Timur puts a bullet in the first man. I come up off the floor and take the second one at close range—no gun, just hands, momentum, and the training that never leaves you—and he goes down hard.
I straighten. Scan.
Aslanov.
He’s at the far edge of the room, and the God complex is gone—what’s on his face now is something rawer and considerably more honest. Fear. His eyes are moving to the exits, calculating, the performance stripped away to pure survival instinct.
For one moment I have him.
Then he grabs Hannah.
He has her before I can close the distance—one arm across her chest, hauling her backward through the door to the rear room.
I’m already moving, vaulting a body, ducking under a shot that splinters the wall behind me.
Timur’s voice cuts through the noise: “Get her! I’ll cover!”
The back room is smaller, darker, the sounds of the firefight suddenly muffled by the walls that separate the two spaces. I come through it with a blade in my hand and close the remaining distance in three strides and then—
He swings Hannah around in front of him.
The gun comes up against her temple.
I stop.
Everything stops—my body, my breathing, the part of my brain that had a plan. It all goes completely still, and what’s left is the image I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget: Hannah, her bound hands, the steel pressed against the side of her small head.
She’s not fighting anymore.
She just looks at me, eyes blown wide with a terror that is entirely beyond anything a four-year-old should ever have to hold.
“Drop it.” Aslanov’s voice is steady. “Or I pull the trigger.”
The knife remains in my hand. Not that it changes anything—Aslanov knows that, and I know that.
I look at Hannah.
She meets my eyes and my fucking heart breaks into a million small pieces.
You failed her, mudak.
Again.
And again.
This time, there is no plan B. There is no play I can make from here that doesn’t risk her life. I’m looking at the one situation I spent four years trying to prevent, and it is exactly as bad as it can get.
The blade finally drops from my hand and hits the floor.
I don’t lunge. Don’t calculate. Don’t do anything except stand here and look at my daughter—really look at her, the way I haven’t let myself since I walked into this building, because looking meant feeling and feeling meant losing my edge.
I’ve lost it now.
There’s nothing else left to lose.
Chapter Thirty
Nikolai
