The silence felt alive. Heavy. Suffocating.
The air stank of apple tobacco and fear. Timur's men sat slumped on their cushions, eyes dull. Hours ago, they'd been boasting about the raid. Now they looked like wolves that had caught the scent of a larger predator. They smelled the trap. They smelled death.
Koba stood at the map, motionless. A general before the ruins of his own campaign. He didn't rage. He didn't panic. Rage was human; panic was useless. He had gone inward, into that cold, airless space where his mind lived when logic was under siege. Every detail replayed—intel, patterns, risks. Somewhere in the equation, something had been wrong. One variable. One mistake. One lie.
He had believed in the data—the randomized patrols, the shift change, the five-minute gap. Perfect. Too perfect. A weakness designed for him to see. Bait.
For the first time since Koba was born from Jake Vance's ashes, he had no answer.
The machine had stalled.
Then Anya moved. She rose sharply, her chair scraping the floor. Her eyes weren't despairing; they were furious. Controlled fury, the kind that could rebuild empires from rubble.
"This isn't failure," she said. Her voice cut clean through the room. Heads lifted. "It's information. The most valuable kind."
She stepped up beside Koba. He didn't turn, but she knew he was listening.
"He didn't react to you," she said quietly. "He anticipated you. We thought we were the hunters. But he's been steering us here from the start."
Her finger tapped the river entrance on the map.
"He knew you'd see this as the weak point. Any strategist would. So he built the illusion of weakness. Pulled men from the other sectors. Left the door open—on purpose. It's bait."
She was breaking down Stolypin's plan piece by piece, mirroring Koba's own methods, forcing his frozen mind to move again.
"He's been playing chess," she said. "Rykov, the manhunt, everything—it was a setup. Sacrifices to push your king into the killing field." She gestured to the port. "The question isn't how he trapped us. It's what his next move is. He's waiting for us to step forward. So what's the counter?"
Her words hit like a jolt to the heart. Koba's eyes focused. The fog cleared.
Failure didn't matter. He had an opponent worth killing for. The game wasn't over. It was only now interesting.
When he spoke, his voice was low, rough. "You're right," he said. He turned to face her, and the dead light in his eyes had flared again, cold and alive. "Stolypin expects a scalpel."
He looked past her, to Timur. To the hulking brute and his sullen men. To the map of the guarded port that was now their tomb.
"We'll give him a bomb."
The air in the room shifted. The despair didn't vanish—it hardened, sharp as glass. Timur straightened, eyes wary. Koba's tone had changed. It was the voice of a man with purpose again.
"Your men," Koba said. "They're fighters?"
Timur's chest swelled. "The best in this city. They fear no one."
"Good," Koba said. A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "Because I'll need them to be more than fighters. I'll need them to be martyrs."
He crossed to the map, grabbed a handful of charcoal, and smeared it across the careful lines of the old plan. "This," he said, "is dead."
He jabbed a finger at the cluster of warehouses near the docks.
"We're done sneaking. Stolypin expects quiet. We'll give him thunder. We're going to start a war at the St. Petersburg docks."
The words landed like gunfire. The plan was insane—violent, suicidal—but it was movement.
They could feel it.
The general was back.
And one by one, knowing they were marching into the jaws of death, they began to follow him.