Stolypin's office remained a fortress of calm precision, but the Prime Minister himself was running out of patience. The reports piling on his desk read like the minutes of a farce. The hunt for the Georgian "planner" had become a carnival of false leads and paranoia—every limping vagrant dragged before Colonel Sazonov, every rumor inflated into certainty. The ghost stayed a ghost.
The shootout in the factory district—the so-called diversion—had gone nowhere. The shell casings were standard issue. The bullets military. A professional job, but the professional had vanished as if swallowed by the city itself.
And the Orlov affair was a masterpiece of frustration. The once-vocal State Councillor had gone utterly silent. No more leaks to the Kadet press, no more late-night speeches at court. The blackmail had worked—but perfectly. Orlov denied everything with the desperation of a man terrified of every side. The trail to his handler had turned to ash.
Stolypin felt like a hunter lost in fog—surrounded by tracks, yet unable to find the wolf that made them.
Then an aide arrived with a thick envelope, stamped with the insignia of the military intelligence directorate—the GRU. At first glance, it was routine: an update on rising tensions in the Balkans. But near the end was an addendum.
A name. A warning.
Captain Dmitri Rykov.
A quartermaster in the St. Petersburg garrison. Suspected of selling Mauser rifles to Serbian nationalist intermediaries.
Stolypin read the paragraph twice. Then a third time.
A rogue officer feeding the Balkans was more than corruption—it was a spark in a powder room. Russia could not afford a Balkan war. Not now. Not when his reforms—land ownership, industrialization, the slow civilizing of an empire—were still fragile. A foreign crisis would hand power back to the reactionaries, drown the treasury, and push the revolutionaries into open revolt.
Rykov's name was not just another file. It was a fuse.
Stolypin looked up, his decision instant and absolute.
"Get me Colonel Sazonov," he told his aide. "New orders. Forget the Georgian for now. I want Rykov watched—his contacts, his debts, his lovers, his suppliers. Everything. He is to be surrounded quietly, completely. This is not corruption. This is state security."
And so, by the Prime Minister's command, the full weight of the Okhrana turned toward Captain Rykov—just as, deep underground, another predator was doing the same.
In the dripping dark of the sewer, Jake studied the same name under the dim light of an oil lamp.
The mission from Malinovsky was poison, but it was also his only way forward. If he refused, the network that could get him out of Russia—and back to Kato—would vanish. If he accepted, he would have to play assassin under the serpent's banner.
But the job couldn't be simple. An army captain was not a street thug. A direct killing would bring the whole garrison crashing down on them. It had to look ordinary. Filthy. Criminal.
To do that, he had to know the man first.
He leaned over the table, speaking low to Pavel. "I don't want his address. I want his habits. Where he drinks, where he gambles, who he owes, who he fears. A man selling army rifles isn't a patriot—he's desperate. Find the desperation. Find the pattern."
Pavel nodded. He understood this kind of hunt. Within hours his network spread through the city's gutters—the beggars, the brothel madams, the tavern keepers who owed him protection. They weren't looking for a soldier. They were listening for a man in trouble.
By the next day, the picture was clear.
Captain Dmitri Rykov was not discreet. He was loud, drunk, and drowning. A regular at an illegal card game in the Peski district—a bathhouse where high-ranking men lost fortunes in silence. And beneath the noise of cards and laughter ran something darker: debt. Crippling, humiliating debt.
Rykov owed money not to the house, but to a Chechen named Timur. A loan shark with a taste for spectacle and blood.
Jake didn't need more. He had his leverage.
Rykov feared the Okhrana, but he belonged to Timur.
Jake smiled—cold, precise. "We don't go to Rykov as killers. We go as businessmen. He'll recognize the kind."
Pavel hesitated. "Planner… Timur's men are wolves. If we walk into his den—"
"He won't kill us," Jake interrupted. "We're not there to steal. We're there to buy."
He rose, already in motion. "Find me a suit. The best you can steal. Clean, pressed. A gold watch, a silver cigarette case. I want to look like money with a pulse. Then send word to Timur's people. Tell them a new man has arrived from the Caucasus—a trader, interested in taking over Captain Rykov's debt."
He paused, a faint glint of amusement in his eyes. "And his business."
That night, two hunts began.
In a cramped attic overlooking the St. Petersburg barracks, Sazonov's agents were setting up their surveillance post. A man adjusted the long lens of a camera; another opened a logbook. They worked in silence, their orders signed by the Prime Minister himself.
And miles below them, in the underworld's damp heart, Jake stood before a cracked mirror as Pavel's men buttoned him into a stolen, immaculate suit. The transformation was complete: the sewer ghost had become a predator in silk.
He would walk into Timur's lair as a rival lion, not prey.
Unbeknownst to him, the Tsar's finest hunters were already closing in on the same target.
Two forces, brilliant and ruthless, were moving toward the same doomed man—each thinking they were alone on the board.
The shadow game was about to begin in earnest.