Aslanov is no longer recognizable. What’s left of his face catches the light in pieces—caved in, the bone structure gone, blood pooling in the hollows. His chest still rises and falls, shallow and wet, but his eyes are open. Somehow, through all of it, his eyes are still open, finding mine in the dark.
I pull my fist back for another pass.
“Stop!”
Hannah’s voice cuts through everything—the ringing in my ears, the tunnel vision, the four years of accumulated fury still moving through my arm.
I freeze.
She’s a few feet away, tears streaming down her face, watching me with an expression that reaches somewhere underneath all of it and pulls me back.
I look at my fist. The knuckles are stripped raw, skin hanging in tatters, the whole hand slick and red. I look at what’s beneath it.
I’ve been doing this in front of my four-year-old daughter.
I lower my arm.
I bring my mouth close to what remains of Aslanov’s ear. “You’re lucky she’s here,” I say quietly. “If she wasn’t, I’d gut you like a pig and make you eat it.”
His eyes stay on me.
Whatever he was, he doesn’t look like it anymore.
I strain to push myself upright and reach for Hannah, taking her hand in mine. What follows is the hardest walk of my life—across the room, one useless leg dragging, the wounds on my thigh and arm bleeding freely now that the adrenaline has nothing left to burn. I focus on Hannah’s hand in mine and keep dragging myself.
I make it four steps before my leg gives out entirely.
We go down together. I twist as I fall, taking the impact on my shoulder, keeping Hannah from hitting the floor. She lands against my chest and I lie there looking up at the ceiling, breathing, the pain from both wounds arriving all at once in a wave that whites out the edges of my vision.
The blood loss is serious. I can feel it in the way the room is moving—slow, heavy, like the floor is tilting by degrees. I press my hand against my thigh and it makes no difference.
The door opens.
A shape fills it. I reach for a weapon that isn’t there.
Hannah scrambles to her feet beside me. “Timur!”
He comes through the door at a crouch, Hannah already in his arms, her face buried in his neck. He looks down at me—takes in the leg, the arm, the floor—and doesn’t waste time on commentary.
“Come on, boss. We need to move you.”
“Da.”I manage.
He gets down beside me, gets an arm under mine, and starts working. Blood is running down his face from the cutabove his eye but he’s moving cleanly, purposefully, which means he’s still functional somehow. Too bad I can’t say the same about myself.
“It’s over,” he says, reading the question before I can ask it. “We’ve done it, Niko.”
I let my head fall back for a moment and close my eyes.
We’ve done it.
Then I put my weight on Timur and start moving toward the door, toward Hannah, toward whatever comes next.
Chapter Thirty-One
Nikolai
The first light of dawn bleeds into Pullman Yard in thin grey streaks, finding nothing worth illuminating.
