Page 64 of The Last Dance

He staggered to his feet, blood streaming from his nose, and fixed me with a look that would have been terror if I hadn’t known what he was underneath. “You can’t,” he said, barely a whisper. “You can’t.”

The door burst open, and the world exploded into noise and movement.

Iren James: still alive.

Chapter Sixteen

~ Vadim ~

We moved through the house like a fish working upstream: precise, silent, leaving everything cleaner than we found it.

Parsons’s place was exactly what I’d expected—the kind of prefab, aggressively normal ranch that grew up in the good part of the suburbs and spent its retirement plotting murder.

The perimeter was clear before we hit the walk. I counted two windows lit: one near the entrance, another on the far side, both with blackout curtains already drawn tight enough to smother a scream.

Inside, the floors were that soulless engineered wood, laid in patterns that made a point of being hard to follow. The air was too dry, like someone had been running the heat for days just to drive out the moisture.

Yuri and I took point, my team fanning out behind. We didn’t speak, didn’t even gesture—at this level, everyone knows where to look.

It took three minutes to sweep the first floor. Kitchen: clean. Living room: neat as a rental staged for photos. No pets, no loose trash, not even a plate in the sink.

The only sign of life was a mug, half-drained, beside a single chair aimed at a television turned to silent news. No one in the open, which made sense; he’d been preparing for this night for a long, lonely time.

At the back of the house, behind a door that used to be a linen closet, we found the stairs: unfinished pine, faintly damp, leading down into a dark that tasted chemical on the tongue.

I heard nothing, but the hair on my arms lifted the way it always does before violence. Yuri didn’t hesitate. He took the steps two at a time, ducked low at the bend, waited for me to clear the turn.

There it was, exactly as the surveillance team had confirmed: a new slab of concrete poured across the back third of the basement, surface raw, the corners still sharp from where the formwork had been peeled away.

The entrance was a proper storm door, set horizontal, the kind they use in tornado country or for cellars meant to keep things in. The padlock was new, shiny, oversized for the latch.

I handed Yuri the cutters. He lined them up, bit in, and snapped the shackle with a single squeeze. The sound was surgical.

I kicked the door in.

The next few seconds have lived in my mind since I was a child, since the first time I watched a man open a locked door and decide what would be on the other side. It’s not fear, not even anticipation. It’s a clarity, the sense that everything you do in the next ten seconds will echo for the rest of your life.

The first echo was the smell: sweat, panic, and that faintest undercurrent of blood. The second was the sound—a muffled, animal struggle, as if a dog was being drowned in the far end of the room and refused to go quiet. The third, the only one that mattered, was the sight of Iren.

He was on the bed, what passed for one—a twin, hospital-issue, bolted to the floor with lag screws. He wore only the remnants of a shirt and a pair of sweats riding low on his hips, both shredded at the seams, and one of his ankles was chained to a ring set deep in the wall.

Parsons was on top of him, straddling his hips, pinning his left arm behind his back with a grip so tight the veins in his wrist stood out like wire. There was a bruise along Iren’s jaw, and a worse one darkening the pale skin at his forearm, but he was alive, eyes wide and flat and fixed on me like a man about to swallow the ocean just to spit it back out.

I crossed the distance in four steps. Parsons tried to turn, but I had a fist in his collar before he could even register the threat. I lifted him up and off Iren in one motion, spun him hard enough that he bounced off the far wall, collapsed to his knees, then scrambled up again like he was expecting applause for the effort. I’d wanted to hit him, but I didn’t.

I wanted him to see the rest.

Iren let his head fall against the pillow for a second, then braced with his good arm and sat up, pulling the blanket around himself, using it as armor or maybe just a flag. His hair was matted to his face, one eye already starting to swell, but he gave me a look that was pure math—calculating, alive, undefeated.

Parsons started to speak. “I can explain—”

I cut him off. “You built a room.” My voice sounded like someone else’s, low and clean, not even a tremor. “You put a chain on the wall. You selected books for the shelf. You imagined a life in here. With him.”

He stared at me, jaw clenched, fingers twitching. I knew the type. Men who don’t think they’re predators, just misunderstood. He tried for dignity. “He needs help,” he said. “You’re killing him with your world—”

“Yuri,” I said, without looking away from Parsons. “Get the chain off.”

Yuri didn’t need a second prompt. He crouched at the anchor, studied the fastenings, then pulled a compact ratchet from his jacket pocket and started working the bolt. The sound of metal on metal was loud in the small space.