They tortured me right in front of everyone, laughing as my blood dripped onto the cold concrete, never suspecting that the mere whisper of a single name held the power to reduce their entire empire to ashes.

By sunrise, the siege of the lake house was over.

Twenty-two mercenaries lay dead across the manicured lawns. The fuel tanker that had breached the gates was reduced to a smoldering, blackened carcass. Dante’s security force had taken casualties, but the compound had held.

Viktor Ivanov, however, had not been among the dead. The Russian had sent his hired guns to die while he holed up in his fortified penthouse atop the thirty-story North River Tower downtown, preparing to flee via private helicopter to an offshore haven.

Dante didn’t wait for the city to wake up.

We arrived at the North River Tower in a convoy of four black Suburbans. Dante had bypassed the local police entirely, using his leverage over the mayor's office to initiate a full blackout of the tower's grid. The elevators were shut down; the building was an iron tomb.

I sat in the command vehicle across the street, watching the rooftop surveillance feed on Luca's terminal.

"Boss is on the roof," Luca said, tapping his comms. "Russian chopper just touched down on the pad."

On the thermal screen, I watched Dante emerge from the rooftop stairwell alone, walking through the swirling dust and gale-force winds whipped up by the helicopter's spinning rotors.

Viktor Ivanov was scurrying toward the chopper door, clutching a metal briefcase, flanked by two remaining personal bodyguards.

Through the surveillance feed, Dante looked like the grim reaper incarnate. He raised a grenade launcher and fired a single high-explosive round into the helicopter's tail rotor. The aircraft spun wildly, slamming into the concrete helipad in a blinding fireball of jet fuel and shrapnel.

The two bodyguards turned to run, but Dante dispatched them with cold, mechanical efficiency—two taps each from his customized sidearm.

Viktor threw himself onto the blood-soaked concrete, hands raised, weeping openly.

The audio feed patched into my headset picked up Dante’s slow, deliberate footsteps as he approached the cowering oligarch.

"Dante! Please! I have fifty million in gold in Zurich! It's yours! All yours! Just let me take a car to the border!" Viktor shrieked, his voice pathetic and cracked.

Dante stopped three feet away. The wind whipped his black coat around him like raven wings.

"You hung my wife from a meat hook, Viktor," Dante said, his voice terrifyingly calm through the microphone. "You made her bleed on concrete. You thought she was alone in this world."

"I didn't know who she was! I swear to God, I didn't know!"

"That was your first mistake," Dante said. He drew his blade, the same serrated steel he had used to cut my chains in the slaughterhouse. "Your second was believing that God could save you from me."

I turned my head away from the monitor just as Dante lowered the blade.

Twenty seconds later, the rooftop audio went quiet, save for the crackling of the burning helicopter.