The knife is on the floor.
So are my chances of making out of this alive.
My hands are empty. And the only play I can see from here is the one I can't take because it would risk Hannah’s life.
I know it.
He knows I know it.
So I stand here, in a bare room with bare walls and nothing on the floor that helps me, and I look at the man who has been the architect of everything I’ve lost—my empire, my mother, the first four years of my daughter’s life—and I have nothing left to throw at him but my presence.
“Face it,mudak.” His voice is almost gentle. “You were always going to end up here. Nothing you did was ever going to change that.”
“Let her go.” I keep my voice flat. “It’s me you wanted. Here I am.”
Something shifts in his expression. Not surprise—he doesn’t do surprise—but a kind of satisfaction, the look of a man whose accounting has come out correct.
“You’re right,” he says. “It is.”
He takes the gun from Hannah’s temple.
The breath that leaves me is involuntary. I watch him move the muzzle away from her head and feel the room recalibrate around that single fact—she’s not at gunpoint, she’s still in his grip but the weapon is no longer against her skull. That is the only thing that matters. He can do whatever he wants to me. Whatever comes next, I can absorb it.
Aslanov levels the gun at my thigh and fires.
The impact drops me before the pain arrives—one moment standing, the next on the floor, the burn exploding outward from the entry point in a wave that whites out everything else.
I’ve been shot before. It doesn’t get easier.
My hand goes to my thigh by reflex, pressing against the wound, and the sound that tears out of me is not something I choose. I press my forehead toward the floor and breathe through it, jaw locked, forcing my vision clear.
Pizdets.
Then, from somewhere above me, small and certain and absolutely devastating:
“Daddy.”
It’s Hannah’s voice. The first time she’s said that word and meant me.
The pain in my thigh becomes the least significant thing in the room.
“It’s okay, Hannah.” I hold her gaze from the floor, pressing my hand against my thigh. “Everything is going to be okay.”
She nods at me, small and solemn, like she’s decided to believe it because I said it.
“Touching,” says Aslanov. “A man who lies to his daughter right up until the end.” He tilts his head. “Not exactly a legacy to be proud of.”
“And what’s yours,mudak?”
He doesn’t answer.
Instead, he shoots me in the arm.
The bicep. The impact spins me and I go down onto my side, the burn from my thigh and the burn from my arm compounding into something that narrows the whole world to a single point of white. I hear myself make a sound. I press mygood hand over the wound and breathe, and breathe, and wait for my vision to clear.
It does. Slowly.
Hannah comes back into focus first—her face, her eyes fixed on me with an expression no four-year-old should ever have to wear.
