Page 102 of Marrying the Savage

“Fuck,” Mikhail says behind me.

I let the body drop back to the gravel. “Convenient.”

I stand, blood from the captain dark on my hands, mine or his, impossible to separate now.

Inside the warehouse, the gunfire has stopped. That silence has its own weight.

We move back inside together. The floor is a mess of splintered wood, shattered glass, smoke, and bodies. My men are already clearing weapons, restraining the wounded attackers, checking pulses. Three of ours injured badly enough for doctors. Two minor. One possibly dying near the loading dock, Nikolai’s medic working fast with both hands red to the wrists.

I stop beside the back office.

The door hangs from one hinge. Inside, filing cabinets have been pulled open, papers scattered across the desk and floor. The safe remains closed. The ledger cabinet is locked, though someone tried to force it and failed. Mikhail’s “breathing” attacker is tied to a chair in the corner, head hanging forward, blood dripping from his chin.

He’s young. A hired piece, not the hand that moved them.

Mikhail wipes his knife on a rag. “He doesn’t know who paid.”

“Everyone knows something.”

“He knows a meeting point, two faces, and that payment came in foreign accounts. No names.”

“Accent?”

“Ukrainian, maybe. Could be trained out of something else.”

“Marks?”

“No family tattoos. No prison marks visible. Hard to place him with a family.”

Nikolai appears in the doorway. “Four dead attackers inside. Two wounded. One escaped in the SUV, driver unknown. Weapons are clean. Serial numbers removed. Ammunition imported.”

“Not Sergei’s usual.”

“No.”

“Mikhail?”

He looks grim. “The timing is too good to be coincidence.”

“Yes.”

“They hit after the wedding, after everyone expects Sokolov or Antonov retaliation. That makes it easy to blame either.”

I look at the open files on the floor.

The attackers breached the office but took nothing.

I crouch and pick up one of the scattered documents. Route schedule. Next month’s movement through the eastern corridor. Not the most valuable file, not the most obvious, but enough to map pressure points if someone already knows what they’re looking for.

“They knew where to go,” I say.

Mikhail’s face hardens. “Inside information?”

“Maybe.”

“From our side?”

I look around the room, at the broken cabinets and at the dead men scattered around me. At the one young attacker bleeding into his shirt, terrified enough to piss himself but not knowledgeable enough to matter.