Chapter 235: Sabatine’s Fury

Dawn bled across Lake Geneva, a wash of bruised violet and sickly yellow that did nothing to warm the world. They knelt on the jetty stones, two shivering, bleeding creatures hauled from the deep, clinging to each other as if the lake itself might rise to reclaim them. The Banque Lombard groaned and sighed behind them, a dying beast bleeding water and smoke into the mist.

Sabatine’s assessment was swift, clinical, driven by a cold, clean fury that burned away the last of his shock. Anton was alive, but pale as parchment, his breath coming in shallow, pained hitches. The graze on his ribs was superficial, but the loss of blood, the cold, the relentless trauma—it was a tally adding up to collapse.

“Can you stand?” Sabatine’s voice was gravel, scraped raw by smoke and lake water.

Anton nodded, a stiff, unconvincing motion. With Sabatine’s help, he lurched to his feet, swaying. His eyes, though clouded with pain, scanned the mist-shrouded grounds, the empty moorings. “Kaine.”

The name was a spark on tinder. Sabatine’s own exhaustion, the ache in his bones, the pounding in his head from the falling debris—all of it vanished, incinerated by a rage so profound it felt like a separate entity living in his chest. This ghost had tried to erase Anton. Had tried to buy him, break him, bury him. Had separated them in a drowning dark. Had turned a night of survival into a scorched-earth campaign against the man he loved.

The cold pragmatist was gone. In his place was the storm given flesh.

“He’ll have gone to ground,” Sabatine said, his eyes like chips of flint scanning the tree line, the boathouse, the distant, dark shape of the Rothschild mansion. “But not far. He lost his boat, his fortress. His options are shrinking to zero. He’ll have a final contingency. A car. A hidden safe room on the estate. He’ll be moving to it now.”

He didn’t wait for Anton’s agreement. He simply turned, an arrow knocked and aimed, and began to move inland, away from the water’s edge, following the freshest scuff marks on the dew-wet grass. Anton, leaning heavily on him, matched his pace, a silent partner in the hunt.

The estate was a silent, sprawling maze of manicured hedges, skeletal winter roses, and gravel paths. The mist curled around ancient oaks, perfect cover. Sabatine moved not with stealth, but with a predator’s directness, his senses expanded to encompass every rustle of leaf, every drip of water. He was a blade drawn, and he would cut until he found his target.

They found the first one near the old greenhouse—a lone sentry, looking nervously back toward the burning bank, a compact radio in his hand. He was young, jumpy. One of Kaine’s perimeter cleaners, left behind.

Sabatine didn’t break stride. As the man turned, opening his mouth to shout a warning, Sabatine was on him. There was no elegant disarm, no silent takedown. Sabatine’s arm shot out, his hand clamping over the man’s mouth and nose, his other arm wrapping around his neck in a brutal chokehold. He drove his knee into the man’s spine, bending him backwards. The radio clattered to the gravel. The man struggled, a frantic, gagging dance, his boots scraping. Sabatine held him, his own face a mask of implacable fury, until the struggles weakened, then ceased. He let the body drop, a sack of useless meat.

He didn’t look back at Anton. He picked up the radio, listened to the static for a second, then crushed it under his boot.

They moved on.

The next two were together, guarding a service entrance to the mansion’s west wing. They were more professional, standing alert, weapons held at the ready. They saw Sabatine coming out of the mist, a grim spectre with a half-conscious man leaning on him, and their weapons came up.

“Halt! Identify—”

Sabatine didn’t halt. He shoved Anton behind the cover of a stone urn and moved.

He didn’t have a gun. He’d lost his in the flood. He had his hands, his boots, and the fury.

He closed the distance in a blur. The first guard fired. The shot went wide, punching a hole in the mist. Sabatine was inside his guard before he could fire again. He grabbed the weapon’s barrel, wrenched it upward, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. Cartilage crunched. As the man stumbled back, blinded, Sabatine ripped the weapon from his grasp, reversed it, and slammed the stock into the side of his head.

The second guard was firing now, a staccato burst. Bullets chewed into the gravel at Sabatine’s feet, splintered the stone urn behind Anton. Sabatine dove into a roll, coming up behind a low boxwood hedge. The guard advanced, firing in controlled bursts, methodically clearing his field of fire.

Sabatine waited. He counted the shots. The rhythm. As the guard paused to reload, Sabatine erupted from the hedge.

He didn’t have the range for the rifle he’d taken. He threw it like a javelin. It wasn’t meant to hit; it was a distraction. The guard flinched, batting it aside.

That half-second was all Sabatine needed.

He covered the last five feet in a flying tackle, driving the guard to the ground. They grappled in the wet gravel. The guard was strong, well-trained. He got an arm around Sabatine’s throat. Sabatine drove his elbow back, again and again, into the man’s ribs. He felt something give. The grip loosened. Sabatine twisted, broke free, and scrambled on top of him.

He didn’t throw a punch. He didn’t need to. He saw the man’s own combat knife sheathed at his hip. Sabatine ripped it free and, in one continuous, savage motion, plunged it to the hilt into the guard’s throat.

A wet, gurgling sigh. The struggle ended.

Sabatine knelt on the gravel, breathing hard, the guard’s blood warm on his hands. He looked up, his eyes finding Anton, who had witnessed the entire brutal, efficient slaughter. There was no horror in Anton’s gaze. Only a grim, exhausted acceptance. This was the currency of their survival now. This was the cost of their ‘after.’

Sabatine stood, wiping the knife clean on the dead man’s jacket. He took the man’s sidearm, checked the magazine, and tucked it into his belt. He retrieved the first guard’s weapon as well.

He walked back to Anton, offering an arm. Anton took it, his grip weak but determined.

“He’s in the house,” Sabatine said, his voice utterly flat. “Clearing his last path. We will finish it there.”

They approached the service entrance. The door was ajar. Sabatine went first, a shadow with guns, clearing the narrow, tiled corridor beyond. It was a servants’ passage, smelling of old polish and damp. They could hear noises ahead—hurried footsteps, a door slamming, the sound of something heavy being dragged.

Sabatine’s fury was a silent engine now, propelling him forward. He kicked open a swinging door into a large, old-fashioned kitchen. A man in a suit—not a guard, but a harried-looking aide—was frantically stuffing files into a burn bag. He looked up, his eyes widening.

Sabatine shot him in the leg. Not to kill. To stop. The man screamed, collapsing.

“Where?” Sabatine asked, the single word ice.

The aide clutched his bleeding thigh, tears of pain and terror in his eyes. “East wing… the old study… he’s taking the car from the stables…”

Sabatine left him there and moved on, a force of nature carving a path through the last remnants of Kaine’s world. They encountered no more resistance. The security detail was gone, cut down or fled. The mansion was a hollow shell, its opulent rooms empty, its silence accusing.

They reached a grand, wood-panelled study overlooking the misty lake. French doors stood open to a terrace. And there, in the centre of the room, a single, expensive leather briefcase sat open on a desk. It was empty.

Kaine was gone.

But he’d left in a hurry. A satellite phone lay smashed on the floor. A map was half-shredded in a wastebasket. And on the desk, beside the briefcase, was a small, familiar silver foil envelope.

Sabatine picked it up. It was empty, but the message had been delivered. A final, mocking signature.

The fury in Sabatine crested, a wave with no shore to crash upon. He had cut his way through the flesh and bone of Kaine’s protection, only to find the ghost had slipped away again. He wanted to roar, to break the elegant furniture, to tear the room apart.

A hand settled on his arm. Anton’s. His touch was gentle, grounding. “He’s running,” Anton said, his voice thin but clear. “You broke everything he had. He’s just a man in a suit now, with a car and nowhere to go.”

Sabatine looked at him, at the quiet certainty in his exhausted eyes. The storm within him didn’t abate, but it changed direction. It was no longer a blind rage seeking destruction. It was a focused, relentless purpose.

Kaine was running. And Sabatine would hunt him. Not as a protector, not as a strategist, but as an instrument of perfect, final vengeance. The fury would fuel him until the job was done.

He crumpled the silver envelope in his fist and let it fall.

“Then let’s go find a man with nowhere to go,” Sabatine said, and together, they walked out onto the terrace, into the cold grey dawn, the hunters once more.

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