Page 42 of Fallen Empire (The Fallen Trilogy #2)

Millie

I’d played out every possible scenario in my mind, trying to stay one step ahead. Deep down, I knew they’d find me. I knew Ben would tear this city apart if he had to. Even if it meant learning a truth I wasn’t ready to admit.

That after everything that has happened… I could never be with him. Not after he’d kept me in the dark again.

Still, I’d held onto the only advantage I had. The fact that Aleksei didn’t know we were on to him. I’d played my part well, kept the mask in place, and let him think I was just a pawn in his game.

But when the door creaked open and the body of a woman collapsed onto the floor, I realized just how wrong I’d been.

I had underestimated him.

Because Aleksei Koslov wasn’t just capable of violence. He knew how to send a message.

And now the message had a pulse.

The door shut behind her, and my body responded instantly.

Don’t let it be Vannah. Please, God—don’t let it be her.

There was already blood pooling on the floor where she lay, limp and lifeless.

I rushed to her side, heart pounding, and rolled her over. My breath caught.

The bile clawing up my throat couldn’t be stopped. I turned my head and vomited onto the floor beside me. And the acrid stench in the room almost triggered it all over again, but I shoved my sleeve over my nose, forcing myself to breathe through the cotton.

I stayed there, crouched and shaking, my knees slick from the floor and my hands too numb to feel the cement. My brain tried to shut down, like if I didn’t look at her again, I could pretend this wasn’t real. Pretend I wasn’t in a room with someone who’d just died in front of me.

But I knew I wouldn’t pretend she didn’t exist.

Then I looked at her.

Really looked at her.

Her hair was matted to her scalp, dark with blood and sweat, the strands tangled like they’d been yanked and twisted by violent hands.

Her clothes—what was left of them—hung in shreds.

A tank top that used to be white, now soaked through with crimson.

One shoe missing. One ankle twisted wrong. Her skin was pale beneath the filth.

There was a delicate chain around her neck, barely visible through the blood. A tiny pendant still clung to it, cracked down the middle like someone had stepped on it.

Her face—God, her face—looked like it had been pressed through a cheese cutter. Perfect lines, carved straight up and down. Her flesh peeled open so far I could see her teeth. Her throat wasn’t cut, but it was bruised. Deep, blooming purples spread across her skin like ink stains.

Her arms were soaked in blood, but when I looked closer…

Burn marks.

Symbols. Branded into her skin. Russian.

One after another, seared into her like twisted trophies.

The stench of dead flesh clung to her, barely masked by the sharp, metallic bite of blood. There wasn’t a single inch of her that hadn’t been ripped, burned, or… ruined. A symphony of wreckage.

Complete. Merciless.

And I couldn’t look away.

I needed to know exactly what kind of monster I was facing.

What Aleksei was capable of.

What he’d already done.

I looked down to her hand. Fuck . Her fingertips had been cut off. If I had to guess… it was done slowly. One by one.

I moved down to adjust her legs, carefully lifting them one at a time. That’s when a scream tore through the silence, ricocheting off the concrete walls and slamming into my chest.

I recoiled instinctively, bracing myself in case she lunged, but she didn’t. She was still. Her eyes were open, locked on mine, but her body had long passed the point of fighting back.

Then I heard it. A whisper of sound I couldn’t place. A mumble, faint and wet, rising from somewhere inside her ruined face. I couldn’t even tell if her lips were moving, or if the words were leaking from the holes in her skin.

I leaned closer, trying to make sense of it. The words were there, just beneath the surface, struggling to be heard.

“I’m…”

She tried to speak. God, she was trying. I could see it. This desperate effort to make her final breath count.

I wanted to give her something. A name. A promise. A prayer. But what the hell could I offer a woman who’d already lost everything?

She wouldn’t remember me. Wouldn’t even know if I meant the words. And yet, they came anyway.

“I’m so sorry.”

And I was. Sorry for her pain. Sorry for whatever brought her to this place. Whatever she’d done—or refused to do—it couldn’t have justified this. No one deserved this kind of agony.

She inhaled sharply, her breath catching on something inside her. There was more she needed to say. Something important.

I bent closer, my face just inches from hers, close enough to see every torn fragment of flesh.

“Tell Jaxson… I’m sorry.”

The words came out broken. Strained. But I heard them. Every syllable lodged in my chest like a bullet.

And then I realized what was causing her difficulty. A cough tore up her throat, and I turned my head just in time—

The blood hit my cheek. Warm. Wet. Sprayed across my face like her body was rejecting death itself.

I sat back hard, my heels catching beneath me, hand clamped over my mouth. But I wasn’t phased by the blood. I was phased by her words.

Because she knew Jaxson.

Because she was one of us.

And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to save her.

A breath slipped from her mouth, soft and final.

Her last.

She was gone. Whoever she was, she’d died for us.

I reached forward, gently closing her eyelids, then stood and backed into the farthest corner of the room, pressing myself into the shadowed wall. As far from the door as I could get. As far from her body as possible.

The click overhead made my heart seize.

He was back.

I didn’t know how long it had been since he last spoke—minutes, hours—everything blurred together in this place. But the sound of his voice again, smooth and casual, like he hadn’t just dumped a dying woman at my feet, made my stomach twist.

“Well. I guess you didn’t know her after all.”

The sound of him made my skin crawl, but I couldn’t afford to let him get inside my head.

It was too calm. Too deliberate.

I’d spent years coaching powerful men through public scandals, teaching them how to fake composure when the world was burning around them. But Aleksei didn’t need to fake anything. He didn’t hide the madness. No, he carried it with pride, wore it like a second skin.

And every word from that speaker? It was a blade I couldn’t see coming. This wasn’t something I could manage or control. This was psychological warfare.

And I was the experiment.

He wasn’t just a monster.

He was calculated. And he was enjoying every second of this.

But if he wasn’t going to come into the room, then he didn’t want my blood, at least not yet.

This was about control.

Which meant if I had any shot of surviving this, I had to take some of it back. I’d have to fight him with the only weapon I had left—my mind.

And pray that was enough.

“No,” I said, voice steady. “I didn’t know her.”

“Then tell me,” he pressed, tone sharper now. “What were her final words? The ones so vital she wasted her last breath on them.”

I glanced at the camera mounted in the corner.

And that’s when it hit me.

He didn’t know who she was either. I looked down, buying myself a second, then shook my head slowly.

A loud bang exploded through the speaker. My body flinched before I could stop it.

“Tell me,” he growled. Any trace of patience was gone.

I didn’t answer right away. Not because I was scared, even though I was, but because for the first time since being dragged into this hellhole, I might’ve had something he didn’t.

After hearing her last words, I assumed she was a warning meant for Jaxson—another twisted move in Aleksei’s obsession with control. Jaxson had sent her after Aleksei, so of course he would respond the only way he knew how. Destruction.

But the longer I sat with it, the more it twisted in my gut.

In Aleksei’s eyes, this wasn’t a message for Jaxson at all.

It was a message to him—one he didn’t even know who had delivered.

And now he was flailing, leaving bodies in his wake, threats hanging in the air, and blood on his hands as he scrambled to figure out who was coming for him.

He thought it might be Jaxson, and hoped throwing her in here with me would force the truth out. After all, Jaxson had already cost him millions, shut down Sinclair, and burned everything Bruce built, according to him.

And yet, here he was. Lost in a war where he didn’t even know who the real enemy was.

And that was the part he couldn’t stand, the not knowing.

But while Aleksei was slipping deeper, Jaxson was already in the game.

Already making moves.

I wasn’t sure Jaxson fully understood the type of man he was dealing with, but that didn’t mean he was idle. If he’d sent this woman out on some mission, then Ben and Nic were damn sure in on it, too.

The realization hit fast, crashing into me all at once: Jaxson was trying to stop Aleksei—quietly, carefully—moving pieces into place before anyone realized there was a strategy.

I know Jaxson would never intend for this to happen, but maybe he didn’t realize the game he was playing yet.

She had become a pawn.

Sacrificed before she ever had the chance to reach the other side of the board.

But Aleksei… he was guessing. Reaching.

And that little bit of knowledge meant I actually held more power than he thought.

If I could hold my nerve, just long enough to use that… maybe I could shift the balance.

Maybe I wasn’t just a hostage.

Maybe I was a variable.

So I gave him the one thing I knew he couldn’t ignore.

One thing I already knew was a fact he wouldn’t try to deny.

“She said you’re Russian Mafia.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was charged.

“Liar.” His voice turned lethal, but the way he said it… there was something underneath.

Fear.

“I’m not lying,” I answered calmly. “She didn’t say your name. Just said, ‘He’s Russian Mafia.’ That was all she could say.” I paused, letting it hang in the air as I let out a deep breath. “Even if she wanted to say more... she’s dead.”

I let the words sink in before adding, “And if that’s true, and judging by the state you left her in—it is, then I don’t understand what you want with Savannah.”

It wasn’t just a challenge. It was bait, a statement he’d already explained earlier. And he took it.

“I already told you,” he snapped. “It isn’t just about her.”

His tone changed. It was darker now, bitter.

“When I get past the wall Westbrook built around her bank accounts, I still want his head. Because he took something from me. Stripped me of everything I was building. I was on the rise. And he made sure I fell.”

He was unraveling. A man who once held power—hell, probably still did—but it wasn’t enough. For someone like Aleksei, it never would be. Even if he owned every bank account, every property, every piece of paper soaked in ink and signatures… he wouldn’t stop.

I knew what was happening to him. I saw it for what it was. Saw it at face value.

I’d spent my entire life learning to read between the lines, trained to catch what people weren’t saying out loud.

It’s what made me good at my job. They’d promise me they wouldn’t make a situation worse—the clients, the CEOs, the political figures I’d cleaned up after—and I’d know, without question, that they would.

So I’d adjust the strategy. Rework the timeline.

Get ahead of the explosion before the first match ever struck.

And Aleksei? I didn’t need to see him to know someone had their hand pressed firmly against his throat.

But whoever it was, they weren’t letting go. I was certain now that this went beyond Jaxson. And whoever was still out there, they wouldn’t stop, even if Aleksei took us all out of the game.

Aleksei didn’t just want control. He wanted ownership. Of people. Of lives. Of choices. Like we were all just puppets in his theater of chaos.

But in reality, he was nothing more than a marionette now. Strings tied to his hands and feet, dangling at the mercy of whoever held the wood above him and decided which way he moved.

And somehow, though I still didn’t fully understand how, Jaxson had taken that from him.

We thought Savannah was the target. But after today, after hearing his fury slip past the polished mask twice, I knew better.

When the speaker finally cut out, the silence that followed felt deafening. But my thoughts didn’t stop. They pressed in, tighter than ever, filling every inch of my brain with a single truth:

He was worse than we thought.

Not just a criminal. Not just some shadowy figure tied to Bruce’s empire. Aleksei Koslov was sick. Strategic. The kind of man who didn’t just crave control, he took pleasure in watching people break.

And Savannah had survived a man just like him.

The man who once vowed to love her was one of them .

One of these monsters.

And suddenly, I wondered just how bad it had really been.

What parts she’d left out.

What details she’d buried to protect me—from him, from her memories, from the truth.

She shouldn’t have had to carry that alone.

None of us should.

For now, I was still breathing. Still in one piece.

But the damage had already started.

I glanced at the woman that was laying in the middle of the floor once again and swallowed hard. If I didn’t get out soon, I wasn’t sure how much of me would be left to save.