She lay struggling to breathe while her body went into labour. Tau, Tikhon and Radovan stayed with her. Bogdan, Ruslan, Konstantin and Aleksandr joined me in extracting Tolam’s location from his captain.
We left the soldier alive.
We would be back for all of them.
The order I had given that caused this retaliation—eliminate every male in Tolam’s bloodline. There was no negotiation after he had tried to do the same to mine. After he went into hiding I thought that was the end of the matter.
Then he took my heir from me.
A hand came down on my shoulder.
I shook it off.
“Move out,” I said, the thought of spilling blood the only thing that felt clean right now.
I glanced back.
Konstantin. He looked older than he had a few days ago—the ageing that happens when something shifts and doesn’t shift back. He was the only enforcer on this job. Every man standing with me had worked through the ranks to be here.
It was time my brother took on more.
??????
“I’ll be the lookout,” Ruslan said, drawing a few chuckles from the men around him.
“Ah, my brother has gone soft in his new position,” Aleksandr said, as he and Bogdan dragged the cement cover off the opening.
“Dirt can be washed off,” Konstantin drawled, strapping his third holster to his leg.
The network of tunnels beneath the city was not common knowledge. They hadn’t been used since the Cold War—built for a different kind of threat, by men who understood that the most useful infrastructure was the kind no one knew existed.
Tolam had too much information and had proved too elusive for too long. Someone was feeding him intel. A rat in my midst—patient, careful, close enough to know things they shouldn’t.
I intended to find out who.
The torchlight carved a pathway down the steps ahead of us. I had memorised the route — every turn, every junction, every point where the ceiling dipped low enough to catch an unprepared man across the skull.
The smell hit first. Damp rot and sewage from the pipes running alongside us, the river held back by sealed walls but finding its way through regardless—thin rivulets tracking down the concrete in dark lines. I ignored it and moved.
No one spoke. We marched in silence, boots careful on the wet floor.
I was already building the list of what I intended to do to him. I moved faster, ducking my head where the cement dipped, the torch sweeping the tunnel ahead.
Then—the soft orange glow. Further down, where the dark thinned.
I raised my hand. The column stopped. The torch went off.
We inched forward and heard two voices. The tunnel widened as it split into three directions.
This was their base.
“I need him alive,” I murmured. The truck. The huge truck driven into Iskra’s car with the specific intention of destroying what was inside it. Had the vehicle not been bomb and bulletproof everyone in that car would have been dead. I needed to look him in the eye before the end.
We went in fast.
I knew Tolam the moment I saw him—by the anger and the hatred in his eyes. The mirror of what I had been carrying for weeks. He reached for his weapon and I moved before the thought completed, driving his hand upward as the gun discharged into the ceiling. The crack of it was deafening in the enclosed space.
I put my fist into his kidneys.
