News of the flaying reached Beijing before the body was cold.
General Guo Feng's response was not a message. It was a revision to the Consortium proposal. The updated document, delivered via a stone-faced PLA courier to Rajendra's Moscow office, now included Appendix D: Security Integration & Threat Neutralization Protocol.
The language was sterile. It stipulated that "persistent, non-state actor threats to Consortium personnel and assets" would be dealt with via "joint, integrated operations" between Zashchita Security and "attached PLA special advisory units." In essence, it was a request—or an order—for Rajendra to invite Chinese special forces into his private war.
The courier stood waiting. The unspoken message was clear: Prove you can control your new backyard, or we will do it for you, and keep the keys.
Rajendra dismissed the man with a nod. He didn't sign. He looked at the Void Orchid on his desk. It was not blooming. It was closed tight, a hard black bud, as if recoiling from the choices in the air.
He could not let the Chinese boots touch the ground. That was the end of his sovereignty. But he also could not lose Dawnlight-7. That was the end of his credibility, and likely his life, at the hands of either Krylov's disillusioned board or the next local warlord.
He needed a victory that was entirely, unmistakably his. A victory that would make both the wolf Khasan and the Dragon in Beijing pause. He needed to speak in a language they both understood: utter, ruthless efficacy.
He sent two messages.
The first was to Kapoor at the Dawnlight-7 perimeter camp. "Hold. Do not engage. Fortify. Let them see you are not running. Let them wonder why."
The second was to Major Voronin of The Silencers. It contained a single name and a location, pried from a captured low-level militant after the flaying: "Rashid. Brother-in-law. Logistics. Grozny safehouse #3."
Then, he called Suryananda.
"The Iron Mother," Rajendra said, his voice like dry ice. "She is a goddess of protection. Of fierce, pragmatic justice. Is she not?"
"She is," Suryananda's voice came back, already tinged with the new, unsettling resonance he was cultivating.
"Then her justice must be seen. Not as an atrocity, but as a… sacred reckoning. A cleansing. The narrative must be ready in twelve hours. Can you do it?"
A pause. He could hear Suryananda's quick, anxious breath. Then, the priest's voice, firming with zeal: "The faithful must witness the Mother's arm. I will have the verse."
The operation was not a battle. It was an excavation.
Voronin's team, working with two of Kapoor's most discreet men, did not assault the Grozny safehouse. They waited. They watched. They identified Rashid, a fleshy, nervous man who handled Khasan's weapons and fuel purchases. They followed him to a clandestine meeting with a corrupt Soviet fuel depot officer.
They took them both, in the dead of night, from a darkened side street. No shots. No alarms.
They were brought to a secured, abandoned grain silo on the frozen outskirts, a place already whispered by Suryananda's new local acolytes to be a "place of the Mother's judgement."
Rajendra arrived just before dawn, a phantom in a long black coat. He found Voronin waiting, his face impassive. Inside the vast, echoing concrete cylinder, the two prisoners were bound, gagged, trembling under the beam of a single harsh lamp.
"The flaying was a message," Rajendra said, his voice echoing coldly in the silo. He spoke in Russian; Voronin translated tersely into Chechen for Rashid. "It was meant to scare. To show cruelty. Your brother-in-law misunderstands."
He walked closer, his boots crunching on frost and old grain. "I am not here to scare you, Rashid. I am here to educate you. And through you, Khasan. There is a difference between terror and efficiency. Terror is messy. It is emotional. It leaves a body for your enemies to find, to mourn, to rally around."
He nodded to Kapoor's men. They stepped forward, not with knives, but with heavy industrial tools from the oil field: a large, hydraulic pipe-cutter, and a soldering torch.
"Efficiency is clean," Rajendra continued, his eyes locked on Rashid's widening ones. "It is a transaction. It removes a problem and creates a lesson. The lesson is not 'I am cruel.' The lesson is: 'I control the things you need to live.'"
He pointed to the fuel depot officer. "This man sold you diesel. He is a link in your chain." A gesture. The pipe-cutter was activated with a sharp, hydraulic hiss. It was not used on the man. It was used on a length of steel pipe, severing it with a deafening CRUNCH. The officer fainted.
"The chain is broken." Rajendra turned back to Rashid. "You need food, brought in from Azerbaijan. The man who drives the truck has a daughter in university in Baku. We have her name. You need bullets, from a cache in Dagestan. We have the grid coordinates."
He leaned down, his face close to Rashid's. "Tell Khasan this: He can flay every foreman I send. It will not get him a single liter of diesel or a loaf of bread. I do not rule this land with fear of death. I rule it with control of life. He can be a king of corpses in these hills, or he can be the Warden of the Dawnlight Field, taking a percentage of every barrel that flows, with my protection and my supply lines behind him. His choice."
He straightened up. "Let him go."
Kapoor's men looked startled, but Voronin gave a sharp nod. They cut Rashid's bonds.
The man stumbled back, clutching his wrists, disbelief and terror warring on his face.
"Go," Rajendra said softly. "Deliver the lesson. The Mother's justice is not blind rage. It is the unblinking eye that sees every link in the chain, and the steady hand that can sever any one of them. The offer stands for forty-eight hours. After that, the lesson becomes… permanent."
Rashid scrambled for the silo door and vanished into the grey dawn.
By noon, Suryananda's network was humming. In the markets and tea houses, the story was told not of a kidnapping, but of a vision. Of how the Iron Mother had taken the corrupt fuel-thief and the warlord's kin to her "steely womb" (the silo) and shown them the futility of blood against the power of the practical. She had offered a covenant: strength through alliance, wealth through order. The message was divine, but the terms were mercantile.
By evening, Khasan's response came. Not through violence. Through a sullen, circuitous message to the Dawnlight-7 perimeter: "Send the contract. We will discuss the percentage."
It was not surrender. It was the beginning of a negotiation. The wolf had smelled the steel in the shepherd's crook and paused.
In Beijing, the updated Consortium document lay unsigned on Rajendra's desk. The Orchid remained a closed fist.
He had not bowed to the Dragon. He had not unleashed the wolf. He had played a third, colder game. He had shown both that his power was not just in guns or gods, but in the quiet control of every system that made life possible. He was the merchant-king, and his currency was reality itself.
The victory was his. But as he looked at his hands, clean of blood but stained with the cold calculus of a severed chain and a broken man's will, he wondered what the Mother, in whatever form she truly existed, would demand as her next due. The faith was spreading. And faith, he was beginning to understand, was a fire that eventually demanded its own sacrifices.