The cellar was no longer a place of fear. It was a throne room, and the air crackled with the raw, ecstatic energy of victory. Pavel slammed the heavy, iron-banded payroll box onto the floor. The sound of the crowbar splintering the wood and prying open the lock was the sweetest music these men had ever heard.
Bundles of rubles, thick stacks of them bound in paper strips, spilled onto the filthy floor. A collective, guttural cheer erupted from the gangsters. They descended on the money like starving wolves, laughing, shouting, clapping each other on the back. The vodka bottle, forgotten in the morning's tension, was now passed around in triumph.
Pavel, his one good eye gleaming with avarice and a newfound respect, strode over to Jake. He scooped up a massive handful of the bundles and shoved them into a rough burlap sack, the same kind they used for potatoes. He thrust the sack at Jake. It was heavy, weighted with more money than Jake Vance had ever seen in his life.
"You earned this, planner," Pavel boomed, his voice full of genuine, boisterous admiration. He clapped Jake on his good shoulder, a blow that would have staggered a smaller man. "By God, you earned it. We'd all be dead or in chains without you. Drink!"
Jake took the sack. The rough fabric was coarse against his skin, the weight of it a solid, undeniable reality. This was the price. The price for a man's life, for a woman's terror, for his own soul. He felt a wave of dizziness, the smell of the unwashed, celebrating men suddenly suffocating.
Before he could process the transaction, Viktor, his face still pale but now flushed with drink and anger, pushed his way through the crowd. He jabbed a finger at Jake.
"You!" he snarled, flecks of spittle flying from his lips. "You almost got us all killed! That rifle shot… you nearly let that woman scream the whole damn police force down on our heads!"
The celebration quieted. The men turned, their expressions shifting from joy to a primal curiosity. A challenge had been issued. Their new god was being questioned.
Jake didn't flinch. He didn't raise his voice. He looked at Viktor with the calm, pitiless expression of a man observing an insect. He let the silence stretch, forcing every man in the room to lean in, to hang on his next words.
"Her scream," Jake said, his voice quiet, yet it sliced through the cellar's thick air, "would have brought the local patrol. Two, maybe three men. Frightened, clumsy. A nuisance."
He took a step closer to Viktor, who instinctively recoiled.
"Your knife," Jake continued, his voice dropping even lower, becoming a conspiratorial, chilling whisper, "in that woman's throat would have brought the Okhrana's murder division. The Tsar's best investigators. Men who don't get frightened. Men who don't stop. They would have locked this entire district down and torn it apart, brick by brick, until they found you. One is an inconvenience. The other is a death sentence."
He paused, letting his gaze sweep over the other men, making them all complicit in the lesson.
"I didn't almost get you killed," he concluded, his eyes locking back onto Viktor's. "I saved your life by stopping you from making a stupid, emotional mistake. You should thank me."
The logic was so cold, so irrefutable, that it left no room for argument. Viktor's face cycled from rage to confusion to a dawning, horrified understanding. He had been thinking about the moment; the planner had been thinking about the next month. The other gangsters looked away from Viktor, their expressions a mixture of contempt for his stupidity and a deeper, more profound fear of the quiet, wounded man who had seen it all.
Jake's authority, which had been forged in the morning's drill, was now tempered in the aftermath of violence. It was absolute. Viktor stumbled back, mumbling an apology, and disappeared into the crowd.
Just then, the cellar door creaked open and Misha slipped inside, his wiry frame trembling with exhaustion and relief. He was breathing heavily, his chest heaving from his long, circuitous run across the city. He looked at Jake, his eyes wide.
"It's done," he gasped. "Just like you said. The fire. The run to the station. I… I put the package in the loose brick. Behind the church. No one saw me."
For the first time since the operation began, a flicker of something other than cold strategy crossed Jake's face. The cool mask of the commander cracked, revealing a sliver of the desperate man beneath. Hope. It was a faint, fragile thing, but it was there. He had thrown his message in a bottle into the vast, hostile ocean of the city. He had done all he could. Now, he could only wait.
"Good," Jake said, his voice softer than before. "You did well, Misha." The simple words of praise made the young thug puff out his chest with pride.
Jake turned away, the heavy sack of blood money clutched in his hand. He had proven he could survive as a gangster. Now he had to see if there was any way to become a revolutionary again.
The air in Borjomi was different. It was clean, crisp, and smelled of pine needles and the distant, cold promise of the Caucasus peaks. It was a world away from the grime and desperation of St. Petersburg. But for Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze, the beauty of the resort town had become a cage, its manicured parks and elegant sanatoriums the gilded bars of her prison.
She was tired of waiting.
For weeks, she had obeyed. She had stayed in the small, clean apartment Kamo had arranged, a ghost in a town of holidaymakers. She had waited for a letter, a sign, a message from the husband who had sent her away. But the silence from the north was a deafening, terrifying roar.
The man she had married, her Soso, was a passionate, brooding intellectual. A poet. A firebrand who spoke of justice in a voice that could make you believe the world could truly be remade. He was difficult, yes, and shadowed by a darkness she didn't fully understand, but he was hers.
The man who had pulled her from the wreckage of their life in Tbilisi was a stranger.
That man had moved with a chilling economy of purpose. He was a creature of angles and orders, his voice a weapon, his eyes seeing not a chaotic raid but a chessboard of threats and escape routes. He had killed a man—she had seen it—and his expression had not changed. He had looked at her not with the warmth of a husband, but with the dispassionate assessment of a general moving a civilian out of the line of fire. Kamo, the loyal, fearless Kamo, had looked at this new Soso with something akin to awe, and to fear.
What happened to my husband? The question had gnawed at her, eroding her patience, replacing her fear with a grim, hardening resolve. She could not simply wait for an answer to arrive by post. She had to find it herself.
She dressed carefully, not as the fugitive's wife, but as a respectable middle-class woman, her simple but elegant dress and neatly pinned hair a costume of anonymity. She walked with purpose, her destination a teahouse on the edge of the town square. Soso had mentioned it once, a long time ago, as a quiet place where men of a certain political persuasion could speak without being overheard. It was a wild, desperate gamble.
She entered the teahouse, the warm air smelling of brewed leaves and honey cakes. She took a small table in the corner, her heart hammering against her ribs. Every man in a bulky coat looked like an Okhrana agent. Every whispered conversation sounded like a conspiracy. After ordering a glass of tea she did not want, she caught the eye of a passing waiter.
"Excuse me," she said, her voice a low, steady murmur. "I was hoping to find a Mr. David Zaguri. The teacher. Is he here today?"
The waiter, a young man with tired eyes, gave a barely perceptible shake of his head and moved on. Kato's heart sank. It was a fool's errand. She had risked everything for nothing. She was about to gather her things and leave when a shadow fell over her table.
A man had detached himself from a dark corner and was approaching her. He was not the jovial, bookish teacher she had imagined. He was thin and pale, with the haunted, paranoid eyes of a man who had looked into the abyss for too long. He sat down at her table without being invited.
"Ekaterina Svanidze?" he whispered, his voice raspy, urgent. "You are Iosif Dzhugashvili's wife?"
Kato's breath caught in her throat. She could only manage a slow, wary nod.
The man, Zaguri, leaned forward, his hands trembling. "You must leave. Now. Borjomi is not safe. Asking for anyone is a death sentence." His eyes darted around the room. "The network in Tbilisi… it was not just damaged. It was eviscerated. Annihilated. They arrested everyone. They knew the names, the safe houses, the dead drops… everything."
He leaned in even closer, his voice dropping to a terrified breath that smelled of fear and cheap tobacco.
"They say there is a ghost in the party, a high-level traitor. Someone near the top, feeding everything to the Okhrana."
Kato felt a chill that had nothing to do with the mountain air. She followed Zaguri's nervous glance. He was looking towards a table near the door, where two men sat. They were dressed in plain, bulky coats, their faces nondescript. They were not drinking their tea. They were not talking. They were watching.
They were looking directly at her.
Zaguri's voice cracked, the last of his composure shattering. "And now they know you're here," he breathed, his words a death knell. "God help us, they followed me."
Kato looked from the teacher's terrified face to the two impassive men by the door. The teahouse was no longer a refuge; it was a trap. Her determined quest for answers had just led the hunters directly to her door. She was no longer a protected piece, waiting for her king. She was a target.