Page 103 of Cruel Submission

“Fall back!” he screams. His remaining bodyguards are already retreating—scrambling into the SUVs, dragging a wounded man between them, leaving their dead on my road like refuse. “FALL BACK!”

I settle the crosshairs on his temple.

One squeeze. Three pounds of pressure on the trigger, and Gavriil Laurov stops being a problem. Stops being a monster. Stops being my father. The trafficking ends, the threats end, the shadow that has hung over every good thing I’ve tried to build disappears in a red mist on the leather interior of a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.

My finger rests on the trigger guard. Not the trigger. The guard.

Stefan is watching me. I can feel it—that attention he gives when he knows I’m calculating something irreversible. He knows what I’m seeing through the scope. Knows what I’m weighing.

“This is not over, Arkady!” My father’s voice tears through the distance as he straightens behind his car door. His eyes scan the property—the gate, the pillars, the wall—looking for me. Looking for the son he made and broke and couldn’t quite destroy. Despite his best efforts. “You will regret what you have done to me, boy!”

Boy.

Always boy. Never son. Always boy. The word used by a man who could never accept that his children grew up and grew teeth.

The crosshairs sit steady on his skull. My breathing is slow. Controlled. I could make this shot in my sleep. Have made harder ones in worse conditions.

I don’t pull the trigger.

I watch him climb into his car. Watch the door slam. Watch the Mercedes lurch forward, tires screeching on the road, the remaining SUVs falling in behind it. I track the convoy through the scope until it rounds the bend in the lane and the taillights disappear.

Gone.

Stefan appears beside me. Doesn’t say a word. He knows what just happened. Knows I had the shot and let it go. His silence isn’t judgment. It’s patience. The patience of a man who has stood beside me for a decade and understands that some decisions are too heavy for commentary.

I lower the rifle.

Five dead on their side. Dmitri dead on ours. Kolya and Pasha wounded but breathing. And my engagement party is now a crime scene decorated with champagne flutes and bullet casings.

I stare at the empty road where my father’s car was. At the bodies of men who were alive fifteen minutes ago. At the blood drying in the late afternoon sun, darkening from red to something uglier.

I should feel something. Relief, maybe. Or satisfaction that we held the line. Or rage that he came here—here, to my home, to the garden where I just asked a woman to spend her life with me—and tried to take what’s mine by force.

But all I feel is the weight of a trigger I didn’t pull. And the certainty—cold, clean, inevitable—that my father is right about one thing.

This is not over.

I turn back toward the house. Mirabel is on the third floor with Debra, Aleks, and Diane. Safe. Locked in. Waiting for me to come tell her it’s over. Because that’s what she expects, what she deserves. A man who walks through the door after the shooting stops and says it’s handled and holds her while she shakes.

But I stand in the driveway with blood on my shoes and cordite under my nails and the ghost of my father’s skull in my scope, and I can’t make my legs carry me inside.

Not yet.

Dmitri is twenty-six. Was twenty-six. Married last spring. His wife, Anya, is pregnant. He took the perimeter shift today as a favor to Pasha, who wanted to watch the party from the garden.

I’m going to have to call Anya.

I’m going to have to tell her that her husband died at an engagement party because my father wanted his sex slave back.

The Dragunov is heavy across my shoulders. I unsling it, and lean it against the wall. The Makarov goes back into its holster.

I look at my hands. Steady. No tremor. That’s the part nobody tells you about killing. It doesn’t make your hands shake. It makes them still. The shaking comes later, in the dark, when the adrenaline drains and the faces come back.

“Clean this up,” I tell Stefan, gesturing at the road. “Bodies, casings, everything. I don’t want Mirabel seeing any of this.”

“Already on it.” He’s got his phone to his ear, coordinating with the cleanup crew we keep on retainer for exactly these situations. Because this is my life. Cleanup crews. Body removal. The sanitization of violence so the woman I love can walk across the driveway tomorrow without stepping in another man’s blood.

“And Stefan.”