Demetrio's POV
The hallway was a different environment than it had been twenty minutes ago.
I moved through it with the calibration that years of specific training had made automatic, reading the geometry of the space the way I had learned to read it, identifying positions and angles and the specific tells of people who were trying not to be heard in a space they did not know as well as I did.
My father's house. I had run these halls since I was seven years old. I knew every corridor and alcove and the specific way sound traveled through the stone construction on the upper floors versus the wood-paneled lower ones. Every Bratva soldier they had sent in here tonight was operating in the dark against a man who had memorized the map.
That was their first miscalculation.
"What is the situation on the patio?" I said, low, to the soldier moving at my left.
