I stop at her door. The lock indicator shows green. Inside, a thin line of light under the threshold. I listen. Nothing. No movement, no voices, no scrape.
“Yuri, Anton,” I say into the radio. “Status, suite twelve.”
Silence.
The carpet shows a dark smear near the baseboard, half hidden in shadow, dragged toward the far end of the hall. My pulse climbs, but my hand stays steady on the gun.
“Kirill, kill the siren,” I say. “Keep the lights.”
The noise cuts mid-wail. The house falls into a strange void of soundlessness, a retreat before a strike. The red light still pulses,turning the smear on the floor a darker, heavier black. I follow it. At the bend in the corridor, I find Yuri.
He lies on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. There’s a neat hole in his forehead. No powder burns. The blood has soaked into the carpet around his head, turning the pattern viscid and dark. I crouch and touch his throat. Warm, but nothing underneath my fingers.
“One guard down, it's Yuri.” I say into the handset. “Headshot. No sign of Anton.”
“Copy,” Kirill says. His voice is tighter now.
“Rewind that feed. Let Vlad have a look,” I say into the handset. “Last minute. Before the loop.”
“Already running,” Kirill replies.
I scan the floor. No shell, no footprint in the blood. The camera at the junction blinks green in the corner, aimed just a fraction too high to have caught the shooter’s face. Kirill and another recruit come running. He grips a handset in one hand and forces his cap back into place with the other.
“Pakhan.” He snaps to attention for a brief second.
I motion for Kirill to fall in beside me. We follow the blood trail. It thins, then vanishes near the service door at the end of the hall. There is a faint scuff on the lower panel, as if someone hit it in a hurry. No obvious drag, no body. Either Anton walked after being hit, or he walked someone else. I try the handle. It opens on bare stairs that drop toward the staff floors. The light is out.
“Secure the east stairs,” I tell the men behind me. “No one uses this route without my eyes on them.”
They nod and take positions, one facing the stairwell, one watching the corridor with his gun up, shoulder brushing the wall.
Raina’s room comes next. My hand is on the gun as I push the door and step inside. Empty. Sheets are kicked back on the bed, boots on the rug, lamp on, bathroom door open. No overturned furniture, no broken glass, no struggle. The air holds the faint trace of her soap and a sharper tang of sweat and chill. If someone pulled her out of here, they did it fast, or she went willingly.
Or she ran.
The thought sits sourly in my throat. If she decided to bolt into a compound under lockdown, with a possible shooter inside, I will wring her neck myself.
I move to the console where Vlad, my head of security for the estate, stands scanning the feeds.
“Negative,” he says. “But I have one female outline in the service corridor behind the kitchen. Small, crouched position, hands empty. Looks like her.”
The tightness in my chest eases half a degree. Enough to keep me from shooting the next thing that moves. “Pull a still,” I say. Her. It has to be.
There is a pause, then the faint click of a key. “Confirmed. It’s Raina.”
Relief slides over the anger for a second. I swallow hard. “Good. Keep eyes on every other corridor. We had at least one inside shooter.”
I leave the suite as I found it and head for the service stairs at the far end of the hall. The house changes character as soon as I slip through the unmarked door. The space smells like hot water and bleach. Narrow steps drop toward the staff floors, lined with scuff marks from deliveries and late-night runs.
Halfway down, another alarm indicator flashes above a metal door, not red this time. Amber. Kitchen.
“Pakhan,” Kirill says, just as I reach it. “We have a new problem.”
“Make it quick.”
“North service entrance, ground floor.” The mouthpiece cackles. “The door opened three minutes before the alarm. No code logged. There’s a box on the kitchen counter. Same size as the first.”
My hand tightens on the railing. “I'm on my way,” I say. “No one touches it.”
