"Get up, you idiot!"
Back at Lux, Gloria and two of her bouncers hauled Youri up off the wet floor by the back door, where he had slid down the wall after Leonora's car pulled away. The room tipped around him for a second before it settled, and his eyes refused to focus on anything for long.
"Who was that bitch?" Gloria spat, still holding her stomach with one hand.
"The General," Youri said flatly.
"General of what?"
"Look, I'm sorry. The night was ruined, and I take responsibility." He let out a broken half-laugh. "But those dancers… my god, they were to die for."
"This fucking moron," Gloria hissed through her teeth.
Before she could decide whether to throw him back out into the rain, one of her runners burst in, breathless. "Gloria! I found her — the woman from earlier! But some big guys in a black car just grabbed her!"
"What do you mean, grabbed her? She got kidnapped?"
"I think so!" the runner said, his voice shaking. "They smashed right into her car."
Gloria swore and turned back to Youri. "Hey, idiot. That general of yours just got snatched off the street. Come on, sober up!" She pulled a small vial from a drawer behind the bar and pressed it to his lips. He choked it down — bitter and medicinal — while the neon bled red and purple through his eyelids. Slowly, the club spun back into focus.
"Ah, my head," he groaned, clutching his temples. "Where the hell am I?"
"At Lux, asshole."
"Gloria? How did I get here?"
"That's for you to figure out later," she snapped. "First, the important news. The lady you call General has been taken by a man named Dimitry. Do you know him?"
"No," Youri said, and the last of the haze cleared out of his eyes as he said it. "Who the hell calls himself Dimitry?"
"Well, buddy, you might want to go after them."
"No. Let them be." He waved a hand. "She's a monster. She can take care of herself."
Gloria folded her arms. "Buddy, you owe me three thousand zells. Either you pay me right now, or you go and fetch that golden-boy wallet of yours. Which one is it going to be?"
Youri looked at her for a long moment and then sighed. "Alright. Who is this Dimitry?"
"He showed up a few years ago," she said, and her tone turned grim. "Half his body is machine. They say someone cut him in half in a battle and he survived somehow."
A coldness crept into Youri's bones. "Oh, shit," he said slowly. "I think I know what's going on. I'd bet you anything that damn woman is the one who cut him. She fights with a sword."
"Then what are you still doing here?" Gloria barked.
"I'm thinking. I can't go in blind. I need a plan."
"A plan? Boy, you can't even get your ass off the floor and you think you can come up with a plan!"
He managed a weak smirk. "You've got a point."
Something heavy thudded into his lap — a rifle, solid and honest, landing on him like a verdict. "Take this and get up," Gloria said. "I'll send you the location of his hideout. Get there and call me, and I'll call the police and come as fast as I can. Now go!"
His fingers closed around the cold metal. The weight of it felt like a promise and a punishment at the same time. Fear and resolve warred in his chest like two birds fighting over the same perch. He stood up, steadier than he had any right to be, and muttered to himself as he headed for the door. "Time to fix this."
On the edge of town, the warehouse stood like a rusted tooth in a jaw of concrete. Its loading docks crouched in the dark like sleeping animals, shipping containers were stacked around it like tombstones, and mercenaries drifted between the shadows with cigarette embers glowing like tiny suns in their hands. The whole place smelled of oil, old rain, and something that felt exactly like the end of everything.
Inside, Dimitry Oron moved around his prisoner like a sculpture that had learned to breathe. He was impossible in the way a rumor becomes true — part flesh and part metal, one eye burning a slow, furious red, one arm wound with pistons and hydraulic veins. The human half of him still carried the old wars in its scars and in the clench of its jaw.
"Now, my dear Phantom," he said, calm and taunting, "it's time to see what your insides look like."
"You piece of shit," Leonora snapped, her eyes burning. "You think you can break me with that toy? I've been cut worse."
"Your reputation precedes you," Dimitry purred, circling her like a predator admiring its prey. Then he stopped and tilted his head toward the shadows at the side of the room, where Anna hung in chains of her own, bruised and barely conscious. "But what would you say if I did it to the lovely woman you call your assistant?"
Leonora's voice trembled with rage, and with fear for someone other than herself. "You go after defenseless women now?"
"Not particularly. But since she seems so important to you, I think I'll enjoy it."
"I swear to you," Leonora said, her voice low and deadly, "once I'm out of this, I'll cut you into so many pieces that no one will ever put you back together again."
"Lovely Leonora, are you stalling for time?" he mocked. "Do you really think you're getting out of here?"
"Mark my words. What I say, I do."
"That's enough. You've taken all the fun out of it." His voice went cold as steel. "Now it's time to die."
The saw sang its blue, hungry note, obscene in the damp air, its teeth spinning like sacrificial stars — and then the world fractured. An explosion threw light through the cracks in the roof. Dust came down like a shroud as a car smashed straight through the warehouse wall and skidded to a stop in the middle of the floor. Alarms began to wail, and men shouted into radios that suddenly seemed useless.
The driver's door creaked open, and Youri fell out of it, rubbing the back of his neck. "Ow. Damn, Gloria, you should've given me a tougher car," he muttered, grinning despite everything.
"Who the hell is that?" one of Dimitry's lieutenants shouted.
"I don't care!" Dimitry roared. "Kill him!"
"Another fucking carnage, then," Youri sighed, and raised the rifle.
The mercenaries swarmed toward him like hornets. Leonora strained against her chains until her wrists were raw. Across the chaos of the warehouse, her eyes found his and held on, as if he were the one fixed point in the storm — alive, breathing and dangerous.
Dimitry turned away from them both with hatred rolling off him like heat. "Get my car ready," he barked at his men, unhooking Leonora's chains with his steel hand and dragging her toward the back of the building. "Bring the other two. You take care of that idiot." He glanced back once at the man by the wrecked car, and his voice was a threat carved in iron. "You and I have unfinished business, Phantom. As for him — he's a dead man walking."
Gunshots split the air into shards. Men fell, cursed, got up and fell again. A crate tipped over and spilled the smell of rotten oranges and rust across the floor. In the middle of it all, Youri and Leonora looked at each other one last time before the back doors closed between them. No words passed between them, only a promise, black and simple: survive, or die trying.