"Aurora." Axel's voice is quiet, final, the particular quiet that means the conversation is over. "You're staying here."
"I'm going with you."
"You're not."
"Then I'll follow in my own car." I hold his eyes. "One of those options has your security around me, and one doesn't. Your choice."
The muscle in his jaw tightens. He stares at me long enough that I feel it in my spine, that stare, the full weight of it. Then he turns to Viktor.
"Third car," he says. "Keep her back from the front line."
I get in the third car before he finishes the sentence.
Viktor doesn't look at me. Sergei suddenly finds his weapon extremely interesting. Every single one of Axel's men develops an urgent need to examine the middle distance. I buckle my seatbelt and face forward and say nothing.
The warehouse district is ugly at night. Wide empty roads between blocky buildings, sodium lights bleeding everything into the color of old bruises, the cold smell of the river threading through it all underneath. Our cars roll in without headlights, slow and quiet, and I watch through the window as Axel's men filter out into the dark like they were never in the vehicles at all, absorbed by shadow in seconds.
Through the warehouse's high windows, the decoy is visible. Two of Axel's men are moving around a table with documents, unhurried, conducting a routine business exchange to anyone looking from the outside. Below the sight lines, twelve more men wait in the dark. In the buildings flanking this one, Luca's men are already in position, have been for two hours.
The trap is set.
My tablet shows four camera feeds, the hastily rigged system Viktor built this afternoon. I watch them, tracking positions, and try not to think about Leo. About the fact that he's coming. About what his face looked like the last time I saw it, in Luca's house, spitting things at me that I can still hear if I'm not careful.
Don't. Watch the feeds. Be useful.
Viktor's voice crackles through the radio. "East approach. Four vehicles. Moving."
My stomach drops straight to the floor.
They come in fast. Four cars emptying into the space between the buildings, men fanning out with the horrible efficiency of people who have rehearsed this specific approach, and I understand immediately from the way they split — half to the entrance, half to the flanks — that someone gave them a precise picture of this location.
The trap springs.
The noise hits like a physical force. Gunfire cracks across the empty district from all directions at once, and my whole body flinches with the first volley, even though I knew it was coming, even though I've been bracing for it; the sound still pierces through skin and bone and lands somewhere animal and scared.
Breathe. Watch the feeds. Call positions.
I do it. I focus on the tablet, tracking movement and calling out what I see over the radio. A Volkov shooter repositioning to the north roof — I call it before he settles. Sergei's voice crackles back ten seconds later, confirmed, handled. Three men pushing through the east door while the defense is focused left — I call it — Viktor redirects and the push collapses.
For twenty minutes, I breathe through the fear, and it works.
Then the third feed shows me Leo.
He comes in from the south entrance alone, no tactical positioning, no coordination with the men fighting twenty meters away. He moves in a straight line, purposeful, and I follow the direction of that line on my screen and feel the cold arrive in my chest before my brain finishes the calculation.
He's walking directly toward the third car.
He already knows which one.
"Viktor." My voice comes out strange. Too high. "Viktor, Leo is at the south entrance, he's coming toward—"
The door opens.
He's faster than I expected. I throw myself across the seat, but his hand closes around my arm, and he hauls me half out of the car before I get any traction, and up close, his face stops me cold. Not the composed cruelty I remember from the estate. Something fractured and pressurized and completely beyond the reach of reason, the face of someone who has been building toward this moment for a very long time.
"There she is." Almost conversational. "There's the woman who ruined everything."
"Leo—"
