The wine cellar no longer smelled of damp stone and fear. It smelled of oil and gunmetal—of victory and its cost. The flickering lantern light glinted off rows of freshly uncrated Mauser pistols, their polished wooden stocks gleaming like trophies. Boxes of dynamite sat in neat stacks against the far wall, sleeping beasts waiting to be woken.
Where one terrified informant had once begged for his life, a new army now stood armed and ready. Overnight, the Bolsheviks of Tbilisi had transformed from hunted radicals with a few rusted revolvers into a disciplined paramilitary force. They had been seconds from extinction—and now they were dangerous.
Jake stood in the center of it all, surrounded by the tools of his triumph. Yet there was no triumph in him. Every gun was a ledger entry written in blood. Every crate of dynamite, a monument to betrayal and execution. Power, he realized, had its own stench—and it clung to him.
Kamo didn't see it that way. He looked at the arsenal with awe, then at Jake with something deeper. Reverence. "Soso," he said, his voice thick, hand landing heavy on Jake's shoulder. "What you did… no one else could have done it. You saved us all."
Jake only nodded. His face revealed nothing.
From the doorway, Stepan Shaumian stepped into the light. The philosopher of the revolution, calm and severe, surveyed the stockpile with a long, thoughtful look. "It's a miracle," he said quietly. "A brutal one, but a miracle all the same."
Then his gaze fixed on Jake. "But the danger hasn't passed. Orlov is gone, yes—but the serpent's head still lives. Yagoda is out there. There are more like him, buried deep. The problem isn't solved. It's only begun."
Jake said nothing. He already knew where this was leading.
Shaumian's tone shifted, deliberate now, heavy with intent. "The party is exposed. It needs protection—an organ devoted solely to security. To rooting out enemies from within. A body that acts without hesitation or sentiment."
He stepped closer. "It must answer only to the Committee. And it must be led by a man of iron—someone who understands the enemy. Someone who's not afraid to do what must be done."
Jake met his eyes. The words landed like the weight of history itself.
This was the birth of the thing he had spent his entire second life trying to prevent—the secret apparatus of fear, the foundation of the coming terror. The Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB—names that would echo through generations of blood.
Somewhere deep inside, Jake Vance—the man he once was—screamed to say no. To walk away. To save himself before the last piece of his humanity crumbled. But the scream was faint now, lost beneath the roar of necessity.
He had made enemies that would not rest. Yagoda was watching, hunting. The only way to survive—to keep shaping the future—was to seize control of the very machine he feared.
When he finally spoke, his voice was flat, drained of life. "I accept."
It was the sound of a man sealing his own fate.
Later that night, sleep was impossible. The city outside was quiet, washed in moonlight. Jake walked the narrow streets alone, the chill air biting his face. He told himself he was just walking off the exhaustion. But his steps led him, unbidden, to the one place that still held something of the man he'd been.
Kato.
He found her in their old apartment, a single candle burning on the table. The room was stripped bare, and she was folding the last of her belongings into a small leather bag.
When she looked up, there was no fear, no anger—only sorrow.
"I'm leaving, Soso," she said softly. "For the countryside. My family will take me in."
The words hit him like a physical blow. "Leaving? Why? I can protect you now. I have power, Kato. No one would dare touch you."
She kept folding her shawl, her voice calm and devastatingly steady. "I know," she said. "That's what frightens me."
Jake stood motionless.
"The man I married is gone," she went on, finally looking at him. "He was kind, even when the world wasn't. He believed in people, in words. But you…" Her voice faltered. "You look like him, but your eyes… they're like that cellar. Cold. Empty. I can't live with a ghost."
The click of the bag's clasp was the sound of something final breaking. She lifted it and moved toward the door.
"Wait," Jake said, his voice cracking, raw with something he hadn't felt in months. "Kato, please—don't go."
He reached out a trembling hand.
She flinched.
It was a small, involuntary movement, but it stopped him cold. More devastating than a slap, more final than a bullet. She looked at him one last time, tears glinting in her eyes.
"Goodbye, Soso," she whispered.
And then she was gone.
The door closed behind her with a soft click. The sound echoed in the empty room like a shot.
Jake stood there, frozen. The head of Tbilisi's new security committee. The architect of survival. The master of an army.
And utterly, irredeemably alone.
He had saved the revolution.
And lost his soul.
A week passed.
A week of whispers and unease. A week in which the ghost of Orlov haunted every backroom and tavern where revolutionaries gathered. His disappearance—his erasure—had become legend overnight. The official story, carefully constructed by Jake and delivered with Shaumian's measured gravity, told of a loyal comrade abducted and executed by the Okhrana. A martyr. A cautionary tale.
But beneath that neat fiction, something new was taking shape. Power in Tbilisi had shifted, drawn toward an invisible center buried beneath a sympathizer's villa.
The wine cellar had changed.
Once a place of fear and interrogation, it now throbbed with purpose. Crates of weapons lined the walls, stacks of documents grew by the day, and men and women came and went in quiet efficiency. It had become the heart of a new organism—Jake's creation, his kingdom. The Special Committee for Party Security.
He had become its architect.
Days blurred into one another. His primary task was Danilov, the broken assassin turned unwilling informant. Gone were the crude methods of beatings and screams. Jake had replaced them with something far more precise.
Danilov was kept fed, clean, and alone. No chains, no threats—just exhaustion and relentless questioning. Jake would sit with him for hours, calm, patient, unblinking. He didn't torture; he dismantled.
Every day, he asked for details—small ones, trivial ones—until Danilov's mind became a threadbare cloth of facts and habits. The man began to talk simply to fill the silence. He mapped Okhrana safe houses, identified couriers, sketched out the smallest rituals of communication: a chalk mark, a folded newspaper, a handkerchief left in a doorway.
To Kamo and the others, it was witchcraft. They were used to extracting truth with fists. But Soso's way was quieter—and far more terrifying. He was a scholar conducting an autopsy on an enemy network, piece by piece, while storing every detail inside the flawless archive of his modern mind.
When Danilov had nothing left to give, Jake began to build.
He needed watchers, not killers. Listeners, not brawlers. The revolution had enough men who could pull a trigger. What it lacked were eyes and ears.
He summoned Luka, the quiet witness from the ice house. "You notice things," Jake said. "You see what others ignore. From now on, you'll watch our people. The taverns. The tea houses. You'll tell me who whispers, who spends too freely, who meets with strangers. You'll be my eyes."
Luka nodded, solemn, proud, frightened.
Next came Anna—Luka's niece, the girl who had once delivered the message that lured Danilov to his doom. She stood before him, nervous but steady.
"Anna," Jake said, handing her a small notebook. "You remember faces. Patterns. Who walks with whom. You'll write it all down. Nothing is too small. Every word comes to me."
She accepted the notebook with both hands, as if it were a holy text.
And so the Special Committee began—not with soldiers, but with watchers and whisperers, bound to Jake by secrecy and devotion. It was the seed of something far larger, a network of loyalty and fear that would outlive them all.
The first sign of Yagoda's counterattack arrived on a gray, wet afternoon.
Pyotr, Jake's runner, stumbled into the cellar clutching a slip of paper as though it might burn him. "Comrade Soso," he whispered, "they're appearing everywhere. In papers. On benches."
Jake took the pamphlet. It was cheaply printed, unevenly inked—but the words were sharp as razors.
WHO JUDGES THE JUDGES?
He read on.
Comrades, we are told that the traitor Orlov has been exposed. But how? Where is the proof? Where is the trial? The confession?
Instead, we are asked to accept his disappearance on faith. We are told he has 'vanished,' a victim of the Okhrana. Convenient, isn't it?
Beware the man who saves you by becoming your master. Beware the Georgian butcher, Soso, who names himself judge, jury, and executioner. Today, his justice strikes a traitor. Tomorrow, whose neck will hang in his noose?
The words were poison, elegantly distilled.
Jake read it twice, his pulse steady but his stomach cold. The rhetoric was precise, the attack deliberate. It didn't deny his story—it used it, twisting his victory into tyranny.
This was Yagoda's work. Not brute violence, but ideological warfare. He was striking at the foundation of Jake's power—not the body of the revolution, but its soul.
Kamo spat on the floor. "Lies! We should find the printers and hang them from the lampposts!"
Jake folded the pamphlet carefully and slipped it into his coat. "And prove him right?" he said, voice quiet, deadly calm.
Kamo blinked, startled. "What do you mean?"
"He's not fighting us in the alleys anymore," Jake said. His tone carried the weight of a teacher explaining a terrible truth. "He's not trying to kill our bodies. He's trying to kill what the people believe we are."
He looked at the pamphlet again, the ink still damp between his fingers.
"This isn't propaganda," he said. "It's a mirror. And if we're not careful, we'll start to believe what we see in it."
The war had changed. No longer fought with pistols or dynamite, it had shifted into a new and treacherous theater—one where words could wound deeper than bullets, and the revolution could die not from betrayal, but from doubt.