Page 111 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

For one second, nobody speaks. Then everything starts moving.

Leonid pulls the signed stack toward him, scans the first page, then the second. “Filed,” he says. “First set is moving.”

Moretti stands now. “This invalidates our access.”

Maksim finally turns his head toward him. “You never had access.”

Karpov’s face has gone flat. He looks at the pages. Then at Maksim. Then at me. His face loses that patient, slick look. If I finish this, his excuse dies with the paper. My listed status closes, the Volkov structure holds, and the house no longer needs Karpov to rescue it from Maksim. His hand drops toward his jacket. Dima moves.

Karpov signals anyway.

The first shot blows through the white light above the table. Glass bursts down, men shout, and every chair scrapes back at once.

33

MAKSIM

The first shot takes the light over the table. Glass bursts down across the papers, and every man around the table moves for what he came here ready to do.

I move for Elena.

My hand catches the back of her chair and yanks it sideways hard enough that the legs scream across the floor. She drops with it, one arm wrapped over her stomach, the pen still in her fist. She keeps the signed pages under her forearm and rolls with the fall before I put my body between her and the first line of fire.

“Down,” I say.

“I am down.” Her eyes are impossibly large as they stare into mine.

“Stay down,” I tell her and get up.

“Busy,” she snaps and starts shoving the signed stack toward Leonid.

A bullet tears through the table edge where her hand was a second before.

My gun is already up.

The man who fired from Karpov’s side catches two rounds in the chest and goes back into the wall. Dima drops the one by the freight elevator. Ilya fires toward the stairwell, and the man there falls before he gets his second foot planted.

Karpov doesn’t shoot first. He steps back, using other men to make space, hand inside his jacket, eyes already moving toward the exit.

Coward.

“Elena,” Leonid says behind the table, voice tight, laptop pulled against his chest. “Pages.”

She shoves them under the table gap. “Take them.”

He grabs the stack, ducks as another shot cracks through the water glass in front of him, and curses in Russian with feeling.

Moretti is shouting now, one hand raised, the other reaching for his man. He came to buy access and found out too late that access can shoot back. Mancini crawls behind his chair, phone in hand, trying to call someone who won’t reach in time.

I put a round through the phone. He screams and drops it.

“No calls,” I tell him.

Another man rushes from the dim edge with a knife because bullets have become difficult and stupid men always return to steel when their plans break. I catch his wrist, drive it down into the table, and break the elbow with my forearm before I put him on the floor. He reaches for my ankle. I shoot him once and step over him.

The fight sorts the loyalties fast. My men hold the exits. Moretti’s men are trying to pull their bosses back. Karpov’s men are trying to open a path through the side wall and make the whole thing look like a rescue gone bad.

Sergei stands where the light blew above him, one hand braced on the table. His face has gone pale, and his mouth stays half open.