Alone with himself and his ghosts. And there he understood that his real life sentence was only beginning. He had avenged his friend.
But in doing it, he had lost himself. The solitary cell at Black Eagle was the distilled essence of nothingness. Four gray walls, a bunk, a toilet bucket, and a tiny barred window high overhead showing only a small, indifferent patch of sky.
For most men, that would have been hell. But after years of psychological warfare, the silence hit Sever harder than noise ever had. He was used to noise.
The noise of prison politics, underworld business, his own mind spinning out long chains of revenge. Now there was only quiet. And in that quiet, for the first time in years, he heard not himself, not his enemies, but the voice he had tried to drown out with revenge.
Mike Krug’s voice. Not a dream. Not a hallucination. Memory.
The memory of a living man who laughed, argued, and sang about life, not death. And in Sever’s mind, that voice didn’t thank him for revenge. It asked a simple question: Why, brother? Why all this blood? Is that what I sang for?
The words of the broken Baskakov—words Sever had first dismissed as madness—now drove into him like nails. “You locked yourself in this cell. I found a way out. You didn’t.”
He, the great Sasha Sever, the winner, had turned out to be the loser. He thought he had been fighting for justice. Instead he had only multiplied evil. He wanted to honor his friend’s memory, but what he had built was a bloody, ugly monument made of ruined lives.
He sat on his bunk for hours, staring at that patch of sky. And his whole life, all of it, came into view as something hollow. The code. The reputation…
