Chapter 2: Old Wounds, Fresh Blood
The study smelled of cigarette smoke and cold paper. Logan had cleared the desk of everything but the files that mattered: yellowed photographs, brittle police reports, a map peppered with notes. The lamplight cut across his jaw in hard lines; the wound inside him showed up in the way he kept returning to one small photograph — two children, sunburned knees, hands clenched together as if holding on to each other for life.
Mikhail hovered at a nearby console, fingers moving over a tablet as if coaxing secrets from it. "There's movement," he said without looking up. "Pockets of money, shell companies, a ring of men who surfaced in Eastern Europe fifteen years ago. Most scrubbed their records. A few names keep cropping up."
Logan's voice was low, steady. "Names."
Mikhail tapped. "Gavrilenko, first. He's—was—a fixer. Then the name someone used in '09 — Krasnov. They split after '05. One went to Italy, one disappeared. I dug into networks; one of the Italian accounts touches companies that launder funds for the Crimson Lotus' front operations."
He watched Logan absorb each syllable like heat. The amber of Logan's eyes dulled, then sharpened. "Crimson Lotus," he repeated. The name landed with a weight that made his knuckles whiten on the file. "So they're not new."
Across the desk, Dante laughed softly, pouring whiskey into a glass, then frowning at the map. "You want names, boss, we'll find names. We make them remember the ones they chewed up and spit out."
Logan did not smile. "My sister's life was taken the night they came for us. I remember their boots, the thick smell of smoke, the way—" He stopped, the memory tearing across him with the force of a physical blow.
A younger voice, quiet and sharp, nudged the moment into sound. "Tell me." Ethan's hand hovered over the edge of the desk, eyes on Logan with that protective focus he always wore like armor.
Logan closed his eyes for a fraction. The flash returned — a corridor, a boy's scream cut short, a stranger's hand on his shoulder. "They called for silence," he said finally, voice rough. "They promised safety and then took everything. Fifteen years of listening for footsteps. Fifteen years of tracing them."
Selena, who had been silent in the doorway, stepped forward. "We hit the man in Italy tonight," she said. Her tone left no room for second-guessing. "A politician. He facilitated their payouts. He hides behind law and speeches; he's a convenient first mark."
Logan's head lifted like a blade turned. "Politics provides the cleanest knives," he said. "Clean money, dirt hands." He folded his fingers on the photograph. "Make it count."
---
They worked in a small bubble of motion and noise. Kai fed surveillance, Mikhail patched and decrypted, Dante and Rico calibrated contingencies. Voices were clipped and efficient; none of the ritual chatter of civilians. In that room, names were targets and targets were answers.
When they moved out, the mansion exhaled behind them — the domestic order of linens and measured footsteps, the masks everyone wore. Catty passed a pair of servants pushing a cart and looked up for the first time at the shape of Logan standing like a statue in the corridor. He nodded once — not to her, not friendly, merely noting presence — and she lowered her eyes. It was the kind of attention that made teeth ache.
Outside, rain had started, grease-dark on the road. The convoy was small, deliberate; Logan rode in silence, Ethan beside him, Selena close at hand. The plan was surgical: intercept the politician at a private fundraiser where the man always felt invincible behind his entourage and his rhetoric. Logan didn't waste words; he ordered results.
They arrived like shadowed weather. The venue smelled of expensive wine and false smiles; men in tailored suits laughed loudly at cruel jokes, and the politician clung to the lectern like a man who had convinced himself of his own righteousness.
"You do this for cameras," Dante muttered under his breath, scanning exits. "This one will taste blood on his cufflinks and call it tragedy."
Isabella stood near the back, knife at her hip like an ornament. Tonight she wore silk and danger; the charm was his and every onlooker's — she knew how to move with both. Catty watched from the periphery, tasked with delivering a tray into the underside of the room. Sofia, bright and eager, had insisted on coming with her for no reason Catty could name besides solidarity.
Inside, a woman with the presence of a storm watched them from a mirrored doorway — Valeria Korsak. When she stepped forward, the room shifted subtly. She moved with deadly grace, an obvious agent of the Crimson Lotus, but more: she carried herself like a woman who despised pretense. Her dark hair was pulled back, and her smile didn't reach her eyes.
Valeria's glance slid over Isabella, landing like a garnish on irritation. The two women's histories were an unspoken ledger; Valeria's arrival at the fundraiser wasn't coincidence. She was a message. Isabella's jaw tightened imperceptibly. Rivalry crackled in the air.
Logan watched them both. He leaned into the moment, not for drama but for calculation. When the politician raised his glass to some sycophant's toast, that was the opening.
They moved with rehearsed calm. Ethan disabled a security camera feed with a flick of his hand — not the how, only the fact — and Kai's voice came briefly through a concealed earbud: "Window clear; route two's open." Selena's shadow cut across exits. Rico and Dante were ghosts in the crowd.
At the edge of the stage, the politician finished his toast and stepped down, radiant with self-importance, making his way between laughing pillars. Isabella shifted, a whisper of motion that set a blade in a precise arc — a practiced threat, but she was not the one to deliver tonight.
A brief chaos bloomed: a startled gasp, shoes scuffing on marble, a muffled curse — then stillness. The man went down as if his legs were made of smoke. Hands grabbed at him. Someone lifted his mask of civility and saw the blood that did not match his speeches. He said one thing, a single plea for help, and then there was silence where once had been power.
Catty stared, breath caught under her ribs. Sofia's hand found hers and squeezed hard. "Don't look," she mouthed, but the world had already shifted for Catty; she had seen the human end of a public man.
They slipped away like a night tide. Logan moved with the quiet of someone who has rehearsed loss and revenge until the two are indistinguishable.
---
Back at the mansion the air hummed with static. Isabella's eyes burned with something Catty couldn't name — not sorrow, not triumph, but a hot, complex resentment. She found Valeria in a dim corridor, her silhouette framed like accusation.
"You staged it well," Valeria said, words soft as silk. "But you should not have involved that girl."
Isabella's laugh was a knife. "Don't pretend you give a damn about her." She stepped close enough that the heat of her body might have been mistaken for an embrace. "You're the one who sends messages."
Valeria's glance slid to the shadowed window where the mansion's inner wing sat quiet. "Messages are cheap. Results are what matter."
The two women spoke in tones that meant knives were their alphabet. Catty watched from the far side of the corridor, a cloth slipping from her hand unnoticed on the marble floor. She had been deliberately kept on the edge of things for years; tonight she had been so close her breath tasted of it.
Later, as the rain hammered the mansion windows, Kai's screen lit with a new message. Mikhail translated the terse line into English and let the words drop into the room like an illicit coin:
To Logan Dragunov: we watched your reach. You kill a man who stood on a stage and said he served the people. We will watch what you value next. — Crimson Lotus.
The paper trembled between Logan's fingers. He folded it once, deliberately, then crushed it under his palm. There were names in his ledger that night, and one more to add , Valeria's, the woman who moved like winter.
He looked up at his team. "They've noticed," he said. Not accusation; fact. "So we move faster. We remember. We make them remember us."
Outside, the rain hadn't stopped. Inside, the mansion circled its prey, and somewhere a rival watched, and responded. The game was no longer only about the past. It had become about who would write the next headlines in blood and silence.
Catty, standing in a dim hall with damp cloth in hand, felt the weight of it settle on her shoulders like a mantle she had not asked for. She wiped her palms on her skirt and realized the world she'd stepped into would not let her be idle.
The house hummed with plans, with memory, with promises of revenge. The first move had been made. The reply had arrived.
And Logan—he remembered everything.