Chapter 216: The Knife at Sabatine’s Throat

Anton’s idea was a gamble that leveraged the only currency they had left: spectacle. He proposed the observation deck of the Tour Genève, the city’s tallest structure—a sleek needle of glass and steel that pierced the low clouds. It was public, iconic, and more importantly, its security was a labyrinth of private contractors and municipal oversight. Kaine couldn’t simply lock it down without drawing massive, unwanted attention. And the vertiginous height, the transparent walls… it was a stage where any violence would be visible for miles.

But getting there meant traversing three more kilometres of hostile city. They moved from the tailor’s doorway like ghosts, their progress a stop-start agony of hiding, listening, and darting through shadows. The rain had softened to a fine, chilling mist, turning the city into a blurred photograph.

They were crossing a deserted, cobbled plaza—a shortcut between grand banking buildings—when the air shifted. It was a subtle thing, a cessation of the ambient hum from a nearby backup generator, a collective indrawn breath from the darkness.

Sabatine sensed it in a heartbeat before it happened. He shoved Anton behind a stone planter filled with sad-looking shrubs. “Contact. Three o’clock. Moving fast.”

Two figures emerged from under the arch of a bank’s portico. They moved not with the methodical sweep of the warehouse team, but with a hungry, focused aggression. Kaine was captured. The safe house ambush had failed. The warehouse fight had proven they were more than prey. The orders had changed: terminate.

These men were different. Lighter, faster, armed with compact machine pistols and a chilling economy of motion. Professionals, but of a more direct, brutal school.

Sabatine and Anton were exposed in the plaza. The planter was a meagre cover. “When I move, you run for that doorway,” Sabatine whispered, nodding to a recessed service entrance across the square. “Don’t look back.”

“No,” Anton hissed. “Together.”

“Anton, now!”

Sabatine broke cover, firing two shots not at the men, but at the glass facade of the bank beside them. The rounds sparked off the reinforced material, but the sudden noise and flash served their purpose—a fractional distraction.

Anton ran, his legs leaden, his vision tunnelling on the dark rectangle of the service door. He heard the suppressed crack-crack of return fire, the thwack of bullets impacting stone near his feet.

He reached the door. It was locked. He slammed his shoulder against it, a cry of pain and frustration tearing from his throat. It didn’t budge.

A glance back froze his blood.

Sabatine was a whirlwind of motion, using the plaza’s few obstacles—a bench, a statue base—to present a difficult target. He’d dropped one attacker with a shot to the hip, but the second was closing, herding him with controlled bursts.

Then, from a shadowed alley Anton hadn’t even seen, a third attacker materialized. He didn’t have a gun. He had a long, serrated combat knife, and he moved with the silent, liquid grace of a predator who lived for this moment. He’d been the flank, the trap within the trap.

While Sabatine was focused on the gunman, the knifeman closed the distance in three silent, lunging steps.

“SABE! BEHIND YOU!” Anton’s scream ripped through the square.

Sabatine spun, but he was a fraction too late. The knifeman was inside his guard. Sabatine’s pistol arm was knocked wide by a brutal slash that opened a line of red across his forearm. The gun clattered to the cobbles.

The knifeman didn’t pause. He drove forward, using his momentum to slam Sabatine back against the cold stone wall of the building beside the service door. His free hand clamped on Sabatine’s throat, pinning him. The other brought the wicked point of the knife to rest just below Sabatine’s jaw, pressing into the soft flesh. A single, hard thrust would sever the carotid artery.

Time stopped.

Anton saw it in horrifying detail: the rain beading on the knifeman’s black wool balaclava, the corded tendons in his forearm, the absolute, professional stillness of his stance. He saw Sabatine’s face, pale and strained, his hands coming up to grip the man’s wrist, but the leverage was all wrong. He was pinned. Beaten.

The gunman, his partner now standing and covering the plaza with his weapon, called out, his voice a flat, emotionless command. “Drop the device. Kick it toward me. Or he dies messily.”

They thought the prototype was on Sabatine. Of course they did. He was the operative, the protector.

Anton stood ten feet away, forgotten for a moment, just the panicked, wounded CEO. Rage, unlike anything he had ever known, erupted within him. It was a silent, supernova detonation behind his eyes, incinerating pain, incinerating fear, incinerating every civilized restraint he’d ever possessed. This man had a knife at Sabatine’s throat. He was going to kill the man Anton loved. The man who was his ‘after.’

The thought didn’t form in words. It was a pure, white-hot imperative: No.

He didn’t think so. He didn’t plan. His body moved.

The gunman’s attention was on Sabatine, waiting for the prototype to be produced. Anton was a blur in his peripheral vision, dismissed until it was too late.

Anton didn’t charge. He flowed. Three long, silent strides, his injured arm held tight to his body. The knifeman, focused on his captive, only sensed the movement at the last second. He started to turn his head.

Anton’s good hand shot out, not for the knife, but for the man’s knife hand at the wrist. His fingers, strengthened by a lifetime of frustration vented on squash courts and climbing walls, closed like a steel cable. He didn’t try to pull the knife away. He rotated it, using the man’s own grip as a pivot, driving the blade’s edge away from Sabatine’s throat and toward the knifeman’s own body.

It was a savage, jiu-jitsu-inspired disarm he’d seen in a self-defence seminar a lifetime ago, executed now with the flawless, desperate strength of a man seeing his future about to be cut short.

The knifeman grunted in surprise, his own leverage turned against him. The knife tip wavered, scratching a line of red down Sabatine’s neck but missing the artery.

That was all the opening Sabatine needed. With the pressure off his throat, he drove his forehead forward in a brutal headbutt, crunching into the bridge of the man’s nose through the balaclava.

The man’s grip slackened. Anton wrenched the knife hand sideways and down, driving the man’s knuckles into the sharp corner of the stone windowsill behind them. There was a sickening pop of breaking bone.

The knife clattered to the ground.

Anton didn’t stop. The rage had him. It was a primal, terrifying force. As the knifeman staggered back, clutching his shattered hand, Anton stepped in. He drove his knee up into the man’s groin with every ounce of weight he could muster. The man folded with a choked gasp.

Still, Anton wasn’t done. The white heat demanded more. He grabbed a fistful of the man’s tactical vest, spun him, and slammed his face into the unyielding stone wall. Once. Twice. A wet, crunching sound.

The man went limp, slumping to the cobbles in a heap.

Anton stood over him, chest heaving, his fists clenched, his entire body trembling with the aftershocks of the fury. He looked at his own hands as if they belonged to a stranger. They were scraped, one of his knuckles was split and bleeding, but they were steady.

A sharp crack made him flinch. He looked up.

Sabatine had retrieved his fallen pistol. The remaining gunman lay sprawled a few feet away, a dark hole in his forehead. Sabatine stood over him, smoke curling from the pistol’s suppressor, his face a mask of stunned, ferocious awe as he stared at Anton.

The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the patter of the mist and Anton’s ragged, sobbing breaths. The fury was draining away, leaving a hollow, shaking void. He looked from the unconscious knifeman to the dead gunman, then finally to Sabatine. The reality of what he had just done—the violence, the bone-breaking precision—hit him like a physical blow. He swayed.

Sabatine was at his side in an instant, holstering his weapon. He caught Anton before he could fall, his hands firm on his arms. “Anton. Look at me.”

Anton’s gaze was wild, unfocused. “I… I think I killed him.”

“He was going to kill me,” Sabatine said, his voice low and intense. He cupped Anton’s face, forcing him to meet his eyes. “You didn’t kill. You are protected. You saved my life.” His thumb stroked Anton’s cheek, smearing rain and a fleck of the attacker’s blood. “That was… the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

There was no judgement in his eyes. Only a profound, reverent shock. He had seen Anton the CEO, Anton the survivor, Anton the strategist. Now he had seen Anton the warrior, unleashed by love.

The trembling in Anton’s body began to subside, replaced by a deep, bone-numbing cold. The adrenaline was gone, leaving him raw. “The knife… it was at your throat.”

“I know.” Sabatine pulled him into a tight, brief embrace, heedless of their wounds, of the bodies around them. It was a transfer of warmth, of grounding reality. “It’s not there anymore. Because of you.”

He broke the embrace, his eyes scanning the plaza. The sounds of the city were beginning to intrude again—a distant siren, a dog barking. They had to move. This scene was a beacon.

“Can you walk?” Sabatine asked, his voice all business again, but with a new, soft undertone.

Anton nodded, swallowing hard. He could still feel the phantom pressure of the knifeman’s wrist in his hand, the crunch of bone. He flexed his fingers.

Sabatine quickly frisked the unconscious knifeman, taking a spare magazine and a set of keys. He didn’t touch the dead gunman. Then he guided Anton away from the plaza, into the maze of streets leading towards the shining spike of the Tour Genève.

As they walked, Anton’s shock began to crystallize into a new understanding. He had crossed a line tonight. He had discovered a capacity for violence within himself that was both horrifying and, in this context, necessary. He had looked into the abyss of loss and had responded not with despair, but with an obliterating rage.

He glanced at Sabatine, walking steadily beside him, a living testament to why that line had to be crossed. The knife had been at Sabatine’s throat. And Anton Rogers had reached out and shattered the hand that held it.

He was no longer just a man trying to survive. He was a man who would burn the world to save the one he loved. And that, he realized as they melted into the grey dawn, made him more dangerous than Elias Kaine could possibly imagine.

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