Nathan sat in the safe house, staring at the file Silas had given him.He had been reading for hours. Reading about Alexei. About his family. About his past. About everything. The file was thick. Heavy. Full of secrets. Full of lies. Full of truth.He had learned about Alexei's childhood. About his father. About his mother. About his brothers. He had learned about the Volkov family. About their rise. About their fall. About everything they had done. Everything they had built. Everything they had lost.But there was one thing that stood out. One thing that didn't make sense. One thing that changed everything.Alexei wasn't just Dimitri and Anton's brother. He was their half-brother. Same father. Different mother. A mother who had been cast out. A mother who had been forgotten. A mother who had died alone and penniless while the Volkov family lived in luxury.Nathan's blood ran cold. His fists clenched. His jaw tightened.He read further. Alexei's mother had been a maid. A servant. A no

Nathan walked out of the church, his body tense, his mind racing.The night air was cold. Clean. The stars were bright. The city was quiet. The world was still.He had done it. He had talked to Alexei. He had offered him a way out. And Alexei had agreed. He had said he would try. He had said he would stop.But Nathan didn't trust it. Not yet. Not completely. He had been fooled before. He had been betrayed before. He had been lied to before.He pulled out his phone. Called Frank."Where are you?" Frank asked."The old church on the north side. I talked to Alexei."Frank was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke. "You talked to him? What happened?"Nathan told him. Everything. The conversation. The truth about Alexei's past. The offer. The agreement.Frank was silent for a long time. Then he spoke. "You're insane. You're absolutely insane. You can't trust him. He's a killer. He's a monster."Nathan's

Nathan stood in the street, watching the gym burn.The flames licked at the walls. The smoke billowed into the night sky. The fire trucks sprayed water that turned to steam the moment it touched the heat. The police kept the crowd back. The paramedics tended to the wounded. The world kept moving. But Nathan felt frozen. Stuck. Trapped.Silas had betrayed him. Silas had been working with Titus. Silas had been feeding them information. Silas had been waiting for this moment. And now the gym was burning. The place where he had become the Underground King. The place where he had built everything.He didn't move for a long time. He just stood there with his hands at his sides while the building came down.Frank found him an hour later. His face was smeared with soot. His eyes were red from the smoke."It's gone," Frank said. "All of it."Nathan didn't answer."Silas did this. He's been working with Titus since the beginning.

Nathan came back to the city three days later.He didn't plan it. He just woke up in a motel room two towns over, stared at the water stain on the ceiling, and realized he was done running. Not because he'd found peace or purpose or any of the things people talk about. Just because running had gotten boring, and boredom was worse than anything waiting for him back home.He checked out, drove back, and parked the car outside Frank's bar at noon.The place looked different. The front window was still boarded up from the fire, and someone had spray-painted over the plywood. The sign above the door was gone. But the lights were on inside, and when Nathan pushed the door open, Frank was behind the counter with a rag and a bottle of polish, working on a glass that didn't need polishing.Frank looked up. Didn't say anything for a second. Then he set the glass down and came around the counter."You look like hell," Frank said."I've been

Nathan left the penthouse around nine and walked for a while without any particular direction.He kept turning the conversation over in his head. The letter. The mother. The two years of asking when they were going back. The way Dmitri had said I don't know when Nathan asked what he was going to do with the rest of his life.It was an honest answer. That was the part that stuck with him. He had been expecting a speech. Some version of the same thing every enemy had said to him over the last year — a reason, a grievance, a threat dressed up as a philosophy. What he got instead was a man sitting in a chair admitting he didn't have a plan.Nathan had been that man. More than once. He still was, most days.He found a payphone outside a drugstore and called Alexei."It's me," he said when the line picked up. "I met him."There was a pause on the other end. "How did it go?""He talked more than I expected. Less than I hoped."<