“I thought you’d attack tonight and I was right, thank god I came here before you carried out your plans because now youlook like a damn fool.” I gesture around the warehouse. “Look around you, all your men are dead.”
His jaw clenches but he stays silent.
“But there’s an olive branch I’m about to give you, and it’s a short, stubby, withering little thing, but I’m gonna give it to you anyway.” I lean against the table. “Why? Because never once in my thirty-seven years of life have I ever been more infuriated with a person and still wanted to keep them alive.”
He stares at me, hope filling his eyes.
“So here’s the choice: option one, I take you to the Bratva council where you confess what you did and tell them about all the families you killed, then the families of those victims get to decide how you die.” I shrug. “See? I’m not the one who ends up killing you, it’s them, so here’s your olive branch and tell me what’s your pick.”
He makes a pathetic sound, a broken and terrified exhale.
“Choice two.” I pull his personal gun from my belt, the exact weapon he was holding when my men first found him, then check the chamber to make sure it holds a single round. I slide the heavy metal across the table until it stops right in front of him. “You handle the execution yourself on your own terms, and it’s the last decision you ever get to make.”
He stares down at the weapon for a long moment. “Tell Stanislav I’m sorry,” Dato whispers, his voice cracking. “Tell him I didn’t mean what I said on the phone, that he was never weak and he was always the best of us.”
“Yeah yeah, I’ll tell him, just kill yourself already.”
He picks up the gun with a hand shaking so badly that the steel barrel rattles against his teeth when he presses it under his chin.
“Do you love her?” he asks. “Zoya?”
“More than anything in this world.”
“I hope her baby isn't yours.”
He pulls the trigger.
The shot echoes through the silent room as his body jerks hard before slumping sideways off the chair, hitting the floor with a heavy thud. Everything Dato Janelidze ever was ends right there on the polished wood of his uncle’s war room.
I sit in the quiet for a long moment before finally standing up and stepping off the table, walking right past his bleeding body without bothering to look down.
“Clear this room,” I tell Bohdan. “Bag him up, bag all of them, then burn the bodies to ash, I want no graves and no remains.”
"Understood, Pakhan."
Walking out the door, I head down the hallway. The fresh blood coating my boots leaves dark red footprints across the clean tile.
The staircase leading to the basement sits at the far east end of the main floor. Taking the steps two at a time, I descend into the unfinished space. Bare concrete walls surround me, with exposed pipes running along the low ceiling in the dim, flickering light.
Two armed guards stand watch at the bottom of the stairs. Seeing me approach, they immediately raise their weapons.
I shoot the first guard before he can aim down his sights. The second man manages to get a wild shot off. The bullet goes wide, chipping the concrete wall right behind my head. Putting two rounds directly into his chest, I drop him to the floor. I step over both bleeding bodies and move deeper into the dark basement.
Finding three doors lining the corridor, I kick open the first one to reveal a basic storage room. Dusty shelves sit stacked with cleaning supplies, but the room is empty. The second door is locked tight. Shooting the metal handle off, I kick the wood inward to find a large wine cellar filled with racks of expensive bottles. There is no panic room.
The third door sits at the dead end of the hall. The frame holds reinforced steel with no visible handle, a digital keypad resting on the concrete wall beside it.
"Panic room located," Marko reports through the earpiece. "Breaching now."
Stepping back to give him space, I watch Marko plant a heavy shaped charge directly on the steel door. We both move down the hall to find cover.
The charge detonates. The explosive blast is deafening inside the enclosed space. The heavy steel door blows inward, the metal landing twisted and smoking on the floor. I walk straight through the thick gray cloud with my combat knife already drawn in my hand.
Levan Janelidze sits calmly behind a metal desk, holding a half-finished glass of red wine between his fingers. He takes a slow sip and sets the crystal down.
"Pakhan Roma…" Reaching under the desk, he pulls up a hidden pistol and fires twice.
I move fast. The first round punches a hole into the wall exactly where my head just was. The second bullet splits the air right past my ear. Closing the distance between us, I watch him fire a desperate third time and miss completely. His hands shake. His eyes stream with smoke.