"THEY'RE AT THE DUMP... I LIVE WITH THEM!" A poor little boy told the millionaire. What he saw next made him feel sick...

The screen flashed with high-definition clarity, revealing the sterile white interior of the private recovery room at St. Luke’s Clinic.

On the screen, Alina and Polina were sitting up in a hospital bed, propped against clean pillows. They were wrapped in warm fleece blankets. Alina was drinking a cup of warm chocolate, her bruised little hands gripping the mug, while Polina was holding her charred, one-eared bunny. Sitting on a stool beside them was Taras, his hair wet and neatly combed, quietly peeling an orange for them.

A collective, deafening gasp ripped through the ballroom.

Several women in the front row brought their hands to their mouths, tears instantly springing to their eyes. The Minister of Infrastructure dropped his program. The room swayed under the sheer weight of impossible revelation.

"Alina? Polina?" Elena’s voice was a mangled screech. Her eyes bulged as she stared at the screen, her carefully manicured fingers clawing at the fabric of her velvet gown. "No... no, that's impossible! Boris said—"

She clamped her mouth shut, but the fatal slip had already echoed through the microphone pinned to Andriy’s lapel.

"Boris said what, Elena?" Andriy asked, stepping closer to her, his shadow towering over her trembling form. "Boris said he threw them in the drainage culvert? Boris said the winter frost would finish them off so you wouldn't have their blood on your manicured hands?"

Vadim moved like lightning.

Realizing the game was shattered beyond repair, he pulled a compact Glock from beneath his tuxedo jacket, aiming it straight at Andriy’s chest. The ballroom exploded into utter pandemonium. Women screamed, men ducked behind tables, overturning crystal flutes and flower arrangements in a mad scramble for the exits.

"Back off!" Vadim roared, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Nobody moves! Elena, get to the back elevator! Now!"

Andriy didn't flinch. He didn't take a single step back. He looked down the barrel of the gun with the cold detachment of a man who had already survived hell.

"Shoot me, Vadim," Andriy said softly. "Go ahead. Kill me in front of the Minister, the Chief Prosecutor, and forty cameras broadcasting this gala across the national news network. Do it. Because if you don't kill me right now, I swear to God you will not leave this city alive."

A red laser dot suddenly danced across Vadim’s forehead. Then another appeared on his chest.

From the upper mezzanine of the ballroom, tactical snipers from the State Special Operations Division racked their bolts in unison—a sharp, metallic chorus that echoed like thunder through the cavernous space.

"Drop the weapon, Chernov!" a voice bellowed through a megaphone from the mezzanine. "State Security Service! Drop the weapon or be neutralized!"

Vadim's hand shook. The sweat was pouring down his temples, stinging his eyes. He looked around the room—at the screaming elite, at the red dots painting his body, at the cold, unyielding eyes of Andriy Bondarenko.

With a guttural curse of defeat, Vadim let the Glock slip from his fingers. It clattered loudly against the marble floor.

Elena sank to her knees, sobbing hysterically into her hands, the hem of her emerald gown dragging through spilled champagne and shattered glass. "Andriy, please! It was Vadim! He forced me! He told me we were drowning in debt! He said you wouldn't notice if Sofia's shares were moved! Please, Andriy, I loved you! I loved the girls!"

Andriy looked down at the woman who had hugged his daughters while planning their slow, agonizing deaths in the dark.

"You left two seven-year-old children to freeze to death in a pile of garbage," Andriy whispered, his voice devoid of any pity, any humanity, any trace of the man who had once considered marrying her. "You are not a human being, Elena. You are a cancer. And today, you are being cut out."