Bare hands. No weapon. No distance. Just my body and his body and the particular violence that lives in the space between a man and the person who took everything from him.
I break his wrist. The gun-hand wrist. The one who held the Makarov to Siobhan's temple for six hours. The bones crack under my grip, and Viktor screams, and the Makarov clatters across the concrete and spins into the dark.
I put him on his knees.
"You touched my wife."
Punch. His head snaps.
"You threatened my family."
Another. Blood from his mouth.
"You thought you could take what'smine."
Around us, the factory fight is ending. Lex is moving through the east side with surgical precision. Cormac and Declan are clearing the loading dock. Stavros and alliance soldiers arecollapsing Viktor's force like a structure with its foundations removed. The fight took ninety seconds. It felt like hours.
Viktor kneels in front of me. Blood on his teeth. One eye is swelling. Even now, even beaten, even abandoned by his father and surrounded by the wreckage of his ambition, something in his face tries to assemble the old pleasantness. The reflex of a man who used charm the way other men use armor.
"Just kill me."
I reach into my boot. The knife. Tactical blade. I pull it and hold it where he can see the edge catch the overhead light.
"No."
I turn to Siobhan. She's standing ten feet away. Leaning against a support column because six hours in a chair and a kick that saved my life have spent everything she had. Her wrists are raw, striped red. Her face is pale. Her eyes are steady.
I look at her and ask the question I've been asking since the beginning. The question that defined us from the first night I told her the door was hers to knock on and the choice was hers to make.
"What do you want me to do with him?"
Siobhan looks at Viktor. I watch her eyes and I can see the calculation. Not the cold mathematics of Ward Risk Advisory. Something deeper. She's thinking about Finn. His hand. The ring finger. The pliers on the table in the harbor facility. She's thinking about six hours in a chair with her bound hands pressed against her stomach, protecting something I don't know about yet, something Viktor would have destroyed without ever knowing it existed.
"Make it slow."
Two words. Viktor's eyes go wide. The pleasantness dies for good.
I nod.
It's slow. The details don't matter. What matters is the sound that fills the factory and the woman who doesn't turn away from it and the knowledge that she chose this and the world she's chosen to live in and neither of us will apologize for the cost of protecting what we love.
It's slow. And then it's over.
Viktor Reznikov is dead on a factory floor in Springfield and the war that began with four bodies in a warehouse and a word carved in concrete ends here, in blood and silence and the steady gaze of a woman who has become something the men in that first Elysium meeting could never have predicted.
Lex's voice on comms: "Perimeter secure. All hostiles neutralized."
Cormac: "Loading dock clear."
Declan: "East side clear."
It's over.
I stand over Viktor's body. My hands are covered in blood. The knife goes back in the boot sheath. I walk across the factory floor toward the woman leaning against a column who saved my life with a chair.
She watches me come. Doesn't move. She's running on nothing now. Six hours of captivity. Four days of exile. Nine days since I packed her bag and broke my promise. The exhaustion is total and she's standing because she's Siobhan O'Brien and standing is what O'Briens do even when they should be on the floor.
I reach her. Stop. A foot apart. The wreckage around us. Bodies. Glass. The overhead light humming.