Reed bolts.
I see him break from the cluster, panic finally shredding the composure he wore like armor. He runs deeper into the warehouse, boots slapping concrete, knocking over crates as he goes. He knows the layout. He thinks that matters.
I follow.
The air is thick with dust and cordite, the space opening into long aisles of stacked pallets and rusted machinery. My footsteps are measured, relentless. I don’t sprint. I herd. Every route he takes, I cut him off from light, from exits, from men who might still be breathing.
He fires blind over his shoulder. Bullets bite sparks from steel inches from my head. I pivot, slide behind a forklift, roll, and come up already aiming.
He disappears around a corner.
I’m on him in seconds.
A catwalk. Narrow stairs. He takes them two at a time, breath ragged now, fear loud. I take them clean, quiet, close enough to smell his sweat. He glances back and trips—catcheshimself, keeps going, desperation giving him speed he doesn’t deserve.
“Rusnak—” he shouts, voice cracking. “We can—”
I put a round into the railing beside his head. He flinches hard, stumbles again.
“Run,” I tell him. “I want you tired.”
He bursts through a door into the back section—office shells, broken windows, moonlight cutting the dust into pale blades. Snow drifts in through shattered glass. Cold. Clean. Final.
He spins, weapon shaking.
“This was never personal,” he pants. “Your wife—she was leverage. That’s all.”
I step forward.
“She was never yours to measure.”
He fires.
I knock the barrel aside, close the distance, and drive him into the wall. The gun skitters away. He swings wild. I break his wrist. Bone snaps. He screams. I don’t flinch.
I lean in close, voice low, controlled—nothing left to prove.
“You lied to her,” I say. “You buried her father twice.”
His knees buckle. I let him slide down the wall to the floor, gasping, broken, alive only because I allow it.
He tries to crawl. I put my boot on his chest and press, slow and deliberate. The fight that follows isn’t chaos. It’s methodical. I take him apart the way I was taught—pressure, leverage, pain applied with purpose. An arm wrenched until the joint gives. Fingers bent back one by one until he’s screaming names, dates, routes. The truth spills out of him in shards.
Hart didn’t die in a crossfire.
He was handed over.
Drugged. Moved. Interrogated.
Killed when he wouldn’t give up the list.
Reed signed the transfer.
Reed falsified the report.
Reed delivered the death notice with practiced sorrow.
And Raelyn—