I step closer before I can stop myself.
“You went for my child,” I say. My voice is steady now. “You drugged me in my own house and talked about my daughter like she was a lever you could pull. If you wanted to prove he was weak, you should have gone at his money. You picked her instead. That doesn’t make you smart. That makes you stupid, cruel, and lazy.”
He looks up at me. His eyes flick over my face. There’s something in his expression I cannot name. It might be regret. It might be nothing. “You were always too calm,” he says with a sigh. “It was hard to see where to break you.”
“You didn’t break me,” I reply.
His gaze shifts back to Sergei. “You’ll never be clean,” he says. “Not with what you started. They killed me when they pushed me out of your shadow. The rest is just walking.”
Sergei stands. “You killed yourself when you chose this,” he says. “I only refused to stop you.”
Kirill steps forward. “We can move him,” he says. “Medical at the compound could keep him breathing long enough for a full list.”
Ilya laughs again, softer. Blood bubbles in his mouth. His chest rises and falls with shallow pulls. “You won’t have time,” he mutters. “That charge was not the only one. I tied others to my pulse. When it stops, something else starts.”
My stomach drops.
“Bullshit,” Oleg says. “He is bluffing.”
“He might be,” Sergei says. His eyes stay on Ilya. “He also might not. He wanted a dead man switch. He would set one if he could.”
Kirill swears under his breath.
“So?” I ask.
“So if we keep him between half-life and death, we risk a slow trigger or a hidden timer we cannot see,” Sergei says quietly. “He built his revenge around his own end. He wanted control of that too.”
He looks at me. There is a question in his eyes. This isn’t a small choice. It’s about justice and safety and the parts of himself he still wants to keep. Ilya watches our faces. He smiles with cracked lips. “This is good,” he says. “You two deciding what kind of killers you are. Very romantic.”
I step closer. I crouch, so my face is level with his. “Where are the other charges?” I ask. “What are they tied to?”
He closes his eyes. “You’ll find out,” he whispers. “If you keep chasing old ghosts instead of walking away.”
28
RAINA
Istudy Ilya carefully. His breath is shorter and his skin has taken on a gray tone under the soot. He’s bleeding inside. We don’t need a doctor to tell us this.
“You had chances,” I say. “Sergei gave you a job. You could have walked when you felt small and built something that wasn’t this. You chose to stand on our bodies to prove you mattered. You’re not a ghost. You’re a man lying in the dirt with his own bomb pieces in his lungs.”
He opens his eyes again, just a little. There is no shine in them now. Only a dull light.
“You sound like him,” he murmurs.
“I learned from him,” I say.
I stand and look at Sergei. “If we drag him out of here, he keeps a hand on us from a hospital bed or a cell,” I say. “He built his whole life on that. I don’t want Nadia to grow up with that shadow still on her walls.”
Sergei’s jaw clenches. For a moment he looks very tired.
“Neither do I,” he says.
He steps back to Ilya’s side, crouches again, and meets his eyes one last time.
“You had your chance,” he says. “You turned it into this.”
Ilya’s mouth moves. I cannot tell if he tries to speak or spit.
