"Since you got yourself suspended from school, I had to come to your house every single day after my own classes to tutor you," Winnie said, pulling Helen—who was happily inhaling her pumpkin puree—up onto her lap.
"My mother genuinely thought I was secretly dating someone. She almost locked me in my room."
Anthony listened quietly, his spoon moving slowly through his borscht, a soft, warm smile playing at the corner of his bruised mouth.
"And you, you absolute idiot, you used every single one of my study notebooks as a sketchpad. Guns. Detailed anatomical diagrams of guns. And little fat pigs lying on their bellies sunbathing on the margins of my calculus notes."
The two of them shared a brief, mutual smile.
And then a quiet, comfortable silence settled between them, broken only by the gentle rhythm of Anthony's spoon tapping the side of the thermos.
Winnie watched him eat with the single-minded intensity of a man who hadn't had a proper meal in days, her expression complicated—somewhere between exasperated tenderness and deep, unspoken worry.
She reached over and grabbed the empty humidifier bucket from behind the sofa, her posture snapping back to business.
"I am completely done with making a forty-minute detour across Manhattan to play food delivery driver for you." She set the bucket down with a decisive thud. "Report to my company's New York office next Monday morning."
"I need a personal driver and security escort. The weekly salary is three thousand dollars, with full medical insurance. Stick with me for ten years, and there's a pension waiting for you at the end of it." She crossed her arms. "At the bare minimum, it is a legitimate, legal job. Something you apparently have no experience with."
"Thank you, Winnie. I genuinely mean that." Anthony set his spoon down slowly, shaking his head. "But I can't accept it. Not right now."
Her brow furrowed immediately. "Why? You would sincerely rather get stabbed in alleyways than have a steady income?"
"This isn't about the work." Anthony pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and wiped his mouth. "I have some things I need to finish. When those things are done, I will genuinely think about your offer. I just can't accept anyone's generosity right now."
"Anthony, is there something you're not telling me?" Winnie's voice rose slightly with urgency, her blue eyes narrowing. "You are doing it again. Locking yourself inside that private little world that only exists in your head. You did it all through high school, and apparently eight years in the military did absolutely nothing to fix it."
She clicked her tongue. "You know what? Sometimes I think you are genuinely no different from your delinquent brother."
"Winnie," Anthony said quietly, his tone shifting, something serious and unguarded surfacing beneath the easy smile. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag. "If the day comes when you find out I'm even more of a monster than I was in high school..."
"The juvenile detention center can't hold you now. It'll go straight to federal prison," Winnie snapped, cutting him off without a shred of hesitation or mercy.
She stood up, pulling her cashmere coat belt tight with sharp, precise fingers.
"Final warning, Anthony Tarasov."
"If I hear anything dangerous, illegal, or explosively stupid about you in the near future..." She leveled a fierce, pointed look at him over her shoulder.
"I freeze that credit card."
She reached down and gave Helen one last, gentle scratch behind the ears. Then she picked up her bag, walked through the front door, and got into her car without once looking back.
The sound of her engine faded down the street.
The insulated catering box sat steaming quietly on the coffee table, the rich smell of rosemary and roasted chicken filling the small, dusty room.
Anthony leaned forward and lifted the bottom tier of the food container, where the baked spinach gratin was nestled.
Tucked against the porcelain dish was a small, yellow sticky note.
The handwriting was sharp and aggressive, the letters pressed so hard into the paper they nearly tore through the back.
"The school nurse always said injured people need iron supplements. Don't you dare die, you absolute bastard."
Anthony stared at the note for a long moment, a quiet, private smile spreading slowly across his battered face.
He understood what it meant.
Winnie had absorbed the events of the past several days. She had pieced together at least the broad strokes. She knew, on some level, that what they were dealing with was not a simple mugging.
And yet she had still chosen to come.
She had offered him a job as her driver—a clean, legitimate cover that would have kept him close and kept him safe.
That offer wasn't just out of high school nostalgia or a sense of duty to an old classmate. It was, at least in part, an acknowledgment of the blurry, unspoken thing that had passed between them in that hotel room. She might have claimed amnesia, but her instincts remembered.
Otherwise, a woman with the Pritzker family's reputation would never have dropped a full day of executive responsibilities to drive across Manhattan with a box of homemade borscht for a broke, wounded veteran she barely saw twice a year.
Anthony closed the insulated box carefully.
He wasn't hungry anymore. His chest still ached too much to eat.
He slowly crossed to his bed and lay down, pulling the thin quilt up over his bruised ribs.
It was the middle of the afternoon and broad daylight, but the constant, grinding chest pain made genuine sleep elusive.
Anthony closed his eyes and reviewed the potential consequences of having killed Perkins.
Ms. Perkins held official High Table certification. She was not a Bratva freelancer or a street-level thug. She was an asset of the global assassination hierarchy.
Even if John chose to keep silent about her attack on him in the Continental—which, knowing John, he very well might, since he technically violated the rules himself by subduing rather than reporting her—the breach of Continental neutrality could not realistically be kept quiet forever.
Eventually, Winston would launch an investigation.
The problem was simple and deeply dangerous: before the High Table formally stripped Perkins of her membership, Anthony's killing of her was legally, by the High Table's own rules, an unauthorized assassination of a sitting member.
It was a lynching.
And committing a lynching against a High Table member was functionally equivalent to spitting in the High Table's face.
If discovered, the consequences would be catastrophically severe.
But the upside was real.
Perkins's death—whether it triggered a sense of urgency in Marcus, or accelerated Viggo's paranoid unraveling—would compress the timeline of the final confrontation.
That was precisely why Anthony had wanted Perkins dead.
After Iosef's death, John's motivation for revenge had evaporated. His war against Viggo was officially over. Left to his own devices, John might very well choose to simply walk away from New York entirely—away from the memories, away from the underworld, to grieve somewhere quiet and cold.
In the original timeline, it was Marcus's torture and murder at Viggo's hands that reignited John's killing rage and drove the film's final act.
Anthony needed that fire to be lit again.
Thinking through the angles, Anthony drifted into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Across the city, inside a Continental Hotel suite, John Wick stared at his burner phone as the line disconnected.
Perkins informed Viggo. Marcus is in danger. Old Pier, 14th Street, Queens. Warehouse B7.
John held the phone, quiet and still.
He turned Anthony's warning over in his mind with cool, tactical precision.
Marcus himself had warned John that Viggo's two-million-dollar open bounty was specifically designed to attract only one assassin capable of carrying out the contract.
John had understood. Only Marcus could get close enough. Viggo was counting on that.
John was also deeply skeptical of the phone call.
Under the High Table's protocols, punishing or executing a sanctioned assassin required a formal ruling. Viggo taking extrajudicial action against Marcus would be a massive violation of the High Table's core authority—the kind of provocation the High Table did not forgive.
Viggo was the High Table's regional enforcer. He could not possibly be ignorant of that line.
John frowned, hesitated for two seconds, and dialed Marcus's private number.
The line rang three times.
Then it connected.
But the voice that answered was not his old friend's.
"Ah, John." Viggo's voice, warm with false pleasantries and tinged with a heavy Russian accent, filled the receiver. "Your dear old friend would very much like to say goodbye. Shall I put him on?"
From somewhere in the background, through what sounded like a concrete wall, came a familiar voice, low, strained, and tightly controlled.
"John." Marcus's voice was thickened with pain. "Don't. It's a trap. Don't come."
John's stomach turned to stone.
"He is bleeding quite badly, Jonathan," Viggo said, his tone shifting to quiet, savoring cruelty. "You understand, I hope. Family is family. A man must avenge what's been taken from him."
A pause.
"The old dock. Come alone."
The line went dead.
"Oh, and Jonathan?" Viggo's voice crept back one final time, almost as an afterthought. "When you come to collect Marcus's body... do try to bring flowers."
John slowly set the phone down onto the bedside table, his expression neither angry nor shocked.
Only cold.
"Winston," John said without raising his voice, without turning his head.
Winston Scott sat in the armchair by the window, his cigar resting between two fingers, a delicate coil of smoke rising into the suite's warm air. He paused, letting the smoke drift into a gray, questioning spiral.
"Rules are rules, John," Winston began carefully. "The High Table has already delivered a formal silence order to Viggo. If he violates that directive again, the consequences for him will be..."
"The rules cannot save Marcus tonight," John said flatly. He stood up and lifted the black tactical trench coat from the back of the chair, shrugging it over his holster. "Viggo has stopped caring about consequences."
"John." Winston's voice dropped an octave. "Iosef was killed by Anthony Tarasov. Not by you. He has been using you as a pawn from the very beginning. Every move he has made has been calculated."
"Remember, Winston," John replied, pulling the trench coat closed and pocketing the room key, "it no longer matters. It's finished."
He considered it for a moment, then added, in a tone that carried the faintest hint of something approaching respect,
"And he didn't truly take advantage of me. He simply made use of a convenient opportunity that was already there."
John pressed the elevator button.
The heavy brass doors slid apart.
He stepped inside.
Winston's long, slow sigh of a man who has watched far too many good people walk toward their own destruction was swallowed by the smooth, mechanical hiss of the doors closing between them.
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