Chapter 2

The man stepped back, breathing hard.Another voice cut in from the doorway—older, calmer.

“He’s still not talking?”

“No.”

A pause.Then a sigh.“Then he’s of no use to us.”

Kol felt it then—the shift in the room.The moment when a captive stops being an asset and becomes a liability.He’d seen it before.Executed it himself.

He closed his eyes, not in surrender, but in acceptance.

Footsteps echoed.Slower now.Different cadence.

Not Bratya.

A third man entered the room.Tall.Unhurried.He wore no insignia, no visible weapon.His presence changed the air—not through threat, but through certainty.

He studied Kol the way a strategist studies a map.

Not what was broken, but what remained beneath the rubble.

“Leave us,” the man said, his Russian accented but fluent.

The others hesitated.

“I wasn’t asking.”

They left.

The silence stretched again—but this time, it was deliberate.

The man crouched in front of Kol, close enough that their knees nearly touched.“You know who betrayed you,” he said quietly.

Kol opened his eyes.

Still said nothing.

A flicker of something—approval, perhaps—crossed the man’s face.

“They won’t kill you today,” he continued.“Not tomorrow either.They’ll keep you alive just enough to be useful if you ever break.”

Kol’s mouth tasted like iron.He swallowed carefully.

The man leaned in.“But you won’t.”

It wasn’t a question.

“My name is Elias,” he said.“I represent an organization that dismantles operations like the one that put you in this room.”

Elias paused, then added, “We don’t traffic.We don’t sell people.And we don’t force loyalty.”

That got Kol’s attention.

Barely.But enough.

Elias held his gaze.“I can get you out.Tonight.Or I can leave, and you’ll die in this cell without ever having spoken another word.”

He straightened.“Those are your choices.”