Page 105 of Blood & Snow

Secondary detonations follow as ammunition cooks off, sending tracer rounds streaking through the darkness.

Black smoke rises over the district, visible for miles against the pre-dawn sky.

By the time the fire trucks arrive, the building will be little more than twisted metal and concrete rubble.

The Sokolov weapons cache has been reduced to ash and glowing metal, and the FSB will have a field day with it.

We drive through empty streets, past apartment blocks where lights flicker on behind curtains as residents wake to investigate the distant rumble.

Moscow swallows us into its embrace, eight ghosts vanishing into the urban maze that spawned us.

The Sokolov Brotherhood is weaker tonight, their war chest reduced to radioactive debris.

But weakness and death are different currencies, and the Pakhan accepts only one form of payment.

Eventually we regroup at my safehouse and my men return to their normal schedules, some of them going home to sleep.

And I head toward my check in with Leonid. I'm running twenty minutes late, but with good news, that there are so few men left I can taste it.

Though I'm not foolish enough to think this meeting will go smoothly.

I park outside the building and take the private elevator to his office.

He sits behind his desk, looking like he walked straight out of a magazine with a cup of coffee in his hand, no doubt dosed with his favorite bourbon.

"The factory?" he grunts as I approach his desk. Before we even set this strike I informed him of my plan.

With only two locations left and the challenge of sniffing out Arkady, I need all the help I can get.

"Gone, sir. Twelve guards have been eliminated, weapons cache destroyed. We left nothing salvageable."

"And survivors?" he asks, calmly picking up his coffee mug and sipping from it.

He doesn't ask me to sit, so I stay standing until he gestures at the chair opposite him.

"None," I tell him sitting down.

The chair creaks under me uneasily, as if it understands the tension between us.

I refuse to take blame for Sokolov's men moving in on our territory through my shipping lanes, but Leonid has delivered the ultimatum and I have to follow through. There’s no other choice for me.

Leonid reaches for a decanter on the shelf behind his desk and pours a glass of bourbon.

I can take this as my celebratory drink from him, but without verbal affirmation of my success thus far, I know he's still waiting for the job to be finished.

We've all but decimated the Brotherhood.

It'll take a decade for them to recover, but if we don't take Arkady out, they will recover.

We can't have that.

"The Sokolovs have other caches," he says, sliding oneglass across the desk.

"Smaller operations, but still dangerous… And Sokolov himself still lives."

I accept the bourbon but don't drink yet.

It feels premature to celebrate when I look at the creases on the boss's forehead and know he's not satisfied yet.