Second Strike

The Kuznetsov mansion was chaos incarnate, a war camp disguised as a home. Smoke from gun oil clung to the halls, servants scurried with bandaged arms and crates of ammunition, and the walls trembled with shouted orders. It was as if the house itself knew that doomsday had arrived.

The poison — the only weapon carefully prepared to stop Silence — had been destroyed. Sergei’s private jet was already in U.S. airspace, but whether he would make it alive to land, no one knew. And that uncertainty was enough to send the entire Kuznetsov household into frenzy.

The weapon room — a private arsenal that stretched wall to wall in cold steel racks and crates — rattled with the metallic clink of magazines snapping into rifles. Lilia stood in the middle, fastening the straps of her dark combat armor, the leather and steel hugging her like a second skin. Her hands trembled, not from fear, but from the icy focus that gripped her veins. She checked the chamber of her pistol, snapped a blade onto her t