His voice echoed in her mind.Men like me don’t last.
He’d warned her.
If he was alive, he was already coming.
41
The Siberian nighthad gone hard as iron, the stars sharp enough to cut.
Pav had counted eleven cigarette glows from the treeline before Fox and Zak arrived.
He’d been there since dusk, crawling close enough to the compound’s eastern wall to smell the diesel from their generator and hear the static bleed from a radio left on in the guardhouse. He’d mapped the sentry rotation and identified two of the guards by gait alone. One dragged his left foot, the other paused mid-circuit to piss against the same stretch of wall.
Routine made people careless.
The compound was an old school. Main building, two auxiliary blocks, all inside a brick perimeter topped with razor wire. One vehicle gate. One rear pedestrian entrance.
Both guarded.
He'd memorized every window and door. He'd walked the perimeter three times already and sketched the compound from memory, even though he no longer needed to.
If he stopped moving, he’d think. And thinking was where things started breaking apart.
Now he stood at the hood of Katya’s van. A red-filtered flashlight washed the hood in dim light as he studied the layout.
He crushed two painkillers between his teeth and swallowed them dry. Chalk coated his tongue. The tablets hit his empty stomach like grit. Not relief yet. Just the promise of a narrower pain signal if they had enough time to work.
Headlights vanished fifty feet out, the vehicle slowing immediately as it picked its way through the trees in the darkness.
Fox.
Pav exhaled. For the first time since Harper and Katya had been taken, he wasn’t alone with the rage. The Land Cruiser rolled to a stop twenty feet away. Two doors opened. Fox emerged first. His gaze found Pav and held for two full seconds without blinking.
Fox crossed the clearing fast, eyes moving over Pav—chest, shoulder, stance, the blood staining his clothes.
“You look like shit,” he said evenly. “Sitrep?”
Pav flattened the map against the hood. His shoulder pulsed with every heartbeat. He kept his hand flat on the hood because if he let it hang, it trembled. “Old school compound. Main building plus two secondary structures. Brick perimeter wall, razor wire, one vehicle gate, one rear pedestrian access.”
Zak came around the vehicle, tablet already in hand.
“My friend Katya’s alive. They took her too.”
“Bastards.” Fox shook his head.
Zak’s gaze dropped to Pav’s boots. “What the fuck is with the socks?”
Pav looked down briefly, as if noticing them for the first time himself. “Katya.”
Fox slid the satellite image across the hood. “Guard count?”
“Eight confirmed. More inside.” Pav tapped the eastern side of the map. “Rotating sentries every twenty minutes. Generatorhere. Guard post here. Blind spots beneath the guard towers here, where the lights don’t overlap.”
Zak cross-referenced the satellite feed against Pav’s hand-drawn map, fingers moving fast over the tablet screen.
Fox blew out a breath. “How’d they find you?”
Pav kept his eyes on the map. “The UAZ. Had to be. Katya hid it, but someone in the town saw us arrive and made a call.”
