“Dance,” Petrovich said again. “Last dance.”
And when Artist, swaying, tried to move, one of the men brought a steel pipe down on his leg. The crack of bone echoed through the empty theater. Artist went down screaming.
The second blow hit the other leg. “That’s it,” Petrovich said, looking at the body twisting on the floor. “No applause tonight.”
They walked out and left him alone in that huge, dark, freezing theater.
To die. From pain, blood loss, and fear.
That, the story says, was Sever’s style of revenge. Artist wanted a stage, and he got one. He wanted to be a star, and his light went out on the dusty boards of an abandoned theater.
Hours later, in his cell at White Swan, Sasha Sever received another note. It contained the route to the cabin in the woods. He studied it carefully.
Then he took out his black beads, now marked twice. He burned the note and scattered the ash around the cell. Next came Moose—the man who had pulled the trigger.
And for him, the legend says, a special ending had been planned. A branch snapped in the woods. Dry wood under a heavy boot.
Inside the cabin, two men flinched at the same time. Their names were City Wolf and Moose. They were the last two men who had entered Mikhail Krug’s house that night.
And they knew somebody was coming. Goldfinch was gone. Artist wasn’t answering his phone.
They’d been holed up in that patch of woods for a week, and paranoia—cold and sticky as swamp mud—had worked its way under their skin. “Probably nothing,” Wolf muttered, eyes fixed on the window and the blackness outside. “No,” Moose said, shaking his head, his pistol slick in his hand.
He was an animal in the old sense. He felt danger in his gut. They were here.
At that exact second, the lights went out. The generator humming outside coughed once and died. Then came absolute silence.
The kind that presses on your ears. The living-room window shattered inward without a sound, as if it had been cut out. Two dark figures in masks and camouflage slipped through the opening like ghosts.
These weren’t street punks. They were professionals. Men for whom violence was a trade.
Former special-operations types, according to the story, men Archimedes kept around for jobs that required precision. And this was that kind of job. Moose reacted first, true to form.
He fired wildly into the dark. The answer was silence. Then a hiss through the air, and something heavy smashed into the hand holding his gun.
He howled and dropped it. The second figure had already taken Wolf down, wrenching his arm behind his back and driving a tranquilizer into his neck. The gang leader went limp like a rag doll.
The whole operation took less than ten seconds. But Moose managed to break free. Blinded by pain and panic, he blasted through the back door and ran into the woods.
Into his own territory. He’d grown up in those woods. Knew every trail. He was sure he could lose them.
He ran hard, crashing through brush, snapping branches, not caring where he stepped. Adrenaline drowned out the pain in his arm. He ran ten minutes before his lungs started to burn.
When he finally stopped and listened, there was nothing. Just wind in the pines and his own heart hammering.
He’d lost them. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and almost smiled. Then the smile died.
Right in front of him, hanging from a pine trunk, was his cap. The same one that had flown off when he burst out of the cabin. They were ahead of him.
They weren’t chasing him. They were herding him. Like game.
A cold, animal fear locked up his whole body. He spun and ran the other way. A few hundred yards later he found another sign.
A spent shell casing from his own pistol hanging from a branch. They were playing with him. Taking their time.
They had turned the woods—his woods—into a maze of fear. He crashed through the trees like a trapped animal, and everywhere he found those markers. Like the forest itself had turned against him.
He shouted for help, but all he got back was his own echo and the silence of old trees. Finally, exhausted, he dropped to his knees in a small clearing. He knew it was over.
A man stepped out from behind the trees. Alone. No mask. It was Petrovich.
He wasn’t carrying a gun. Just a coil of rope. “Get your running in?” he asked evenly.
