Malakai's POV
The first suspect was already downstairs by the time I got there.
Tiger had chosen one of the lower rooms.
Not the basement cells we used for men we planned to break over days.
This room was smaller. Cleaner. More immediate. Concrete walls. One drain in the center of the floor. A steel chair bolted to the ground. A single light overhead that cast everything in a hard white glare and left no shadows for a man to hide in.
I preferred this room when I only needed the truth.
Not a performance.
Not a confession for the sake of drama.
Just truth.
The bastard was tied to the chair when I walked in.
Marek Duvan.
Mid-level logistics.
Not important enough to think himself untouchable.
Not low enough to know nothing.
Exactly the kind of man a leak could hide inside.
His shirt was damp through the chest. Sweat. Fear. Maybe both. One side of his face was already bruised — Tiger's work, probably. Not enough to break him. Just enough to remind him that nobody had brought him in for polite conversation.
He lifted his head when he heard the door close behind me.
And then I watched the exact moment hope left his body.
"Boss," he said.
His voice was too thin.
I didn't answer immediately.
I walked past him first.
Slowly.
Let him hear my steps against the concrete. Let him hear the measured pace. Let him feel the room tighten around him before I ever gave him words.
Tiger stayed by the wall, arms folded, eyes quiet.
I stopped in front of Marek and looked down at him.
He tried to hold my gaze.
Tried.
That alone irritated me.
"Do you know why you're here?"
He swallowed. "I can guess."
"Guessing is for men who still have options."
His throat moved again.
I bent slightly, just enough to bring my face into the hard white spill of light.
"Tell me what you know about the Russia route."
His entire body changed.
Not much.
Just enough.
The shoulders stiffened. The breath shortened. The eyes moved before he could stop them.
Good.
He knew something.
"I— I don't handle route confirmation directly," he said.
I straightened.
Then I hit him.
One clean blow across the mouth.
Not wild. Not loud. Just fast enough that the chair screeched once against the bolts and blood jumped fresh across his lower lip.
He made a sound through his teeth.
Tiger didn't move.
Neither did I.
"When I ask you something," I said quietly, "you answer the thing I asked. Not the thing you think might save you."
Marek was breathing harder now, red already starting to show in his eyes.
"I don't know who gave them the route," he said quickly. "I swear it."
That wasn't what I asked either.
I stepped closer.
"So you admit someone gave them the route."
His face drained.
Stupid man.
He heard it a second too late.
I watched the realization hit him — the understanding that he had just said too much and that the room had noticed.
"I didn't—"
"You did."
I crouched in front of him now so he had no choice but to look directly at me.
"Let's do this cleanly," I said. "You tell me what you know, and I decide whether I take your hands or your life. If I have to dig for it, I get bored. When I get bored, men stop leaving rooms with enough of themselves to matter."
Marek stared at me, breathing through his mouth now.
I let the silence build.
Sometimes pain opens a man up.
Sometimes silence does it better.
This one was silence.
"I heard people talking," he said finally.
"Who."
He hesitated.
Tiger pushed off the wall then, just one step, just enough to let the steel of his rings catch the light.
Marek rushed the words out.
"I heard Viktor and Len speaking in the records room two nights ago."
I said nothing.
He kept going because now fear had him by the throat and he could feel it.
"They didn't say everything. Just pieces. Airport. Russia. Sokolov. I wasn't supposed to hear it."
Viktor.
Len.
My jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
Both inner circle adjacents. Close enough to movement schedules. Not close enough to touch final decisions without permission.
Useful.
"Why didn't you report it."
His face twisted. "I thought it was above me."
"No."
I stood again.
"You thought keeping your mouth shut would keep you safe."
He didn't answer.
Which was answer enough.
Tiger looked at me once from the wall.
I understood.
Not enough yet.
Still too thin.
I looked back at Marek.
"Who else knew you overheard them."
"No one."
I hit him again.
This time harder.
The chair jolted. Blood sprayed from his nose. One of his teeth clicked audibly against another.
He cried out.
"Try again."
"I told you—"
I grabbed his jaw.
Hard.
My fingers dug in enough to force his mouth open around the pain.
"You are not in a room where I need your courage," I said, my voice so low it nearly disappeared. "You are in a room where I need your usefulness. Be useful."
His eyes watered.
Good.
That usually meant the lies were getting harder to hold together.
"Nico," he gasped.
I went still.
Tiger went still too.
The room itself seemed to narrow.
I let go of his jaw slowly.
"Nico," I repeated.
Marek coughed, blood trailing from the corner of his mouth now.
"He saw me near the records room after. Asked what I heard. I told him nothing. He said to keep it that way." Panic climbed into his face now that he realized the name was out. "I didn't think— I thought he was just covering himself, I didn't know—"
Nico.
That was worse.
Not because he was closer than Viktor or Len.
Because he had been closer longer.
Long enough to know my habits.
Long enough to know timing.
Long enough to know how to speak just enough to the wrong people without leaving his own fingerprints on the glass.
I turned away from Marek and walked once to the far end of the room.
Then back.
The blood from earlier had already started drying on his chin.
My men were dead.
One of mine was probably going to lose his leg.
And now the rot had a face.
Or almost had one.
Because names mean nothing until you prove them.
I looked at Tiger. "Bring Viktor."
Tiger nodded once and left the room without a word.
The door shut behind him.
I was alone with Marek again.
He was crying quietly now.
Not fully.
Not loudly.
Just enough to disgrace himself.
I hated that sound.
"I told you what I knew," he said. "I told you."
I looked at him.
"You told me what you were forced to tell me."
"That still counts."
"No," I said. "It doesn't."
I crossed back to him, slow enough that he started shaking before I even touched him.
"You heard classified movement and buried it. Two men are dead because too many men around me keep deciding silence is a survival strategy."
I rested one hand on the back of his chair.
Leaning in just enough to make him understand that the next part mattered.
"So let me teach you something," I said. "Silence only protects you when I choose not to hear what's under it."
He stared at me, lips trembling now around broken breath.
I straightened.
By the time Tiger came back with Viktor, Marek had already become background noise in his own life.
Viktor Hale did not look like a traitor.
That was the trouble with men like him.
He looked like administration. Numbers. Logistics. Dry work done in clean shirts and expensive pens. Early forties. Greying at the temples. Careful hands. The kind of face that would disappear in a crowd if he asked it to.
But he walked into the room pale.
He'd already been told enough to understand what this was.
He saw Marek bloodied in the chair.
Then he looked at me.
Then at Tiger.
And in that one tiny, doomed flicker of his eyes, I knew.
Guilt is fast.
It moves before the mouth can cover it.
"You know why you're here?" I asked.
Viktor kept his breathing controlled better than Marek had.
"That depends on what Marek said."
I smiled then.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was finished.
Tiger saw it too.
He moved to shut the door.
The sound of the latch locking was small.
Almost polite.
Viktor heard it anyway.
His composure thinned.
"Bad answer," I said.
He looked at me sharply. "I've done nothing."
"Then you won't mind repeating your conversations from two nights ago."
He stayed silent.
I walked toward him, unhurried.
"Marek says he heard you discussing airport movement. Russia. Sokolov."
Viktor said nothing.
I stopped directly in front of him.
"There are only two possible explanations now," I said. "One, he's lying. Two, you are."
He tried one last time to stand inside dignity.
"I don't discuss business with subordinates in hallways."
"No," I said. "You sell it elsewhere."
That hit.
His mouth tightened.
There.
There it was.
Not innocence.
Insult.
He felt accused because he was guilty, not because he was shocked.
I hit him hard enough to drop him to one knee.
Tiger closed the remaining distance in half a breath and dragged him back upright by the back of his shirt.
Viktor spat blood onto the floor and glared at me.
That glare cost him two more blows.
By the third, he stopped trying to look defiant.
By the fourth, his right eye started swelling.
By the fifth, Tiger didn't even have to hold him all the way up anymore because fear had finally reached his bones and was doing the work for us.
"Who did you sell it to," I asked.
He laughed.
Actually laughed.
Blood on his teeth.
Face opening under bruises.
And that made something in me go very quiet.
"Do you know," he said, voice broken but ugly with nerve, "how much they offered?"
Tiger looked at me once.
Permission.
I gave it with a glance.
Tiger's fist landed deep in Viktor's ribs. Something cracked. Viktor folded around the pain with a strangled sound.
I waited.
He coughed hard enough to spray red.
Then looked up again.
"They said you were distracted," he hissed. "That you were getting careless. That all they needed was one route. One opening."
Kiera's face hit my mind so suddenly I nearly killed him on the spot.
Distracted.
Careless.
Because I had someone to come home to now.
Because they thought that meant I had softened.
I stepped in until Viktor had no room to mistake what came next.
"Who gave you the confidence," I asked quietly, "to think you'd survive saying that out loud?"
His eyes widened then.
For the first time, real fear.
Good.
He started talking.
Names first.
Then routes.
Then the contact point.
Then the payment chain.
Then where Romano's men were supposed to meet the next carrier.
By the time he was done, I had enough.
Not everything.
Enough.
Enough to start cutting back.
I nodded once when he finished.
Tiger understood immediately.
He pulled Viktor back by the collar, forcing him upright one last time while the man begged now, finally, the pride gone, the money gone, the loyalty gone, all of it stripped down to the oldest animal sound in the world.
Please.
I looked at him and felt nothing.
"Compensate the families," I said to Tiger again, without taking my eyes off Viktor. "Double what I said before."
Tiger's jaw tightened once. "Done."
"And for him?" Tiger asked, meaning Ivan. "If he loses the leg."
"He gets a house if he wants one. Medical for life. His bloodline doesn't pay for this twice."
Tiger nodded.
Viktor made a sound like he was going to throw himself at my feet if the chair hadn't already taken that privilege from him.
I stepped back.
"Finish it," I said.
Tiger's expression didn't move.
Neither did mine.
I walked out before the sound came.
Again.
The mercy was still not for them.
It was for time.
Because now I had names.
Now I had routes.
Now I had a family mark carved into my dead men and a Sokolov arrangement poisoned from the inside.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, beneath the blood and the betrayal and the cold arithmetic of what came next, there was still one thought moving beneath all the others like a low flame under steel:
I had promised her I'd come back.
So I would.
But first, I was going to make sure the men who tried to take anything from me understood exactly what kind of mistake they had made.