Page 48 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

The man with the tablet steps into view. “Careful,” he says. “Karpov said alive.” Karpov. The name lands clean and cold in my head. So he's Karpov's man.

I wrench my head up enough to spit, “He picked a side, then.”

The hand on my face eases just enough for me to breathe. The man with the earpiece crouches in front of me, dark tactical clothes, clean jaw, expensive watch turned inward under his sleeve. He isn’t house. He isn’t Russian either. Moretti’s extraction lead, then.

“It was never your side,” he says in accented Russian.

I’d like to bite him. Break his nose. Take one useful thing out of this. One of them catches my arm and hauls me up to standing so fast, the kitchen lurches around me.

The older cook is still crouched behind the rack, white-faced and shaking. One of Maksim’s guards lies half under the pantry door with blood spreading out under him. No one looks at either of them. The kitchen has already become a transit point now. That’s when I understand exactly what being listed means. No one wants me dead. Dead closes the account. They want me movable.

The man with the inward-turned watch looks me over once, from my bare feet to my hair half falling loose down my back, and says in Italian, “This is her?”

Karpov's man answers in the same language. I don’t catch all of it, only enough to hear the shape of ownership in it. Yes. Confirmed. Alive. Then he says in Russian, for my benefit, or maybe because humiliation is easier in a language I know.

“Listed collateral.”

“Go to hell,” I say, because it’s the only thing in my reach.

The man nearest me smiles. “This from the bridge itself.”

I kick backward hard enough to connect with a shin. He curses. A hand clamps over the front of my throat and shoves me into the side of the prep counter.

“Enough,” the Moretti man says.

His tone is mild. That makes everyone else obey faster. He steps closer, taking his time. His eyes drift over the zip ties at my wrists, then to the bruise already darkening on my throat under the man’s hand.

“Not the face,” he says.

The grip loosens at once.

I laugh, and it comes out thin and ugly. “Should I be grateful?”

“No,” he says. “Walk.”

I don’t.

It earns me a hand at the back of my neck and a shove toward the service corridor. My feet slip on tile, then catch. My robe twists half open from the struggle, and as I jerk it closed with bound hands, the fabric snags on a drawer handle and tears, which makes the men around me laugh. I hate them for hearing how hard I’m breathing.

The digital panel at the corner now blinks hard red.

WEST SERVICE ENTRY OVERRIDE. MANUAL LOCK FAILED. INNER GRID COMPROMISED.

A body lies facedown near the cold-room door in one of the house suits, one arm trapped under him wrongly. Another man farther down has slumped against the wall beneath a framed service schedule, blood smeared across the neatly typed columns of deliveries and staffing times.

Two more men join the group from the direction of the side stairs. One of them is the estate driver.

“You found her,” he says.

The Moretti man doesn’t answer. He just gives the smallest nod.

The driver’s gaze slides over me, impersonal as paperwork. “Good. West service exit is clear for another minute.”

Another minute. That means there are still men in this house fighting. Still doors holding. Parts of Maksim’s machine are still slowing the breach.

My head jerks toward the back corridor on instinct, toward the deeper part of the house where the study and office layers sit behind old wood and controlled access. I hear distant shots and someone shouting orders through a radio with too much static on the line.

No sign of Maksim.