Anya stood frozen in the doorway for a beat, her sharp mind struggling to process the scene before her. The man at the washbasin was a stranger. The infallible General, the cold architect of chaos who had held them all in his thrall through sheer, terrifying force of will, was gone. In his place was this trembling, gasping creature, a man seemingly being torn apart from the inside out. Her first instinct was a flicker of contempt, the predator's disdain for a display of weakness. But it was immediately replaced by something far more complex: a surge of cold, pragmatic alarm.
His breakdown was not just a personal crisis; it was a strategic catastrophe. His power over Timur and his men was a faith-based system. They followed him because they believed he was more than a man. They believed he was an infallible force, a being who could see the future and bend it to his will. If they were to see him like this, a quivering wreck muttering about guilt and fear, that faith would shatter. And with it, their entire, fragile alliance. They would all be dead by morning.
She closed the door behind her, the soft click of the latch an unnervingly loud sound in the charged silence. She did not approach him with pity or with scorn. She approached him with the cautious, focused intensity of a bomb disposal expert approaching a live, unstable device.
"Get a hold of yourself, General," she said. Her voice was not gentle or soothing. It was a low, firm command, a sharp, cold slap of words designed to cut through his panic. "Breathe. In. Out. Now."
Jake—for it was Jake, raw and exposed—flnched at the sound of her voice, his head snapping up. He looked at her, his eyes wild with the trapped, terrified animal's desperation. The mask was gone. She could see everything: the profound, soul-deep horror, the crushing weight of guilt.
"The men downstairs," she continued, her voice remaining a steady, hard monotone, "they cannot see you like this. Ever. Your power over them is not based on love or loyalty. It is based on the belief that you are inevitable. That you are stronger and smarter than any man they have ever met. If they see you break, even for a moment, the fear will turn to contempt. And they will put a knife in your back before the sun comes up. We will all be dead."
She was not trying to comfort him. She was reminding him of the stakes. She was trying to resurrect Koba, not for his sake, but for hers. She needed the monster to survive.
"You don't understand," Jake rasped, his voice a raw, broken thing. He pushed himself away from the basin, leaning against the wall, his whole body trembling. "It's not a game. It's not a map. They're real people. Men with wives, with children. They're going to be cut down in the streets… for a lie. For a fiction about gold." He dragged a hand through his hair, his composure completely gone. "I'm sending them to their deaths. I'm murdering them. For what? For a woman? For a chance to stop a war that hasn't even happened yet? What kind of monster does that?"
It was a confession, a raw outpouring of the moral agony that the Koba persona had been created to suppress. He was confessing his own damnation to the last person on earth who would offer him absolution.
Anya listened to his broken words, her expression unreadable. She did not offer sympathy. She did not offer comfort. She offered him her own brutal, unvarnished philosophy, a creed forged in the vicious, unsentimental crucible of the St. Petersburg underworld.
"Yes, they will die," she said, her voice utterly devoid of sentiment. She took a step closer, her gray eyes locking onto his. "They will be shot by the police, or burned in the fires they set, or beaten to death in a gutter. And tomorrow, the sun will rise. The world is a butcher's yard, Koba. Everyone dies. The peasant in the field dies of starvation. The factory worker dies with his lungs full of poison. The soldier dies in a pointless war for a Tsar he's never met. Their deaths are random, meaningless, and forgotten before their bodies are cold."
Her words were not cruel; they were simply true, a statement of fact from her perspective.
"You are not offering them a meaningless death," she continued, her voice low and hypnotic, weaving a new logic, a new justification for him to cling to. "You are offering them a death with purpose. You are giving them a story. They will die fighting the Tsar's police. They will die believing they are striking a blow for a fortune that will save their families. You are giving their pointless, brutal lives a heroic ending, a moment of glory in a world that has given them nothing but dirt and pain. In a way," she concluded, her voice dropping to a near whisper, "it is the kindest, most honorable thing you can do for them."
It was a monstrous, terrifying, and strangely compelling argument. It was a devil's calculus, a way to reframe mass murder as a noble sacrifice. She was not healing his fractured soul; she was teaching him how to build a thicker, stronger wall around it. She was giving him a new, more potent poison to cure the old.
Her words, as cold and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, cut through the chaotic fog of Jake's panic. He stared at her, his ragged breathing beginning to slow. Her logic was inhuman, but it was a logic he could grasp. It was a framework, a justification, a way to put the monster back in its cage by convincing him the monster was, in fact, a savior.
He slowly, shakily, pushed himself off the wall. He walked back to the washbasin and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, at the pale, terrified man with the wild eyes, and he forced him back down. He took a deep, shuddering breath, and when he exhaled, the panic was gone, replaced by an unnerving, absolute calm. The Koba persona reasserted itself, but it was different now. It had been shattered and then reforged in the fire of Anya's nihilistic philosophy. He was no longer just a strategist playing a role. He was a man who had looked into the abyss of his own actions, and she had shown him not how to step back from it, but how to embrace it. He had left a piece of his soul down there, and he knew he could never get it back.
He turned to face her. The terror was gone from his eyes, replaced by an empty, chilling clarity.
"You are right," he said. And in those three words, a new and dangerous bond was forged between them. She was no longer just his lieutenant or his intellectual rival. She was his confessor. The high priestess of his new, monstrous creed. She was the only person who had seen his weakness, and had not pitied him, but had shown him how to turn it back into a weapon.
His mind, now clear and cold once more, snapped back to the plan. He walked to the map, his movements once again precise and confident.
"The plan has a flaw," he stated, his voice pure ice. "The chaos is good, but our own infiltration is still too risky. We are relying on a disguise that could fail." He needed a better way. A key. An undeniable right of passage through the inferno he was about to create.
He outlined the final, critical detail. While the city burned, while Timur's men died in the streets, he and Pavel would not be disguised as simple workers. They would be disguised as firemen. He would have Pavel procure two uniforms and, most importantly, a fire-cart, one of the new, horse-drawn steam pumpers.
"The fire brigades will be given priority access to the port," he explained. "The police will clear a path for them. No one will question a fire-cart racing towards a blaze."
Their target was no longer the warehouse. Attacking it, even under the cover of chaos, was too risky with Stolypin's trap in place.
"We cannot steal the rifles in the dark anymore," Koba stated, his eyes fixed on the map. "So we will steal them in broad daylight. While the city is fighting my phantom army, we will use the fire-cart to get past the outer cordons and approach the naval command office itself. We are not going to steal the guns. We are going to steal the official shipping manifest and the transfer schedule for the next day."
He tapped a small building near the center of the port district. "We will find out exactly when and where the rifles are being legitimately moved by the army, under official guard. We will not intercept the shipment in the port." His finger traced a line out of the city. "We will intercept it on the road, long after Stolypin thinks we have failed and fled."
He turned to Anya, the full, terrifying scope of his new plan laid bare. "We will not just become ghosts in the night. We will become the shipment itself."
The plan was set. The objective was clear. In less than thirty-six hours, they would bring the capital of the Russian Empire to its knees, sacrificing dozens of lives in fire and blood, all to steal a single piece of paper.