Chapter 7: Into the Dark

The click of the breaker was deafening in the sudden silence. My eyes, still dilated from the flash of muzzle fire, were useless. I dropped to a crouch, the gravel biting into my knees, my gun sweeping the void where my target had been a heartbeat ago. I could hear his breath—ragged, panicked—somewhere to my left. And I could hear her.

A sharp, strangled gasp.

My name was a scream trapped in her throat, and it took every ounce of willpower I had not to call back to her. To stay silent. To become the predator in the dark instead of the prey.

I’d been in the dark before. In the bowels of a shipping container off the coast of Odessa, in a forgotten tunnel under the city, in the suffocating blackness of a buried car. I knew the rules. Don't move. Don't breathe. Let your eyes adjust. But this was different. This was her.

A shuffling sound. Scraping shoes on concrete. He was running. I uncoiled, moving low and fast, my footsteps ghost-silent. My shoulder clipped a stacked shipping crate, the impact jarring my teeth, but I didn't stop. I could feel the open space of the dock ahead, the faint, sickly-sweet smell of the river.

Then, a new sound cut through the blackness: the high, terrified screech of a woman, followed by a guttural curse in Italian. And a thud.

I froze. The sound wasn't right. The screech wasn't her. It was too shrill, too theatrical. A decoy. The curse was for my benefit, a breadcrumb.

I smiled in the dark. He was playing games. He was Saul Moretti, a lieutenant in the Vitale family, and he was supposed to be dead. I’d put a bullet in his shoulder a year ago and watched him fall into the harbor. Apparently, he was a better swimmer than I gave him credit for.

The floodlights snapped back on, blindingly white. I was exposed, standing in the middle of the dock, caught in a spotlight. Saul Moretti stood twenty feet away, a trembling dock worker held in front of him like a shield, a silenced pistol pressed to the man’s temple. Saul’s face was a mask of fury, but his eyes—they darted. They were the eyes of a man who had run out of moves.

"Drop it, Volkov!" he snarled, his accent thick. "Or this man's brains paint the concrete."

My gun stayed trained on him, but I saw her. She was off to the side, standing near a stack of wooden pallets. Her hands were clenched at her sides, her face pale in the harsh light. Her eyes were locked on me, wide and pleading. She mouthed the words again. *Don’t do it.*

But Saul was a liar. He was going to kill the dockworker no matter what I did. The only variable was whether I died first. So I did the only thing I could. I dropped my gun. It clattered on the ground, and I raised my hands.

Saul’s smile was a ugly slash in his face. "Now that's better." He shoved the dockworker aside, and the man scrambled away, bleeding from a gash on his head. Saul turned his full attention to me. "Your father sends his regards. He wanted to know what it felt like to take something from you."

My blood ran cold. My father. The man I’d escaped, the man whose empire I was dismantling piece by piece. He was in on this.

Saul raised his pistol, aiming squarely at my chest. I saw the flicker of movement in my periphery, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the barrel. I saw the hammer begin to pull back.

Then I heard it. A sharp, metallic *clink* from behind him.

Saul’s eyes went wide, and his body stiffened. He looked down, confused. A small, black-handled knife was sticking out of his side. It was my knife. The one I’d given her for protection.

The gunshot that followed was muffled, a wet *thump*. Saul toppled forward, his finger convulsing on the trigger. The bullet whined past my ear, shattering a light fixture behind me.

And then, she was there. Standing over his body, her hands shaking, my knife gleaming with blood.

I stared at her, at the woman I’d dragged into this world of blood and shadows. There was no fear in her eyes anymore. There was only a cold fury.

"He touched me," she whispered, her voice raw. "When the lights went out. He touched me."

I walked to her, my steps heavy. I took her face in my hands, forcing her to look at me. "Look at me," I commanded. "You’re okay. You did what you had to."

She blinked, a single tear tracing a clean path through the grime on her cheek. "He said he was going to take me back to him. Back to your father."

I pulled her into my arms, crushing her against my chest. I could feel her heart hammering against her ribs. My father. He had sent a ghost to fetch her, to use her as a weapon against me.

"You're safe," I murmured into her hair, even as my mind was racing. This wasn't over. The dock was a trap, but it was a first move, not a checkmate.

I felt her nod against my chest, her body finally beginning to tremble. The adrenaline was wearing off. A wave of exhausted relief washed over her, turning her limbs to water.

I looked down at Saul Moretti’s body. The dockworker was gone, vanished into the night. No witnesses. I knelt, retrieving my knife and wiping it on his expensive suit. I picked up my gun, holstered it.

"We have to move," I said, my voice hardening back to business. "This was a message. He knows where you are, which means he knows where I am. We can't go back to the penthouse."

She pulled back, looking up at me. Her eyes were clearer now, a new steel behind them. "Where do we go?"

I looked past her, towards the dark, churning river. My father had been a step ahead of me for the first time in years. That was a mistake he wouldn't make again.

"Somewhere he can't follow," I said, my jaw tight. "Where no one can follow. The only place where I'm the one with the home-field advantage. Hell."

I took her hand, and we ran, leaving the body of Saul Moretti to the rats and the rising tide. This was no longer a war of attrition. He had tried to take her. Now, it was personal. And I was going to burn his world to the ground.

A new message vibrated on my phone. A single word from an unknown number: *Rook taken.*

I stopped dead in my tracks, the phone screen illuminating my face. She looked at me, questioning.

The message wasn't for him. It was for me. The game wasn't over. It had just moved to a board I didn't know.