Page 62 of The Mafia's Quintuplets

“Ivan.” I clasp his hand, pull him in close. “There’s a Kazanov hit team here. Get out now.”

His face shifts immediately. Surprise disappears behind cold computation. “Where?”

“Near the bar. Two men. More outside, most likely. They’re using tonight as cover.”

It’s not a lie. Fedor brought in outside muscle for this hit, and the Kazanov name makes for an ideal red herring. It'll trigger retaliation, suspicion, and weeks of distraction.

Ivan nods once and signals his men. They form around him like clockwork and begin extracting him from the building, drawing attention as they move.

Perfect.

Fedor’s men glance toward the disturbance, and some reach for comms. Others shift position, distracted.

I slip behind one of the carved columns lining the corridor. The timer on my phone reads 0:47.

The path through the club is open. Kitchen. Corridor. Hatch.

Time to vanish.

I catch Orlov's attention across the room, giving the predetermined signal with a subtle gesture that would be meaningless to anyone else, and he taps his earpiece, alerting the others that the extraction is happening now, ready or not.

I glance toward the main floor, where I see staff quietly directing first-floor/non-VIP guests toward the exit. In moments, the innocent guests will be out of the club, and only the ones on this floor will remain.

Fedor turns, realizing I'm no longer beside him, and scans the VIP section with increasing urgency until he sees me across the room. For a brief moment, recognition passes between us—he knows that I know, and I know that he knows—as the pretense dissolves like sugar in rain.

"Find my cousin," he snaps to his men with uncharacteristic loss of composure, loudly enough I can hear and interpret it from here by the shape of his lips as he snaps the command. "Now!"

The timer reads 0:32, with each passing second bringing destruction closer.

I move swiftly through service corridors, using the confusion as cover while distant shouts suggest Ivan's confrontation with the Kazanov soldiers is escalating exactly as I hoped. Two of Fedor's men spot me rounding a corner and scramble for their weapons, but Lev and Sasha intercept them from behind, neutralizing them so quickly that there’s no time for anyone to fire back.

"This way," Lev says, leading me down a narrow passage that reeks of spilled beer and cleaning chemicals from years of nightclub operations.

We push through the swinging doors into the kitchen, but instead of chaos and noise, we find eerie stillness. The space, normally loud with orders, clattering pans, and shouted instructions, is completely deserted, as planned. Pans sit cooling on still-warm burners, half-prepped ingredients rest on cutting boards, abandoned mid-task, and a digital timer beeps from an oven no one remains to attend. There’s even a finished crème brûlée waiting on the pass, its caramelized top beginning to sweat in the heat.

Lev sweeps the room. “Clear,” he says, confirming what we already expected.

No staff and no witnesses. Every soul who should have been here is already gone, ushered out according to the quiet evacuation orders passed down earlier this evening. We have the time and the cover we need.

We cross quickly to the “Employees Only” door that leads to the back corridor, but the handle won’t budge. Sasha gives it a shove, then steps back with a grimace. “Locked. External padlock, maybe? That wasn’t in the blueprints.”

“Fedor’s doing,” I mutter, already scanning for alternatives. “We move to Plan B.”

Sasha nods toward the dumbwaiter in the wall, a relic predating all renovations conducted in the past thirty years. “That thing gonna hold us?”

“Not all at once, but it’ll get us where we need to go.” I speak more confidently than I feel, but it seems to reassure them.

Without hesitation, Sasha yanks open the small metal door, revealing the narrow shaft just large enough to accommodate a crouched adult. Dust floats in the air inside, undisturbed for decades, until now.

“Lev, you’re first,” I say.

He climbs in without a word, curling himself into the space before easing down into the dark. Sasha follows, cramming in his much larger frame. “One more leg day, and I’d never have made this fit,” he mutters.

The countdown in my head ticks relentlessly onward. The timer on my phone reads nine seconds. I slide into the dumbwaiter last, knees tucked tightly to my chest. The wood groans beneath my weight, but it holds. I reach up and pull the door closed behind me just as the kitchen doors crash open once again.

Mikhail storms in, his boots hitting the tile with force in the sharp cadence of a man expecting resistance or confrontation. He holds his gun at the ready, his body tense, gaze sweeping the space as he takes in the strange stillness. This is clearly not what he anticipated.

He pauses just inside the threshold and surveys the empty kitchen with a mounting sense of confusion. The place looks abandoned mid-shift. He was expecting to find someone—anyone—he could corner, interrogate, or intimidate for information, but there’s no one.

---