Page 13 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

“Get them out,” I say.

Maksim doesn’t promise. He never wastes mercy on lies.

His men go in anyway. For a few minutes, I hear only shouting, glass breaking, the cough of men breathing smoke, orders snapped through radios. I watch one of my guards stumble out with his sleeve burning. Another man beats the flame off him and sends him back toward the line. Then the first stretcher comes out. Covered.

I stop breathing. A second follows, smaller only because my mother was never a large woman. The stretchers are placed on the snow. Maksim walks to them himself.

“No,” I say, though no one has asked me anything.

He lifts the first shroud. My father. His face is darkened by smoke, one side burned, hair singed back from his temple. Someone has placed his watch beside him because the strap is gone and the metal is warped.

Maksim lowers the cloth. He moves to the next one without pause. My mother. I keep my eyes open. I make myself watch. I’ve taken fists, knives, bullets, broken bones, and every ugly order Maksim ever gave me. None of it comes close to this. None of it knows where to cut.

Then the sound comes. It doesn’t feel human. I don’t remember making it. I only know Cara stirs somewhere beyond the kitchen, and I press the phone closer to my ear like that can keep my grief from reaching her.

Maksim covers my mother again. For a moment, he looks at the screen, and even through the feed, I see the fury in him.

“Listen to me,” he says.

I can’t.

“Dmitri.”

I stare at the covered bodies on the ground.

“Dmitri.”

My name breaks through because Maksim says it like an order, and I have obeyed him for years.

In our world, fire is an insult. Fire says your guards are blind, your walls are paper, your bloodline can be erased while men sleep. Burning a family home isn’t only murder. It’s a message to the dead, the living, and every ally watching for weakness.

Someone sent that message through my parents.

Through Maksim.

Through me.

My mother told me goodnight, and I went to a hotel with Cara O’Connell.

Cara makes a small sound from the bed. I turn my head. For one second, I want to go to her. I want to wake her, tell her, let her look at me like I’m still a man and not this hollow thing standing under cheap hotel lights while Moscow burns on my phone. She’d say something wrong and brave. She’d touch me. I might let her. So I stay where I am.

Maksim’s voice cuts through again. “A car will reach you in five minutes. Charter is being arranged. Dress. Bring nothing you don’t need.”

I look back at the feed. The stretchers remain on the snow.

“I should’ve been there.”

“You’d be dead.”

“I should’ve been there.”

“Find out who wanted you looking in the wrong direction,” Maksim says. “Then bring me proof.”

It’s the closest he comes to comfort, and it works because it gives me something to do.

I dress in silence. Shirt. Trousers. Watch. Gun. Shoes. Phone. My hands know the sequence while the rest of me empties out.

At the door, I stop. Cara’s scarf is on the chair beside the bed. Dark red. The hallway cameras will have caught it, caught her, caught us. The registration is under an alias, paid in cash, but cameras remember better than men.