Page 29

The room is wreckage.

Smoke still curls from bullet-split beams, rising like ghosts through the broken ceiling. Shattered glass crunches beneath my boots, and somewhere to my right, a pipe drips steadily, the sound sharp against the silence.

We’re cornered.

Trapped in what used to be some kind of storage room or back office—maybe in a warehouse, maybe the ruined shell of some estate long forgotten. There’s nothing left here but fire stains, concrete, and death.

Andrei slumps against a cracked support beam just feet from me, one hand pressed to his shoulder, blood soaking through his shirt and jacket in thick, wet streaks. His breathing is rough. Labored. His jaw clenched tight. He’s still upright. Still glaring.

Still alive.

Matías stands across the room now, gun trained on Andrei’s chest, expression gleaming with cruel satisfaction. There’s no hurry in him. He’s savoring this. His suit is torn, dirtied with ash and sweat and blood, but he still holds himself like a king about to cut down a rival in front of a crowd.

Only the crowd is gone.

It’s just us.

My heart punches against my ribs. Every second feels too long and too short at once. Every inhale tastes like soot and fear.

I glance at Andrei again—his face pale, jaw twitching with pain. I’ve seen him stand up for me before. I’ve seen him bleed, but not like this. Not with the weight of failure starting to settle in his shoulders, like he knows he might not walk out of this one.

Something tears open inside me. A feeling I don’t have words for.

I want him to live.

I want it with a desperation I don’t understand, can’t justify. He’s done terrible things. He’s scared me, hurt me, broken me open and forced me to see parts of myself I wish I hadn’t. He is violence. He is obsession.

He’s also the only one who came.

The only one who would, and now it feels too late.

I step forward. My voice shakes as I speak. I clutch the gun in my hands, not knowing if I can use it. To kill like this would make me just as bad at him. My hands waver.

“Please—Matías—don’t.”

His eyes flick to me. Cold. Dismissive. “Quiet.”

That one word silences me more than a slap would have.

He turns back to Andrei, tilting his head slightly, gun still raised. There’s almost pity in his smile—twisted, mocking.

“You should blame your girl’s father,” he says, voice low, almost conversational. “Not me.”

Andrei doesn’t answer. He just watches him. Waiting.

Matías’s smile widens. “He pulled the trigger. I gave the order.”

He says it like a confession. Like a gift. My breath catches.

He’s not done. “Maxim was my message,” he says. “To remind your Bratva what real power looks like.”

Silence follows Matías’s confession. Thick. Cold. Absolute.

Even the air seems to stop moving. The words hang there like a curse, like a death sentence: Maxim was my message.

Andrei doesn’t move. His eyes are locked on Matías, his body tense against the beam, but his gun hand has dropped slightly. His chest rises and falls, slow, controlled—but his knuckles are white from how tightly he grips the pistol.

I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.

Then—

A slow, deliberate clap echoes from the edge of the room.

The sound slices through the tension like a blade.

Matías’s smile falters.

A voice follows the clap. Smooth. Sharp. Amused in a way that carries weight beneath it.

“Are you sure Maxim died?”

Matías freezes.

The color drains from his face—not all at once, but in stages, like his brain refuses to understand what it’s hearing.

From the dark corner of the room, a figure steps forward.

Tall, broad and fark-haired. He’s scarred across the jaw.

Familiar. So familiar it steals the breath from my lungs, the spitting image of Andrei.

Maxim.

Alive.

Andrei stares. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. His expression goes hollow—like the floor has vanished beneath him and he’s still falling.

His gun lowers a fraction more. His eyes are wide, the lines of pain forgotten. For the first time since I’ve known him, he looks completely unprepared.

Like he’s staring at a ghost.

I gasp, the sound involuntary.

One of Matías’s men stumbles backward and drops his weapon, the clatter deafening in the dead air.

Matías’s mouth opens—then closes again. His fingers twitch around the grip of his gun.

Maxim stops a few feet from him. His face is hard, unreadable. There’s no warmth in his eyes—no relief, no reunion. Just a quiet, glacial fury that makes the air itself feel sharper.

He looks straight at Matías. “You should’ve made sure.”

The room explodes.

Matías turns to fire—too slow.

Maxim moves like a weapon fired from a string—his gun already up, already aimed. One shot punches through Matías’s shoulder. He screams, stumbling back, the pistol dropping from his grip as blood sprays against the crumbling wall behind him.

Then the rest of the room ignites. Gunfire. Shouting.

Men scrambling, shooting blindly. A second of chaos.

I hit the ground instinctively, pulling Andrei down with me. He curses, half in pain, half in disbelief. His eyes are still on Maxim, like he hasn’t blinked.

Maxim doesn’t flinch. He moves through the chaos like a machine—cold, relentless, precise. There’s no hesitation in him, no wasted motion. Each step is calculated, every shot fired with deadly intent. He doesn’t fire to wound. He doesn’t fire to scare.

Matías’s men scramble to react, but they’re already too late.

Some hesitate—stunned by Maxim’s face, by the impossibility of it.

The man they buried in the sea has returned with steel in his spine and a kill order in his eyes.

Others try to rally, shouting in Spanish, dragging rifles into position—but their disarray is fatal.

Andrei groans beside me, pushing himself up from the floor, one hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder.

He grabs a weapon off a fallen man, his movements slower than usual but still deadly.

The look on his face is unreadable—shock, rage, disbelief all layered together—but his hand is steady when he raises the gun.

I stay low, tucked behind the broken remnants of a metal cabinet, heart racing but hands clenched tight. I’m wide-eyed, but not frozen.

Not when I’ve come this far.

Maxim cuts a path through the room like a storm. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t gloat. He just moves—methodical, brutal, exact. One man lunges at him with a blade; Maxim puts two bullets in his chest before the man finishes his first step.

Another tries to run.

Maxim shoots him in the back without blinking.

This isn’t justice. This is vengeance.

A door crashes open in the far wall—Dima and two more Bratva men flood in, rifles raised, their arrival late but decisive. The last of the cartel soldiers turn to fight and are mowed down in seconds, their resistance crushed beneath the black-suited force of retribution.

And then—

Silence.

Only one man remains.

Matías.

He’s on his knees, back to the wall, blood pouring from the gunshot in his shoulder. His breathing is ragged, but his eyes are still sharp. Defiant. Dangerous. Like a snake coiled even in death.

His pistol is gone, his men are dead. He looks at Maxim, then at Andrei—and laughs. A dry, rasping sound that echoes far too loud in the ruined space.

“So this is it,” he spits, blood on his teeth. “The Sharovs. Both of you.” He shakes his head, shoulders twitching in pain. “You should’ve stayed dead.”

He’s bleeding badly now, eyes wide with fear he’s too proud to show, the kind that leaks out through clenched teeth and shaking fingers. He tips forward—but catches himself with a hiss.

He’s trying to find his gun, but he’s out of time.

I can only watch as it all plays out.

Maxim steps forward slowly, boots crunching over shell casings and broken glass, his gun held steady at chest height. No shaking. No hesitation. Just cold, unrelenting aim.

He doesn’t rush, there’s no need.

Matías snarls, jaw clenched, breath coming fast through his nose. “You should be dead,” he growls, spitting the words like venom.

Maxim doesn’t blink. “You should’ve checked for a pulse.”

He fires one shot, straight through the center of Matías’s chest.

There’s no scream. No dramatic gasp. No monologue. Just a dull thud as his body folds in on itself and hits the ground.

Gone.

No redemption. No legacy.

Just blood pooling across the cracked floor.

The silence that follows is deafening. No gunfire. No shouting. Just the low hum of smoke and blood thickening the air. The ruined room holds its breath. Men—armed and trained—stand frozen as if afraid to speak, unsure if what they just witnessed was real.

Everyone is looking at Maxim.

Maxim lowers his gun slowly. His hand doesn’t shake. His face doesn’t change. He stares at Matías’s corpse for one long second—then turns his back on it like it means nothing.

Like the job is done and he already knew how it would end.

Andrei finally moves.

He pushes off the support beam, the wound in his shoulder still bleeding, the pain visible in the stiffness of his gait. His footsteps echo through the ruined room as he limps forward, gun lowered but still in hand.

He stops a few feet away, face pale, jaw tight, eyes locked on the man he buried ten years ago.

Ten years.

And Maxim’s alive.

“How?” Andrei asks, voice hoarse. Raw. The word catches in his throat like he hasn’t used it in years.

Maxim turns to face him.

There’s no smile. No warmth. Only the faintest flicker—an echo—of who he used to be.

I feel like I shouldn’t be here, like this is a moment I don’t deserve to witness.

He doesn’t answer at first, only holds his brother’s gaze.

Finally, he says, “The sea spit me back.”

It’s not an explanation. Not really, but it’s the only one he gives.

Andrei stands there, caught somewhere between disbelief and the kind of grief that comes too late to matter. His grip on the pistol tightens, but not in aggression—just as if he needs something solid to hold on to.

He nods once, and that’s it.

Beside them, I exhale for the first time in what feels like forever. My legs tremble, and my throat is raw from holding in the scream that nearly tore free when Matías raised his gun.

Maxim glances at me briefly. There’s no recognition in his eyes, but there’s understanding. He sees what I am—what I’ve become in this war—and gives me the smallest nod.

Respect.

Then he looks away, already turning toward the door.

Smoke coils in through a broken window. Rain drums softly on the crumbling roof. Outside, the world goes on.

Inside this room, something has shifted. Something old has cracked open. Something that died ten years ago just stood up and shot a man in the chest.

No one here will ever forget it.