The hammer of the Nagant hung back, a black steel thumb pointed at the ceiling. For a moment, time itself seemed to recoil. Every man in the print shop froze—each breath shallow, each heartbeat loud enough to feel.
Orlov's face twisted into something between fury and disbelief. He drew himself up one last time, finding the only weapon left to him: contempt.
"You're the traitor, Jughashvili!" he spat, the word sharp enough to cut. "A butcher!"
Jake didn't blink. His eyes—flat, cold, merciless—were the last thing Orlov ever saw.
He pulled the trigger.
The gunshot wasn't a sound so much as a physical blow. It slammed into the walls, into lungs, into the bones of everyone in the room. The roar collapsed into ringing silence, leaving only the stench of powder and the metallic tang of blood. Orlov's body crumpled like paper, the wall behind him blooming red.
No one spoke. The committee members sat frozen, caught between shock and awe. They had spoken of revolutionary justice for years—but now they had seen it, naked and immediate, staring them in the face through the smoke.
Jake lowered the revolver with slow, deliberate grace. His hand didn't shake. Smoke curled lazily from the barrel, a ghost rising from the corpse on the floor.
"The cancer has been excised," he said, his tone cold and precise. Not triumphant, not shaken—clinical. "Now we save the body."
He pivoted from executioner to commander without pause. His authority filled the void before anyone could think, before fear could take root. Orders followed like hammer strikes.
He pointed at a wiry man with ink stains on his cuffs. "Nikolay. The train from Moscow—find the manifest. I want the car numbers and the markings on every barrel. You have ten minutes."
Nikolay jerked upright, pale and trembling. "Yes, Comrade," he stammered, and fled the room.
Jake's finger moved to another man. "Semyon. Send word to the rail yard. The shipment rendezvous is compromised. No one moves until they receive a direct order from me. Use the emergency codes."
Semyon rose so fast his chair toppled over. "Right away," he said, and bolted after Nikolay.
The room began to breathe again, the paralysis breaking under the force of command. Jake had replaced horror with action, terror with clarity. He was proving that only he could steer them through the chaos he'd unleashed.
But there was one piece left to secure—the legitimacy of what he'd done. Without it, he was nothing more than a murderer.
His eyes found Stepan Shaumian.
The older man sat rigid, his knuckles white against the table. He looked from Orlov's body to Jake, and in that terrible, quiet instant, he understood. He saw what the others were only beginning to grasp: that they were alive because of this man's ruthlessness.
Shaumian rose slowly. "Comrade Soso is right," he said, his voice steady. "He has done a terrible but necessary thing. This man"—he gestured toward Orlov's body, his tone hardening—"would have destroyed us all by dawn. The party owes Comrade Soso its life. We will follow his lead."
The effect was immediate. Heads nodded. The fear in the room shifted shape, turning from horror into obedience. They were all implicated now. Orlov's blood was theirs.
Jake gave Shaumian the briefest nod. Then he turned to business.
Danilov was huddled in the corner, trembling, trying to vanish into the shadows.
"This one," Jake said, his tone stripped of all emotion, "is now our most valuable asset. He knows Orlov's contacts, Yagoda's methods, the Okhrana's structure. We'll extract everything."
He turned to Kamo. "Take him back to the cellar. He's not a prisoner anymore. He's a resource. Bleed him for every secret he's worth."
Kamo nodded, wordless, and hauled Danilov to his feet. The man's terrified sobs echoed as they disappeared through the back door.
Jake's gaze returned to the body on the floor. "And get rid of that," he said flatly. "Take it to the river. No funeral. No grave. No martyr."
His voice dropped to a quiet, deadly calm. "As of this moment, Comrade Orlov has vanished—another victim of the Okhrana he served so loyally."
The committee obeyed.
As they moved, as the body was dragged away and orders were whispered into the night, Jake stood where he was, revolver still in hand. The smoke had cleared, but the air was thicker than ever—heavy with fear, obedience, and something new.
Power.
He wasn't just killing his enemies anymore.
He was rewriting history.
The night was a frantic race against dawn. The execution had bought them survival at the cost of stability, leaving a vacuum that had to be filled before panic took hold.
In the backroom of a sympathetic bakery, the smell of warm bread hung strangely against the lingering tang of gunpowder and fear. Jake gathered what remained of his leadership—his war council. Kamo was there, his eyes dark but steady. Shaumian sat beside him, calm as ever, his sharp mind already processing a dozen contingencies. Around them were the others—the ones who hadn't broken at the print shop. The ones who were now his.
Jake spread a rough map of the Tbilisi rail yards across the table and pinned it down with teacups. "The arms shipment is all that matters," he said, his voice cutting clean through the exhaustion. "Calling it off is impossible. The Okhrana are watching. Yagoda is watching. If our men don't appear, they'll smell the leak. They'll hunt for us—and they'll find us."
Kamo slammed his fist against the table. "Then we fight them! We ambush them at the yard!"
"A gunfight in the heart of the city?" Shaumian interjected, his voice calm but hard. "The tsar's men would bury us in a day."
Jake looked between them. "No," he said simply. "We won't hide. We won't fight. We'll make them think they've won—and we'll gut them for it."
He leaned over the map, his finger tracing the railway's snaking path into the city. "They expect greed. They expect chaos. So we'll give them what they expect."
He turned to Kamo. "You'll assemble a decoy team. Ten men. Our best performers. They'll go to the freight yard as planned. They'll unload the crates from the designated car, move them to the warehouse, and make it look real. Every movement, every shout, every crate. But those crates will be filled with rocks and sand."
A grim smile spread across Kamo's face.
Jake nodded. "Their job is to hold the Okhrana's attention. Nothing more."
Shaumian leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "And the real weapons?"
Jake's finger slid up the map to a stretch of track two kilometers north of the main yard. "Here. The abandoned siding near the old foundry. That's where we'll take them."
He explained: Nikolay's cousin, a switchman, had been bought off—his loyalty secured by money and fear. When the train approached the city, he would uncouple Car 73, the one carrying the weapons, and divert it onto the abandoned line.
"Kamo," Jake said, "your main force will be waiting there. Quietly. You'll unload the real cargo and move it to the new location."
Kamo's brow furrowed. "Where?"
Jake allowed himself a faint, humorless smile. "The wine cellar. We've already cleared out the previous tenant. It's deep, secure, and no one outside this room knows it exists."
The plan was madness—but it was precise madness. It required timing, trust, and the absolute obedience Jake had begun to command.
The next night, Jake stood on the roof of a tenement overlooking the Tbilisi freight yard. The air was sharp and cold. Through a pair of military field glasses—spoils from Danilov's pockets—he watched the stage he'd built come to life. Below, steam hissed and sparks flared as locomotives idled. His decoy team moved into place, their every gesture rehearsed.
The train arrived, brakes shrieking. Jake watched his men begin unloading, straining under the weight of worthless crates filled with dirt and stone. It was perfect theater—an opera of deception.
A runner scrambled up the stairs behind him, breathless. "Message from Kamo, comrade," he gasped. "Car 73 is on the siding. They've started unloading. No problems."
Jake's grip tightened around the spyglasses. Two parts of the plan, two halves of one heartbeat, working in harmony.
He turned the lenses back toward the yard—and froze.
The shadows were moving.
Dozens of figures emerged from the dark edges of the rail yard—Okhrana agents and uniformed police. They moved like predators circling prey. At their head was a police captain, self-satisfied and smug, already savoring his triumph.
The whistle blew. The trap was sprung.
The agents surged forward, surrounding the warehouse. Jake watched as his decoy team played their part—shouting, scrambling, staging their doomed resistance before allowing themselves to be "captured."
The police stormed in. Shouts echoed, followed by silence. Then, seconds later, the captain emerged again, his victory collapsing into rage. He kicked open a crate—rocks tumbled out, clattering uselessly across the ground.
A small, cold smile flickered across Jake's face. The great Okhrana raid had captured nothing but a pile of stones.
But then the smile died.
Through the spyglass, in a narrow alley at the edge of the yard, two men stood watching the chaos. The first was the high-ranking official Jake had seen in the cemetery. The second, lighting a cigarette with steady, unhurried hands, was Yagoda.
They weren't part of the raid. They were its architects.
Jake focused on Yagoda's face. There was no fury there, no confusion—only calculation. He was already dissecting the failure, piecing together the truth. He knew his trap had been turned inside out. He knew the Bolsheviks had a new hand guiding them, one sharper, colder, more dangerous than anything he'd faced before.
And then, through the smoke, Yagoda looked up.
For a heartbeat, their eyes met across the expanse of the rail yard—two predators recognizing each other in the dark.
Jake lowered the glasses slowly. The night air burned in his lungs. He hadn't just stolen the enemy's victory. He had declared open war on the man who would, in another lifetime, become the executioner of millions.
The game had changed.
And for the first time, Yagoda knew his opponent's name.