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I press my bleeding arm against my ribs and keep my head down.

“The offer of a peaceful surrender is withdrawn,” I say.

Zane cackles. The sound belongs in a smaller room than this. “I’m going to enjoy this,” Zane says. “Knock you out. Take you to my place. Torture first. Then I kill you. And then I dump your ass in the city river.”

I look at the gun… just out of reach. Two meters of open floor. Another knife will come if I lunge wrong.

I make the grab anyway. Swift. Low. Fingers almost close on the grip.

A second blade slams into the mat where my wrist was. I miss by a breath and scramble back, cursing through my teeth.

I try to breathe. I change the angle. I scurry behind a metal cupboard, tall, dented, full of stock pots—and my hand finds a small stainless steel pan on the shelf beside it. Weight. Handle. I grip it hard enough that my knuckles go white.

I listen…

Footsteps.

Careful.

Zane thinks I am still by the table. I sense him close the last meter, then spring up and smash the pan into his face.

“Aaaargh,” Zane groans.

The sound is wet and perfect. Cartilage. Steel. Zane reels, nose broken, blood already sheeting down his mouth and chin. He screams something that is not a word and then he charges.

His swing for my face misses by the width of the cut on my arm.

I am already moving. My other hand finds a knife from the block—chef’s blade, Japanese steel, sharper than sharp—and I plunge it deep into Zane’s chest.

He staggers.

The look on his face is surprise first. Then hate. Then the beginning of understanding that it’s all over.

Zane falls backward onto the rubber mats. The knife handle stands in him like a fact.

I find my gun, take a few steps, tower over him.

The pistol comes up. My arm is screaming. I do not care. Zane’s mouth opens. Blood in his teeth drips and then spurts. He is trying to say my name like it is still a lever.

“Fffffffuccckkkkk,” Zane says, his voice now garbled as the blood builds in his mouth.

Out of nowhere Dmitri steps into the kitchen. His eyes like the night I first saw him in the side room. He takes in the blood, the pan, the man on the floor, me standing over him with Hardy’s pistol.

“Pull the trigger,” Dmitri says. “That’s an order. From your Pakhan. And from your Master too.”

“Orders are orders,” I say with a true vengeance in my voice.

I shoot Zane. The shot is loud in the steel throat of the kitchen. He jerks and then he is gone.

No smug smile.

No date when this is over.

No influence. Just a fixer who picked the wrong boy to use.

I keep the gun on him a second longer than I need to. Then the shake arrives in my hands and I let the muzzle drop.

Dmitri is already there. He takes my face in his hands like the war upstairs has not just ended in a basement that smells of garlic and blood.