I feel him processing it without moving a muscle.
I take a long, slow drag and let the smoke out in front of me, watching it rise and flatten in the low light. The taste is foul—stale and chemical, nothing like the clean burn of a good cigar—but I hold Aslanov’s gaze across the plume of it and keep my face unhurried.
I need time.
Popov’s men need to be in position before the room changes.
One more breath.
I draw again, deep and deliberate, and let it out slowly. The smoke hangs between us.
Aslanov’s patience, which was always going to run out, finally runs out.
“Alright.” The word comes out quiet, almost tired. He raises the gun and brings the muzzle level with my head, and the room contracts around the gesture. “Enough of this shit.”
I look at him down the barrel and say nothing.
Three.
Two.
One.
That is when the doors come off their hinges.
Three directions simultaneously—the back entrance, the side corridor, a third point I’d clocked when they walked me in. Popov’s men pour through all of them at once, and the room that was a controlled performance thirty seconds ago becomes something entirely different: loud, immediate, and without ceremony.
The room erupts into chaos.
Aslanov’s men retaliate fast, spinning toward Popov’s crew with weapons already drawn, the air cracking open with the first exchange of rapid gunfire. Bodies find cover. Some drop to the floor. Glass shatters somewhere to my left. The space that was controlled and theatrical thirty seconds ago has become something primal, all noise and motion, and the particular chaos of men who have decided to kill each other.
Popov moves through it like a man who has been waiting years for exactly this. He’s not shooting—he doesn’t need to. He takes the first man he reaches by the weapon arm, turns it, and the sound that follows is not a gunshot.
The man drops.
Popov steps over him without looking down. His crew works the room with the ruthless efficiency of people for whom this is not extraordinary—firing clean and fast, no hesitation, no wasted movement. Aslanov’s men have the numbers, but they didn’t have warning, and in the first critical seconds that counts for more than anything else.
Timur—hands freed by Popov’s men in the chaos—strips a Glock from the nearest body and comes up firing before he’s even fully upright. One shot. His target drops. He’s bleeding from the cut above his eye and moving like it costs him, but he’s moving.
I need a weapon and I need it fast.
The floor is cluttered with the dead and the dying, and I move through it low and fast, reading the room as I go.
Two of Aslanov’s men swing toward me simultaneously, both armed. I drop before the first shot leaves the barrel, feel the displaced air as it passes overhead. The second shot sparks off the concrete inches from my hand.
