I breathed. I counted my own heartbeat—steady, present, insistently alive.
Then I straightened my spine against the cold wall, lifted my chin in a room where no one could see me do it, and waited.
Chapter 16 – Gregory
The first man who put his hands on me lasted approximately four seconds.
He came in fast—Tomas’s security, the broader of the two who had been stationed in my corridor an hour ago—grabbing my collar with both hands, and I broke his grip at the wrists, turned into his momentum, and had him face-first against my kitchen wall before his partner had fully registered that it was happening. The second one moved in from the left, and I caught his forearm mid-swing, redirected, and put my elbow into his ribs with enough force to drop him onto one knee.
He didn’t stay there.
He came back up with a straight punch that clipped my jaw, and I tasted the familiar copper of split skin but didn’t stop moving. We went into the kitchen island together, something ceramic shattering off the counter, and I got my arm around his throat from behind and held until his legs stopped working and lowered him to the floor with the particular care of a man who wants the other man unconscious and not dead.
The first one had peeled himself off the wall. He had a knife now—a boot knife, short and practical—and he came in low with it, which told me he actually knew what he was doing, and that this was going to take longer than I wanted. I took the cut across my forearm to get inside his reach, felt the sting of it as distant information, got the knife hand, broke his grip on it, and we traded three blows in close quarters that left us both bleeding and breathing harder than either of us would have preferred.
A fourth man came through my door. Then a fifth.
“Enough.”
Yegor’s voice. Yegor himself was a half-step behind it, filling the doorframe with the specific quality of stillness that very large men with very long memories projected when they had decided a situation was going to stop. The men around me stopped. Even the one with the bleeding nose stopped, which said something about Yegor’s reputation that I filed away for a less urgent moment.
“Everyone, stand down,” Yegor said. Not loudly. He didn’t need to say it loudly.
I straightened. My forearm was bleeding steadily onto my kitchen floor. I noted this without particular feeling.
Tomas Alvarez had come in behind Yegor’s men, and he was standing near the door with his arms crossed and his face doing the thing it did when he had already reached a verdict and was performing the courtesy of appearing to weigh evidence.
He looked at the two men on the floor and then at me.
“Talk,” he said.
“There’s a chain,” I said. “Maverick to Nico to people inside your organization. The arms routes—the ones running through the eastern corridors that your ledgers don’t account for—they’re not Bratva. They were never Bratva. Nico has been using corrupted members of your staff to run them and build a case that points back to us. To you.”
Tomas’s expression didn’t change. That was its own kind of information.
“That’s a significant claim,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
“You’re standing in your kitchen with two of my men on the floor—”
“Your men put their hands on me first,” I said. “I have a great deal more patience for this conversation than I just demonstrated. I need you to listen to me.”
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The silence had the particular texture of a room full of armed men deciding collectively what to do next, which was one of the more dangerous silences there was.
“Matvey knows everything,” I said.
The room changed.
It wasn’t loud, the change—no one shouted, no one raised a weapon. It was quieter than that and therefore more significant. Every man in the room recalibrated in the space of a breath, the way men recalibrated when a name landed that rearranged the hierarchy of the situation.
Tomas looked at me for a long moment.
“Then we go to Matvey,” he said.
Matvey was in his office. Of course, he was—it was close to midnight and Matvey’s relationship with standard hours had always been largely theoretical. He was at his desk with a glass of water and a folder open in front of him, and when we came through the door, he looked at Tomas Alvarez and then at me, and the shift in his expression was minute and deliberate, communicating a great deal in a very small space.
He closed the folder.