Chapter 150: Dirty work

The basement smelled of wet concrete, old rust, and the heavy, copper tang of dried blood.

The man tied to the wooden chair couldn’t keep his head up.

His breathing came in shallow, wet rattles, his chin resting against his chest as blood dripped from his swollen lip onto the front of his torn shirt.

He had been in this room for six hours. Six hours with two of Aaron’s men, and he looked like a doll that had been dropped from a window and put back together wrong.

The heavy Iron door at the top of the stairs creaked open.

Footsteps echoed down the concrete steps... slow, steady, and unhurried.

Aaron Kazarov stepped into the dim light of the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

He wore his tailored charcoal trousers and a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled neatly up to his elbows.

He stopped a few feet away, pulling a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and slowly unbuttoning his cuffs.

His blue eyes, cold and clear as winter ice, swept over the broken figure in the chair without a shred of pity.

Beside the chair, Viktor, a broad-shouldered man with a scar running through his eyebrow, stepped back and lowered his bloody knuckles.

"He’s still stubborn, Boss," Viktor said in a quiet, low voice. "He swears he doesn’t have the ledgers."

Aaron didn’t look at Viktor. He stepped closer, the sharp leather soles of his shoes crunching slightly on the dirt floor.

He reached out, his long fingers gently catching the bound man under the chin and lifting his head up.

The man opened one swollen eye. When he saw Aaron, a raw, instinctual terror flashed across his battered face. He tried to pull back, but the thick ropes held him fast against the wood.

"You made this unnecessarily difficult, Pavel," Aaron said softly. His voice was smooth, relaxed, almost conversational, like a man discussing the weather over morning coffee.

Pavel swallowed hard, a drop of dark blood running down his throat. "I... I don’t have it, Kazarov," he rasped, his voice trembling violently. "I swear on my mother’s grave. I sold the offshore routing codes two weeks ago. I don’t know where the Minister’s files went—"

"You had three opportunities to disappear properly," Aaron interrupted quietly. He let go of Pavel’s chin, taking a slow step back and using his handkerchief to wipe a tiny smudge of red from his thumb. "You chose the fourth."

"Please," Pavel begged, his voice breaking into a high, pitiful whine. "I have a family in Vienna. I can get you the names. I can give you the banks Kian’s people used in Zurich—"

"I didn’t ask about Kian," Aaron said. He folded the handkerchief neatly and tossed it onto a wooden crate nearby. "I asked for the Minister’s physical offshore account keys. The ones you stole from the vault in St. Petersburg before you ran."

Pavel shook his head frantically, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt and blood on his cheeks. "They’re in a safety deposit box! Bank of Cyprus! Key code four-eight-nine-two, registered under my sister’s maiden name! That’s all! That’s everything I have!"

Aaron watched him for three long seconds. He simply absorbed the numbers, storing them away. The Minister needed those accounts buried before the upcoming regional elections, and now the problem was solved. Clean. Simple.

Pavel panted heavily, his chest heaving as he stared up at Aaron with wide, desperate eyes. "I gave it to you... I gave you what you wanted. What happens now?"

Aaron turned his back on him, picking up his dark suit jacket from the back of a clean chair near the door. He slipped his arms into the sleeves, adjusting the shoulders with practiced ease.

"Dispose of him," Aaron said to Viktor as he walked toward the stairs.

"Wait! No! Kazarov, wait! You promised! You said—"

Pavel’s screams were cut off as the heavy iron door slammed shut, locking the sound deep underground.

Aaron walked up the narrow stone hallway, his face entirely serene. He pulled his cuff links from his pocket, smoothly fastening them as he stepped out into the cold, gray afternoon air.

He didn’t care about Pavel. He didn’t care about the man’s family in Vienna, nor did he care about the bloody mess left in that basement.

To Aaron, it was just work. A dirty, necessary chore to keep the political machine in line and ensure the Minister stayed indebted to the Kazarov name.

He reached his black car, where his driver held the door open. Just as Aaron was about to step inside, the phone in his inner jacket pocket began to ring.

He pulled it out and answered. "Speak."

"Mr. Kazarov," a woman’s calm, professional voice came through the speaker. "This is from the private Wing. We are preparing to take Miss Kingston into the operating room now. The doctor requests your presence if you wish to see her before the anesthesia is administered."

The cold, ruthless look in Aaron’s eyes vanished instantly.

It didn’t melt into soft weakness; rather, the sharp, dangerous edge simply retracted, replaced by a quiet, absolute focus.

The basement, the blood, the Minister’s offshore money—all of it dissolved from his mind in a single second.

"Tell her I am five minutes away," Aaron said flatly.

He ended the call, slid the phone away, and looked at his driver. "Hospital. Drive fast."

In the private room on the fourth floor of the hospital, the air was warm, smelling strongly of rubbing alcohol, fresh linens, and faint floral soap.

Isabella sat on the edge of the high hospital bed.

She wore a thin, pale blue surgical gown that felt loose and strange against her skin. Her dark hair was tied back , resting over her shoulder. Nearby, a machine beeped in a steady, slow rhythm, tracking her pulse.

A nurse was quietly wrapping a soft blood pressure cuff around Isabella’s arm. "Just relax for me, dear. Blood pressure is a little elevated, but that’s completely normal."

"Thank you," Isabella whispered.

Her voice sounded smaller than she wanted it to be. She sat very still, her hands resting tightly in her lap, her fingers tangled together so hard her knuckles were white.

Ever since she had lost the light in her eyes, she had lived in a world made entirely of sounds, textures, and scents. She had grown used to the dark. It was a miserable, heavy cage, but it was a cage she understood.

Now, in less than thirty minutes, someone was going to take a scalpel to her eyes.

"Miss Kingston?" a man’s voice spoke from the side. It was the doctor, his tone warm and patient. "The surgical team is ready. We’re just waiting on Mr. Kazarov, as requested. I want to walk you through the first step one more time."

"Okay," Isabella said softly, nodding her head toward his voice.

"Once we take you inside, the anesthesiologist will give you something to help you sleep. You won’t feel anything. The cornea transplant itself takes about two hours. When you wake up, your eyes will be heavily bandaged, and we will keep you in recovery overnight."

Isabella swallowed the dryness in her throat. "And... when the bandages come off?"

"We will test your vision tomorrow morning," Dr. Vance said gently. "We are very optimistic, Isabella. But as we discussed, your optic nerve took trauma during the crash. There is a chance the clarity won’t return immediately, or..." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "...or that the damage is permanent."

The words hung in the sterile air like lead weights.

’Permanent.’

Isabella slowly raised her trembling hand, her fingers floating up until her fingertips lightly brushed the delicate skin beneath her left eye. She touched her eyelids, feeling the soft curve of her brows, tracing the shape of her own nose.

A sudden, strange ache squeezed her chest. She realized, with a quiet shock, that she couldn’t clearly remember what her own face looked like anymore. She remembered Kian’s sharp face. She remembered the color of the sky over the Kingston estate. But her own face had become a blurred ghost in her mind.

What if she woke up, the dark wraps were pulled away, and there was still nothing? Just empty, black glass?

The door to the room swung open with a firm, steady push.

The heavy, distinct sound of custom leather shoes echoed against the tile floor. A scent of cold rain, crisp tobacco, and expensive cedar flooded into the room, cutting right through the sharp hospital smell.

Isabella’s shoulders relaxed instantly, a small breath escaping her lips. "You’re late."

Aaron stopped beside the bed. He didn’t look like a man who had just come from a damp basement with blood on his hands. His hair was perfectly styled, his suit dark and immaculate.

He glanced at his silver wristwatch. "By three minutes."

"That’s late," she murmured, a faint, fragile smile touching her pale lips.

"Then I will apologize properly when you wake up," Aaron said softly.

He turned his head toward the doctor and the two nurses. He didn’t say a word to them, but the quiet authority radiating off him was enough. The doctor offered a polite nod. "We’ll give you two minutes, Mr. Kazarov."

The medical team stepped out, closing the door quietly behind them.