Anthony fired four rapid rounds through the outer wall, the Walther P99's sixteen-round magazine laying down a devastating curtain of suppressive fire.
Under Anthony's pressure from below, John seized the opening and struck.
He pressed the P30L's suppressor directly against a gap in the floorboards.
Puff-puff.
Two rounds punched through the floor slab. The sharp, wet crack of bone detonating and a choked scream erupted from downstairs almost simultaneously.
An assassin lunged from the darkness of the hallway. John executed a seamless combat roll, tracking the target's center mass and firing from the center axis the moment his knee hit the floor.
Three rounds, arranged in a tight inverted triangle, stitched across the man's chest and abdomen. The muffled, wet sound of a liver and lung cavity collapsing under hydrostatic shock was distinctly audible beneath the bulletproof vest. The ceramic insert cracked but held; the man's organs did not.
The last surviving assassin closed the distance to arm's reach, driving a hard forearm strike toward John's throat.
John deflected the strike, caught the wrist, and applied a brutal twisting joint lock.
The moment the Glock 26 was kicked free from his grip, John's right hand drew the Ka-Bar Tanto serrated blade in a single fluid motion, driving it upward from beneath the jaw.
The blade's tip punched through the soft palate and penetrated the brainstem. The man was dead before his knees buckled.
The house went completely silent.
Anthony finished clearing the last two contacts on the ground floor, collected a heavy travel bag he had pre-staged by the rear door, and climbed the stairs.
John was sitting on the floor at the top of the landing, his back against the wall, chest heaving. His white dress shirt was drenched through with a mixture of blood and sweat.
He didn't look up at Anthony. He reached down and methodically extracted a long shard of glass embedded in his left side, preparing to tear a strip from his shirt to use as a field dressing.
Anthony immediately caught his wrist. He pulled a small pouch from his jacket pocket, shook a measured dose of sulfa hemostatic powder directly into the open wound, followed it with a precise application of medical adhesive gel, and finished by applying firm compression with a pre-cut bandage strip.
John looked up then, his gaze falling on the travel bag sitting by Anthony's feet. "You came prepared."
Anthony offered a thin smile. "I treat every environment I enter as a potential battlefield."
He nudged the bag with his boot. "I'm running on essentially zero income right now. Since you certainly wouldn't want their weapons anyway, I picked them up."
John didn't respond. He said nothing for a long moment.
"John, I know you could have handled these men alone." Anthony sat down against the wall beside him and lit two cigarettes from a battered lighter. "But you're sitting here panting after a twelve-man hit squad. You have to admit, you've got some rust to shake off."
John glanced sideways at the cigarette being offered to his lips. He frowned slightly, as if debating refusing it out of pure stubbornness.
He took it anyway.
He pressed the P30L's magazine against his thigh, methodically loading fresh rounds, drawing a long pull of smoke between each round.
Then he suddenly bent forward and coughed violently, a deep, rattling convulsion that produced a mouthful of blood and a broken fragment of molar tooth.
When the coughing subsided, he tapped the next round into the magazine without missing a beat.
"You used Helen to deliberately get close to me," John said quietly. It wasn't quite a question.
The beagle's name was Helen.
The nameplate engraved with daisies.
Viggo's illegitimate son, who just happened to live two kilometers away.
John simply could not accept that this many coincidences could accumulate around a single person. There were too many threads pulled together too neatly.
Everything about their introduction—the dogs, the collar, the name, the daisies—had the structural logic of a premeditated approach.
"Before yesterday, I had no way of knowing who you were," Anthony said smoothly, keeping his face completely neutral. "It was Helen who pulled toward your yard."
Anthony deliberately avoided saying Daisy's name. The omission was pointed, and it left a small, quiet weight in the air.
John turned his head, studying Anthony's profile. The room was too dark to read his expression clearly.
He had quietly run a background check on Anthony over the past forty-eight hours. The information matched: the man genuinely had only been discharged and back in the country for a week. It was plausible he hadn't yet heard about John Wick through the underworld grapevine.
However, according to the intelligence John had obtained from his network, Anthony was supposed to have died from Iosef's poisoning. The fact that he was alive and functional was a significant anomaly. Whether that was connected to Viggo's orchestration remained unclear.
"Why did you help me tonight?" John set the freshly loaded P30L aside. "It was your own father who put a hit on me."
Anthony lay back flat on the floor, folding his arms under his head like a pillow, staring at the blood-splattered ceiling. "Iosef burned my mother alive. I intend to dismantle the Tarasov syndicate. That's my entire agenda."
"Ha." John released a low, cold exhale of laughter. "Do you understand what the Tarasov syndicate actually represents in New York?"
Anthony understood it perfectly.
The Tarasov family was a mid-level enforcement arm operating directly beneath the High Table. If the High Table was the Pope of the assassin world, then Viggo Tarasov was a regional cardinal—holding genuine local authority, but ultimately bowing to a power structure so far above him he couldn't comprehend its ceiling.
Viggo's fatal error in the original timeline had been his unilateral decision to place a bounty on John's head, which violated the High Table's strict neutrality protocols governing Continental property and neutral ground. The High Table didn't intervene during John's rampage through the Tarasov empire. That wasn't an inability to stop John; it was deliberate, tacit approval. The High Table was using John as a scalpel to remove a disobedient pawn.
"I don't know, and I don't particularly care," Anthony said cheerfully. "Whether you kill Iosef or not, I'm going to kill him myself. That's non-negotiable."
A wash of red and blue light strobed through the front curtains. The doorbell chimed simultaneously.
John slowly rose to his feet and made his way downstairs. Anthony followed him down.
John opened the front door. Two uniformed NYPD patrol officers stood on the porch, rain-dampened and unhurried.
It was immediately obvious they knew John personally. One glance through the doorway at the vaguely visible corpse in the hallway and the overwhelming smell of blood, and neither officer's expression changed by a single degree.
"You're back in business?" one of the officers asked neutrally.
"No," John replied with his characteristic calm. "I just finished handling some personal matters."
"Understood." The officer paused for a moment of professional silence. "Good night, John."
The officer's eyes shifted as Anthony appeared from behind John's shoulder. His expression flickered with genuine, involuntary surprise.
"Lieutenant Tarasov? You're here too?"
Anthony recognized both officers instantly. Officer Jimmy Simmons and Officer Nils O'Connor—the same two men who had taken his statement in the hospital after the stabbing incident.
"Good morning, Officers," Anthony said with effortless, casual ease. "You can drop the Lieutenant. Anthony works."
Jimmy's gaze shuttled back and forth between the two men's faces for several seconds, visibly struggling to construct a coherent explanation for how these two individuals ended up in the same house surrounded by a dozen dead Bratva assassins.
He apparently decided no satisfactory explanation existed.
"Alright then. Anthony." Jimmy shrugged, professionally. "Have a good morning."
As the patrol car pulled away, John stepped back inside and turned to look at Anthony.
"Are you using me?" He asked it directly, his gray eyes searching.
Anthony laughed openly. "What are you basing that on? I was just saying hello to old acquaintances."
"Anthony," John said, his voice dropping to a low warning, "this path is extremely dangerous. You should leave now. I'll handle the cleanup."
Anthony walked out onto the porch, stopping in the doorway as John reached for the handle to close it.
"Two things, John." Anthony turned but didn't step back inside. "One: being Viggo's son means the two officers in that patrol car are going to stay loyal to me. You don't need to spend any political capital managing them. Two: I am going to kill Iosef personally. That is my kill to make."
He paused, then added, "One more thing. Viggo has placed a substantial bounty on your head. When you go to the Continental to cash coins for intelligence, watch your back around a woman named Ms. Perkins."
He turned and walked away into the early morning without looking back.
He knew John was going to call the Cleaners. There was nothing more to do here tonight.
Behind him, John stood in the dark doorway, his gray eyes fixed on Anthony's retreating silhouette, an expression of quiet, unsettled bewilderment on his scarred face.
He couldn't understand how a man who had only been back from Afghanistan for a single week seemed to know far more about the New York underworld's moving pieces than any person in his position logically should.
John didn't ask. He quietly closed the door.
He had a visit to the Continental to plan.
Iosef had vanished into the city's criminal infrastructure, and only the Continental's intelligence network had the resources to track a Tarasov heir in hiding.
As for Ms. Perkins...
John let out a quiet, measured exhale through his nose.
Who would dare to break the Continental's strict code of neutrality by taking a contract inside the hotel?
The rules were absolute.
Anthony walked home as the sun began burning off the last of the storm clouds. He took a scalding shower, dropped into bed, and slept for five hours with the focused, guilt-free efficiency of a soldier.
When he woke up, he unzipped the travel bag on the kitchen table and took full inventory.
The Bratva hit squad had carried Glock 17s almost universally. The standard police-issue variant chambered in 9x19mm Parabellum, with factory magazines running seventeen rounds and extended variants pushing nineteen. All were in clean operational condition.
Anthony counted six Glock 17s and over a dozen loaded magazines.
He field-stripped each pistol, checked the barrels and receivers for damage, re-lubricated the slides, and reassembled them in silence. A modest but genuinely useful arsenal.
Helen padded out from her crate in the corner, circling his legs and making soft, curious sounds. She poked her wet nose repeatedly at the pistols laid across the table, sniffing at the residual scent of burnt cordite and gun oil.
After breakfast, Anthony clipped Helen's leash to her collar and took her out for their morning walk.
When they reached John's house, the gate was latched shut. The garage was empty. The curtains were drawn.
Helen poked her nose through the fence slats and called out several times, her tail wagging expectantly, waiting for an answering bark from inside the house.
The yard remained silent.
John had already left for the Continental.
Helen nuzzled against Anthony's ankle, tugging slightly at the leash, asking to be let in to look for her friend.
Anthony crouched down slowly. He wrapped one hand around the small dog's warm, squirming body, and gently held her still.
He stared at Daisy's small, empty yard and let out a long, heavy sigh.
"I'm sorry, Helen," he said quietly.