“My cousin had four lieutenants,” I say as he sputters and groans. “Four men he trusted above all else. Three are dead, all killed by my hand. Which leaves just you.”

“So kill me like the others and be done with it,” he wheezes.

“I’ll be glad to—once you give me what I want.”

“You already have everything,” he says, glowering weakly at me. “Ravil is dead. His Bratva is in shambles. You’re rounding up his men like cattle. What more do you want?”

I squat down in front of him. “I want my woman.”

Kulikov shakes his head. “My orders were not to take the girl. And even if they were, that became moot after you killed Ravil.”

“She’s been missing for five days.”

“Maybe she ran away,” he suggests uncaringly. “Maybe she’s dead. I don’t fucking know. All I know is that I didn’t have shit to do with shit.”

His words ring with truth, but I don’t want to accept them.

What does it say about a don who can’t protect his own family? First, my brother, and now, June. I should feel guilty. But I’m not made for that.

So I choose anger instead.

“You must know something.”

He laughs darkly before it dissolves into a dead man’s cough. “Maybe one of Ravil’s other guys killed the bitch once they realized you’d done the boss in,” he offers. “I’d stop looking for the girl and start looking for her corpse.”

I smash my fist into his face so violently that he careens back onto the crimson-crusted concrete, chair and all. His head smacks the concrete floor hard enough to break something, and his eyes pinwheel wildly in their sockets.

He’s as close to dead as you can get while still drawing breath. All I have to do is turn my back on him and his time will be up.

But I don’t stop there.

I’m on him like a feral fucking beast. I cave his face in. His windpipe. I punch and roar and roar and punch, and the only sounds are my breathing and his bleeding and the sickening thump of knuckle meeting flesh—again, and again, and again.

I only stop when the thing beneath me doesn’t look human anymore.

I exhale as I straighten up. My fists are red with Kulikov’s blood, so I wipe them on my pants, though that does little more than smear it around into warpaint. The adrenaline still surging through me wants more, but Kulikov has nothing left to give. He’s as dead as it gets.

Milana is standing by the industrial windows, watching me with concern. I feel her eyes on me.

“Don’t,” I growl without looking.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I can hear you thinking.”

She sighs and takes a hesitant half-step towards me. “I’ll continue the search, of course,” she promises. “But—”

“Don’t give me a fucking ‘but,’” I spit. “She’s alive. We’d have found her body by now if she wasn’t.”

“Ravil’s loyalists could have buried her, or thrown her into a river somewhere, or stuck her in a million other places we’ll never uncover.”