Page 67 of Knuckles & Knives
“Heat signatures show activity in the central building,” Marcus whispers into his comm unit. “At least six bodies, possibly more.”
“Axel?” I ask.
“Impossible to tell at this distance.”
We split into two teams—Kieran and his men taking the east entrance while Dom, Marcus, and I approach from the west. Despite his injury, Dom moves with deadly grace, his military training evident in every careful step, but I see the subtle signsothers might miss—the slight hitch in his stride, the hand he keeps near his side as if holding himself together by sheer willpower.
The building is eerily quiet as we slip inside. Emergency lighting casts everything in hellish red shadows, and the air smells of rust, motor oil, and something metallic. I hope to hell it’s not blood.
We find the first body twenty feet from the entrance.
The mercenary is sprawled against a support pillar, throat cut with surgical precision. No struggle, no defensive wounds—just quick, efficient death. Axel’s work.
“Two more here,” Dom’s voice crackles through the comm from across the building. “Same MO.”
We move deeper into the warehouse, following a trail of bodies that speaks to Axel’s particular brand of lethal artistry. Each kill is clean, professional, almost respectful in its efficiency. This isn’t mindless violence. It’s a hunter eliminating obstacles between himself and his real prey.
The sounds reach us before we see the source—grunts of effort, the solid impact of flesh on flesh, something heavy hitting concrete. We round a corner and find them.
Axel and Viktor Kozlov are locked in brutal, intimate combat in a cleared area surrounded by shipping containers. Both men are bloodied, moving with the deadly grace of apex predators who’ve found their match.
Viktor is larger, his reach longer, but Axel is faster and more fluid. As I watch, he slips inside Viktor’s guard and drives an elbow into the bigger man’s ribs with a crack I can hear from thirty feet away.
“Persistent little ghost,” Viktor rasps, his accent thick with Russian inflection. “I taught you better than this.”
“You taught me to survive,” Axel replies, dancing back from a vicious hook. Blood streams from a cut above his left eye, but his voice is steady, calm. “Everything else I learned on my own.”
Viktor lunges forward with a knife, and Axel barely twists away in time. The blade catches his shoulder, opening a red line across his skin, but he uses the momentum to drive his knee into Viktor’s solar plexus.
I start to move forward, but Dom’s hand catches my arm. “Wait,” he breathes. “This is his fight.”
“He’s bleeding?—”
“He’s winning.”
Dom’s right. Even injured, even facing a larger, more experienced opponent, Axel is systematically dismantling Viktor Kozlov with the patient precision of someone settling a very old debt.
“You remember the games, don’t you?” Viktor taunts, circling like a predatory animal. “The tests? You were always my favorite, little ghost. So much potential. So much beautiful rage.”
Axel’s response is a combination that comes from nowhere—three lightning-fast strikes that leave Viktor staggering and spitting blood. “I remember everything,” he says quietly. “Every lesson, every scar, every night you made me wish I was dead.”
“And yet here you are, using everything I taught you. You should thank me.”
“I’ll thank you by making sure you never touch another kid.”
The final exchange happens too fast to follow. Viktor makes one last desperate charge, his knife aimed at Axel’s heart, but Axel is ready. He’s been ready for years, maybe. He sidesteps with fluid grace, catches Viktor’s wrist, and twists with a sharp crack that echoes through the warehouse.
The knife clatters to the concrete. Viktor drops to his knees, cradling his broken arm against his chest.
Axel stands over him, breathing hard but steady, and pulls his own knife from a sheath at his back. The blade gleams in the red emergency lighting.
“Any last words?” he asks conversationally.
Viktor looks up at him with something that might be pride. “You were always my masterpiece.”
“Yeah?” Axel tilts his head, considering. “Then consider this my signature.”
The knife slides between Viktor’s ribs with surgical precision, angled upward toward the heart. Viktor’s eyes widen in surprise then go glassy as he topples forward.
