Page 113 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

“You were useful,” I say into his face.

He bares bloody teeth. “You got soft.”

I drive him back into the wall again. “No.”

Then I punch him in the throat.

He folds enough for me to take the knife from his own belt and shove it under his ribs. His eyes go wide from pain, but I keep my hand on the handle and push until he stops fighting the blade and starts fighting for breath.

“You mistook her for weakness,” I say. “That was your last mistake.”

He tries to speak. I don’t let him. I pull the blade free and put him down at my feet. Karpov hits the floor, suit ruined, one hand opening and closing on nothing. He looks smaller than he did standing off-center, pretending to understand power better than the man who owns it.

The service door hangs open by two inches, just enough for me to see into the side dispatch office. Elena is on the floor beside Leonid, dress pulled around her knees, hair loose around her face, one finger on the screen while Leonid works with the laptop balanced on an overturned crate.

A Moretti man crawls under the broken side of the table, low enough to slip past my first line of sight. His gun turns toward the service door. I see him before Ilya does. Elena lifts her head. She freezes with one hand over her stomach and the pen still locked in her fist.

I don’t have the angle I want, but I take the one I have. The shot hits him high in the shoulder before his finger settles, and he drops hard with his gun skidding across the floor.

Elena doesn’t move for one second. Then she reaches with her heel, kicks the gun away from the door, and pushes the next page toward Leonid.

“Scan it,” she says, and her voice shakes once before it steadies.

Leonid looks at her.

She taps the page with the pen. “Now.”

He gets moving.

Men shout, glass crunches underfoot, and another shot punches into the wall. Papers slide through blood and water. Pens roll under chairs. One of the capped pens from Sergei’s neat stack lies near my shoe, cracked in half. The documents Elena signed are spreading through the system one page at a time while men die trying to stop the future from being filed.

Dima pushes two bodies away from the elevator doors and reloads. Ilya drags Moretti’s gunman off the stairs and kicks the weapon out of reach. Moretti is on his knees now, one hand pressed to his side, eyes fixed on Karpov’s body.

“You killed your own man,” he says.

“He stopped being mine when he opened my doors,” I say.

Sergei laughs then, a short, cracked sound. “You think this is victory?”

I open my mouth, but Elena reaches my side first. There is blood on one sleeve and a thin cut across her forearm where the light burst over the table. “No,” she says before I can. “This is the part before it.”

Leonid turns the screen toward her, then toward me. “Filed. Revocations accepted. Ownership confirmations pending. Succession block entered.”

Sergei’s face goes slack. He looks at Elena, and for once, he has nothing ready.

I put my arm around her waist, and she lets some of her weight come against me. Her body shakes against my side, but her chin stays up.

“You’re hurt,” she says, looking at my side.

“So are you.”

“I’m standing.” She gives me one stubborn look.

“With help.”

Her mouth twists, and for one second, in the middle of all this, she almost looks like herself. I keep her behind me and face the room.

“Drop every weapon.”