The first shot didn't just break the silence; it shattered the world.
Viktor's snipers opened up from the sub-level maintenance hatches, and the Romano front line dissolved into screams and crimson mist. Salvatore dived behind his armored sedan, his men scattering like dry leaves in a gale.
"Move!" Dimitri roared.
We didn't run; we hunted.
The pier turned into a labyrinth of steel and fire. Dimitri was a phantom of precision, his .45 barking in rhythmic intervals, each shot finding a throat or a temple. I stayed low, my Glock an extension of my arm.
We hit the first cluster of containers. A Romano soldier lunged from the shadows, a combat knife gleaming. Dimitri didn't even look; he caught the man's wrist, snapped it with a sickening pop, and put a bullet in his chest without breaking his stride.
"Left!" I screamed, spotting a muzzle flash from a stack of pallets.
I fired three times. The man slumped over the wood, his rifle clattering to the concrete.
"Good eyes, milaya," Dimitri grunted, reloading with a mechanical speed that shouldn't have been possible in the middle of a war.
The air was thick with the scent of ozone, salt, and the copper tang of fresh blood. We were winning. Viktor's team was flushing them out from the rear, and Yuri's convoy was pinning them from the flank.
Then, the world exploded.
A Romano heavy-weapons team had managed to stabilize a mortar on the roof of the main warehouse. The shell hit a stack of fuel drums thirty feet away.
The shockwave was a physical wall of heat. I was lifted off my feet and slammed into the side of a rusted shipping container. My vision went white, then a muddy, swimming gray. My ears were ringing with a high, piercing whistle that drowned out the gunfire.
"Dimitri!" I tried to shout, but it came out as a strangled wheeze.
Through the drifting black smoke, I saw him. He had been thrown in the opposite direction, separated from me by a wall of burning debris and twisted metal. He was on his feet, fighting off two men, his face a mask of primal fury, but he couldn't get to me. The fire was too high.
I was alone.
I tasted blood—my own. I scrambled to my feet, my legs feeling like lead. I reached for my Glock, but it was gone, kicked somewhere into the darkness.
Footsteps. Heavy, confident.
"Well, well. The little Queen is all out of jewels," a voice sneered.
Three Romano soldiers emerged from the smoke. They weren't looking for a fair fight. They looked at me with a sickening, predatory hunger.
I backed up until my spine hit the cold steel of a container. My hand went to my boot. The serrated blade.
The first one lunged. He was big, twice my weight. I didn't try to block him. I dropped low, letting his momentum carry him over me, and drove the blade into the back of his thigh. He howled, collapsing to one knee.
I didn't wait. I grabbed a heavy iron hook hanging from a cargo net nearby and swung it with everything I had. It caught the second man in the temple with a wet *thunk*. He went down and stayed down.
The third man—the leader—pulled his sidearm. "Enough games, bitch."
I didn't have a gun. But I had the environment. I reached back and yanked the emergency release lever on the container behind me—the one Yuri had mentioned was tilted and unstable from the blast.
The heavy steel doors groaned. Six tons of unsecured timber crates shifted, sliding out like a landslide of splintered wood.
The soldier didn't even have time to scream. The crates buried him instantly.
I stood there, gasping for air, covered in soot and someone else's blood. I looked down at the man I'd stabbed in the leg. He was reaching for his fallen pistol. I kicked him in the face, hard, and picked up the gun myself.
"Maya!"
Dimitri burst through the wall of smoke, his tactical vest shredded, blood dripping from a cut on his forehead. He looked at the bodies around me, then at the gun in my hand. For a split second, the Ice Pakhan vanished, replaced by a man who looked like he'd just seen a miracle.
He grabbed my face, his thumbs bruising my skin. "Are you hurt? Tell me!"
"I'm fine," I panted, leaning into his touch for one precious second. "Viktor? Yuri?"
"Viktor took a round to the shoulder, but he's still clearing the cranes," Dimitri said, his voice returning to its lethal rasp. "Yuri is holding the perimeter. But Salvatore is gone."
"He wouldn't run," I said, looking toward the end of the pier where the fog was thickest. "He's a king. He stays with his crown."
A low, mechanical hum started.
At the very tip of the pier, a massive industrial crane began to rotate. Suspended from the hook was a steel platform. Standing on it, bathed in the orange glow of the fires, was Salvatore Romano.
But he didn't have a cane. He had an AT4 anti-tank launcher perched on his shoulder.
"You fought like lions!" Salvatore's voice boomed, amplified by a megaphone. "But you forgot the most important rule of war, Dimitri! It isn't about who has the most heart. It's about who is willing to burn the whole world down to win!"
He leveled the launcher. He wasn't aiming at the soldiers. He wasn't even aiming at Dimitri.
He was aiming at the support pilings of the section of the pier where we were standing—a section filled with volatile fuel lines.
"If I can't have the city, no one can," Salvatore shouted.
"Dimitri, run!" I screamed.
Salvatore pulled the trigger.
The backblast lit up the sky like a second sun. The rocket streaked through the air, a finger of white fire aimed at the heart of our position.
*BOOM.*
The pier groaned. The concrete beneath our feet began to tilt, the sound of snapping steel pilings like a series of gunshots.
"Jump!" Dimitri yelled, grabbing my hand.
But the explosion hadn't just hit the pilings. It had triggered the main gas line. A wall of fire erupted between us and the water.
We were trapped on a crumbling island of fire, and Salvatore was watching us with the cold, satisfied eyes of a man who had finally found peace in destruction.