Dozens of sirens. Red and blue lights flashed across the warehouse walls through the dirty windows. In the next second the heavy warehouse doors blew inward, rammed open by an armored tactical vehicle.
Armed officers in black flooded the building. The entry team moved fast and clean. “Everybody down! Hands where we can see them! Drop your weapons!” a voice boomed.
Roach froze, his face a mix of fury and disbelief. His guards lowered their guns in confusion. The man Alex had called before walking into the trap was no fool.
He had understood everything from one word—goodbye. He hadn’t waited. He called every favor he had. He tracked Alex’s last phone signal.
And he brought in the law. Not the bought local kind that worked for Roach, but the part of the system that still functioned. Alex lay on the cold concrete in a pool of his own blood.
He saw figures running toward him, heard shouting. But it was already far away. The last thing he saw before darkness took him was Lena’s face leaning over him.
He felt her tears hit his cheek and saw her lips form one word: “Live.” The world collapsed into white noise streaked with red flashes and distant voices, muffled as if underwater. The pain receded, replaced by a deep ringing cold.
Alex felt strong hands lift him, carry him, lay him on the hard surface of a gurney. He was no longer a man acting. He was an object now, a body people were trying to save. He drifted in thick black weightlessness, and strangely, it wasn’t frightening.
For the first time in years he felt no anxiety, no rage. Only exhaustion. Endless, cosmic exhaustion.
Ahead of him in the dark appeared a dull warm light. Like a campfire in an open field at night. It drew him in.
Alex moved toward it instinctively, the way a moth goes to flame. As he got closer, two figures took shape inside the light. He knew them immediately.
Sergeant Semyon, with both arms again, in his old field uniform. And Uncle Mike in a proper suit, no fear and no tears on his face. They weren’t smiling. They just watched him with quiet patience.
— So you made it, son, — said Semyon. And his voice was less a sound than an echo inside Alex’s head. — Your fight is over. Time to rest.
— No cruelty here, no dirty business, son, — came Uncle Mike’s echo. — Just peace. Come on. You’ve earned it.
And Alex wanted to. God, he wanted to. To set down the impossible weight, the pain, the memory.
To step into that warm light and disappear inside it. To stop being. He had already taken a step and reached out his hand.
— Live, Alex, live! Lena’s voice cracked through that peaceful silence like a whip. It yanked him out of the warmth.
He turned. Behind him, in the darkness, there was not emptiness. There were images, flickering like old home movies.
Katie, not in a hospital bed but alive. Five years old, riding on his shoulders and laughing, fingers tangled in his hair. Twelve years old, proudly showing him a report card full of A’s.
Seventeen. Spinning in front of him in her graduation dress, beautiful and young and full of hope. She looked at him and laughed.
And that laugh was the only sound strong enough to drown out the hospital monitors and the echo of gunfire. He stood between two worlds. Between the world of peace, where his dead fathers waited, and the world of pain, where his living daughter lay in a coma.
And he chose. He turned his back on the light, on Semyon and Uncle Mike. He stepped back into the darkness, toward the ghostly sound of his daughter’s laughter.
At that same instant the world exploded in white light and a violent blow to the chest. “Clear! We’re losing him!”
“No pulse. Epinephrine. Charge again. Everybody clear!”
He was on an operating table. Around him people in green masks moved in a blur. His body was a battlefield.
Surgeons fought for his life with the same intensity he had brought to his own private war. Scalpels, clamps, needles, blood. A lot of blood…
