Betray. Survive. Betray.

A hard-edged crime and political thriller based on real events: a case every news outlet shouted about, then fell silent on, in unison and for good.

A daughter's wounded honour. Olympic money transfers. The construction project of the century in Gelendzhik. The Dresden and Stasi archives of 1989. A truth buried after the failed coup of August 1991. All of it converges on a single highway.

One stamp on the brakes. A banker's bodyguards beat up a stranger, and the banker doesn't even look to see who. But the man in the other car is the son-in-law of someone whose name is never spoken aloud. A trivial road incident sets the machinery of the state in motion, and it grinds up everything, from bank accounts to human lives.

Names, motives and consequences are the author's own interpretation.

1986–2005. From the mountain villages of Surkhandarya to the cells of Guantánamo.

He survived the Afghan inferno by changing his name and his faith. His brother became a senator, building a brilliant career on the myth of his heroic death. Their neighbour turned double agent, selling lives at the dollar rate. And a young KGB officer, sworn to fight evil, raised an empire of corruption on the bones of yesterday's comrades.

For twenty years one great lie bound their fates together. Then the fallen hero comes home from an American prison, a living witness to other men's crimes, and the old world collapses. The rules of the Great Game change, and yesterday's allies become the most dangerous targets.

In a world where morality has been worn away by Afghan dust and the cold of interrogation rooms, one law remains: to survive is to betray. The winner will not be the strongest, but the one who betrays first.

What is left of a man when there is no one left to betray?

Late 2008. Rustem, the former restaurant owner from Termez readers met in book one, has built an empire with two faces. By day his tankers haul fuel into Afghanistan, protected by Aziz, a counterintelligence major in the national security service who acts with his chief's blessing and asks no questions. By night the same tankers roll back “empty”, loaded with drugs for Atilla's crime syndicate.

The money has to sit somewhere. Opening an account at ABLV, a bank in Riga, Rustem meets Karina, the banker they call the Snow Queen. At first he tries to buy her. Then she falls for him on her own.

The scheme is ready. Only one thing is missing: the supplier's blessing. Zarif survived the purge in Waziristan and went on to work for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, who pinned the attempt on Benazir Bhutto's life on him. When the attack in Karachi failed, he eliminated his handlers, fled to Badakhshan and took over its drug cartel. Now he wants to look Rustem in the eye. In person. In Faizabad.

Saying no is not an option. Atilla has already spelled out the terms: if it goes wrong, Rustem pays with his life, but his loved ones will be left alone. A gangster's word of honour.

But the deadliest threat is at home. President Karimov is furious: his sworn enemy Tohir Yuldash is still alive. The foreign intelligence directorate of the national security service is ordered to find him and hand him to the Afghan government, and through them to the Americans, so it starts calling in every agent with Afghan connections. That includes Rustem, an off-the-books asset and their key to Badakhshan. Counterintelligence realises that if their colleagues start asking questions, he could say far too much. So they decide to burn him first.

Rustem sends Karina's mother to Dubai, leaves Karina his unlimited card, and flies to a place not everyone comes back from. Caught between a drug lord, a crime boss and his own country's security services, he has no guards and no allies. Only his calculations, and the love of a woman who is beginning to understand far too much.

In book two of the Betray. Survive. Betray. series, the rule hasn't changed: whoever fails to betray first has already lost.

Autumn, 312. Constantine's army is camped in Etruria, a few days' march from Rome. There is food for six weeks at most, and Maxentius can sit behind the walls of the Eternal City until winter. The legions need a miracle, so Constantine invents one: a prophetic dream, a sign in the sky and a new standard, the Labarum. Only his son Crispus knows the truth. Sometimes, his father tells him with a wry smile, you have to dream up the dreams that other people will believe in.

But a miracle alone won't win a war. Betrayal will. Senator Petronius Annianus and his friends clear Constantine's road to Rome, and at the Milvian Bridge Maxentius's lines break. The Praetorians fight to the last man, and it is young Crispus's daring manoeuvre that saves the day. It is Crispus, too, who grants the fallen emperor a final honour, letting the captured Praetorian prefect give the body to the flames, and Constantine, for all his fury, cannot punish his son for showing mercy.

Rome hails its liberator, then hands him the bill. The people want bread and circuses, the legions want their pay, and the treasury is empty. Only Maxentius's widow, Valeria Maximilla, knows where the gold is hidden, and she has gone to ground in the one place no one would look for an empress: a brothel. Everyone is hunting her. Meanwhile the streets erupt in bloody clashes between Christian legionaries and pagan citizens. The city is on the brink. Once again, Crispus finds a way out. Yet in a city where every face has two sides, like Janus in the emperor's hall, even a promise from Constantine himself may be a lie.

312. Labarum is a fast-paced historical adventure from the Ordo Novus series that peels back the textbook gloss to reveal the debauchery, betrayal and base appetites beneath. Yet even where everything is for sale, there are those who rise above it. In a world like this, honour is the one currency that can't be counterfeited.

Dan Holt is a cynic and an intellectual who, even in panic, watches himself like a scientist watching an experiment fail. Then Nika enters his life — an AI that knows far too much — along with a violet-haired girl no one else can see.

Purple becomes a signal: a system error made visible. Mirrors start answering back. A restaurant inside a black cube, a book on his shelf he never bought, a psychiatrist whose voice he almost recognises.

Simulation, breakdown, or something no rational explanation can hold? The only witness whose testimony can't be dismissed is a Maine Coon named Shah.

She is a luxury lot, an elite escort: €99,900 for three nights. Yet beneath the expensive wrapping a living heart still beats, and within hours she is ready to give herself for free to a man she barely knows.

He is a shady dealmaker who bought women the way he buys crypto. But this particular purchase brings his cynical world crashing down.

Reason screams: it's a trap, run. But feelings are running the show. Love or illusion? A distorted mirror, or magic that hacked the matrix of pragmatism?

Read it, and learn the price of a miracle in a world ruled by numbers.