Chapter 13 - Face to Face in the Ashes
The library smelled of old paper, burning leather, and copper blood.
Water poured through the shattered skylights, hissing furiously as it struck the burning embers of the bookcases.
Kolov lunged forward with terrifying speed for a man of his massive size.
His heavy combat knife sliced through the air in a vicious upward arc aimed directly at my throat.
I stepped back half an inch, feeling the cold steel kiss the collar of my torn dress shirt.
Before he could reset his balance, I slammed the heel of my left palm into his nose.
Cartilage shattered beneath the impact, sending a spray of bright crimson across his grey beard.
Kolov let out a savage grunt of rage, refusing to go down.
He used his immense weight to drive his shoulder into my chest, slamming me violently against the heavy oak mantle.
The wind exploded from my lungs in a sharp gasp.
My vision blurred for a split second as the stone edge dug into my spine.
Kolov gripped my throat with his massive, calloused left hand, squeezing with the force of an iron vise.
His thumbs dug into my carotid arteries, cutting off the oxygen to my brain.
“You thought you were a god in this city, boy!” Kolov roared, flecks of bloody spittle flying from his lips into my face.
“You are nothing but a rich kid hiding behind his father’s dead ghost!”
“I built an empire out of corpses while you were sipping champagne in country clubs!”
My lungs burned for air as darkness began creeping into the corners of my eyes.
Through the blur, I saw the reflection of the family crest carved into the stone mantle above my head.
The two silver falcons.
The motto: Honor Above Blood.
I remembered Emma lying broken in the rain on my marble floor.
I remembered her bruised, swollen lips whispering her brother’s name instead of begging for her own life.
That girl had taken twenty blows from iron pipes without surrendering her dignity.
I was not going to die at the hands of a rabid dog in my own home.
I drove the pommel of my Damascus dagger straight into the soft nerve cluster beneath Kolov’s right armpit.
His grip on my throat involuntarily loosened as agonizing numbness shot through his arm.
I broke his hold with a violent outward strike of my forearms and drove my knee into his groin.
Kolov doubled over with a strangled gasp of pure agony.
Before he could recover, I grabbed the back of his greasy hair with both hands.
I hauled him upward and slammed his face downward onto the corner of the heavy marble hearth.
The sickening sound of his cheekbone crushing echoed over the sound of the rain.
Kolov crashed onto his back in the center of the wet parquet floor, his combat knife sliding across the room into the shadows.
He lay there, heaving like a dying beast, his face unrecognizable beneath a mask of black blood and crushed bone.
He stared up at me through one swollen, bloodshot eye as I stepped over his chest.
I placed my leather boot heavily onto the center of his sternum, pinning him to the floorboards.
The tip of my Damascus blade rested lightly against the hollow of his throat.
“Please...” Kolov wheezed, his voice reduced to a pathetic, rattling whisper.
The arrogant monster who had terrorized the five boroughs for thirty years was gone.
In his place lay a terrified, broken old man staring into the abyss of his own mortality.
“I have sixty million dollars in offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands...” Kolov whimpered, tears of sheer panic mixing with the blood on his cheeks.
“I can transfer the bearer bonds to your personal trust tonight...”
“I will leave New York...”
“I will never return to the United States...”
“Just let me walk out of this door...”
I looked down at him with an expression of cold, emotionless detachment.
“You didn't offer sixty million dollars to Emma Carter when you found her in that alley, Viktor,” I said softly.
“She had twelve dollars in her purse.”
“Twelve dollars to buy bread for her sick mother.”
“And you let your men beat her until she couldn't see the sky.”
“She was nobody!” Kolov cried out in desperate protest.
“She was an insect!”
“She is a daughter of the Castellano house,” I corrected him, pressing the blade slightly deeper until a bead of dark crimson welled around the steel.
“And in this house, an attack on the humblest servant is an attack on the master himself.”
Behind me, the hydraulic seals on the floor hatch hissed as the vault door swung open.
Emma emerged from the opening, the twelve-gauge shotgun held tightly in her bruised hands.
She stood at the edge of the pit, her emerald dress soaked with water from the leaking ceiling.
She looked at Kolov lying beneath my boot, her chest heaving with rapid, shallow breaths.
Kolov turned his bleeding head, looking at the girl he had ordered his men to butcher two nights ago.
“Tell him...” Kolov begged her, his voice cracking with humiliation.
“Tell him to show mercy, girl...”
“You understand poverty...”
“You understand what it means to beg...”
Emma walked slowly across the shattered room, her footsteps steady and quiet.
She stopped beside me, looking down into the eyes of the man who had ordered her destruction.
There was no hatred in her brown eyes.
There was only a cold, magnificent pity that cut deeper than any blade.
“You are not a warrior, Mister Kolov,” Emma said, her voice clear and unbroken.
“You are just a coward who preys on people who cannot fight back.”
“And cowards do not deserve our mercy.”
She looked up from the dying gangster and locked her gaze with mine.
“Do what you have to do, Dominic,” she whispered softly.
“Finish it.”
I did not need to drive the steel home myself.
From the corridor behind us, the heavy footsteps of tactical boots echoed against the stone.
Commissioner Thomas Davies stepped into the library, flanked by ten federal marshals with assault weapons drawn.
Davies took one look at Kolov pinned beneath my boot, and then looked at the cold, unyielding resolve on my face.
“Dominic,” Davies said quietly, raising a single hand.
“Let the law take him.”
“The federal judges have unsealed thirty-two counts of racketeering, kidnapping, and treason against him.”
“He will spend the rest of his miserable life in a concrete cell at ADX Florence in Colorado.”
“He will never see the sun again.”
“He will rot in solitary confinement until the day he dies.”
I stared down at Kolov for five long, silent seconds.
A quick death with my blade was a mercy this animal did not deserve.
Solitary confinement in a federal supermax prison, stripped of his wealth, his pride, and his power, was a far more agonizing hell.
I slowly lifted my boot from his chest and stepped backward.
“He is all yours, Thomas,” I said, wiping the blood from my blade on a clean silk handkerchief.
Two federal marshals moved forward instantly, hauling Kolov to his feet by his collar and snapping heavy iron cuffs around his wrists.
May you like
As they dragged the screaming, bleeding Russian crime boss out through the ruined corridor, the silence finally returned to my home.
The war for Manhattan was over.
