Page 63 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

There is an unreadable emotion in his eyes, something I don’t understand but Mikhail does, judging by his quick and loud inhale.

“You fucking—” I swear, advancing at him. Mikhail’s arm quickly holds me back again. I resist, telling him to let go.

Timur quickly moves a hand into his jacket and takes out his pistol. Mikhail shifts me behind him in the blink of an eye, his own gun in his hand. I freeze, the sudden burst of adrenaline crashing my system.

“Timur. Put it down,” Mikhail instructs sharply, a true predator’s warning.

Timur is unbothered by Mikhail’s gun aiming at him, eyes seeing through both me and Mikhail.

They are looking at nothing. Timur raises his gun, putting the barrel in his mouth.

Then time slows down.

“Timur,” Mikhail repeats, but this time, his voice has a confused waver in it, something I have not heard from him before—raw, urgent, cracked slightly at the edges in a way that belongs to a man who has worked beside another for years and is watching him reach the end of himself. “Don’t.”

Chapter 24 - Mikhail

There is a room in the secure facility we maintain in Athens that was built for exactly this.

A rectangle of concrete and controlled light that could belong to any number of institutional purposes, except it’s sealed, soundproofed, no windows, or ambient sound from the city. No indication of time passing. A room in which the normal rules of the world beyond its walls do not apply.

Timur has been held inside in it for exactly twenty minutes when I push the door open, locking it behind me.

He is seated unrestrained. I didn’t see the point in restraining him, because Timur Sokolov has fifteen years of experience and muscle memory of men trained in the same school I was trained in. And what does it matter if I restrain him or not?

His eyes were empty, and the gun he had angled inside his mouth had been fully loaded, pressed at the correct angle to blow his brains out once and for all.

He’s a prisoner, sure, but what he’s done is far more personal.

His eyes fall onto me when he hears the creak of the door.

His face has changed since the street in Athens. The composed mask is cracked, like a coat sitting on a person who has been wearing it too long.

I loosely sit across from him.

I do not speak immediately. I have spent years in rooms like this one, on the other side of the table, extracting information from people who had decided not to give it, and the first and most important lesson I learned was that what you do with the silence determines everything about what follows.

I give him thirty seconds of it.

Then I say, “Sokolov. Start speaking.”

He resists for two minutes, deciding whether it’s worth the cost, running the numbers in real time, arriving at the conclusion that I am waiting for.

Then he begins, and it isn’t the defense I expected it would be. He doesn’t justify himself first, nor reframe his actions. He begins flatly, like narrating the ending credits of a movie.

Three years ago is when it started. Not with the Irish syndicate directly like I expected, but with a contact inside a financial network that had overlapping interests with both the Korovin operation and the Irish, a man who came to Timur not with the intention of an offer.

He simply had information about what the Korovin Bratva's trajectory looked like from the outside, from the perspective of people who had been watching its evolution for years and had opinions about the direction it was heading.

“They told you what you wanted to hear,” I state.

“They told me what I had already been thinking for two years,” he corrects me. He hasn’t done that in a long while. Maybe that’s where things went wrong—when he stopped playing the game with the Bratva at all.

The arrangement went like this: the information he began supplying wasn’t particularly threatening to us, but was shit that over time gave the Irish significant positional advantage. Small things like security rotations, route communications.

The structural information that only someone inside the Korovin organization would have access to.

“Like the car ambush in New York,” I mutter.