“I came prepared,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
We drove in silence for a while, and I let myself absorb what had happened. I’d killed a man. Two men, technically, though the second one felt more like mercy than murder. I’d made a choice that would reverberate through the rest of my life. And somehow, impossibly, it felt right.
“Rafael’s going to want answers,” Drew said finally. “About what happened in that warehouse.”
“He already knows,” I replied. “Or he will by morning. Kirill was tracking me the entire time. Everything we did, everything that happened—they’ll know.”
Drew nodded slowly, and I could see him processing the reality of our situation. We’d killed a federal agent, albeit a dirty one. We’d left bodies in an abandoned warehouse. We’d stepped over a line that couldn’t be uncrossed.
“Are you afraid?” I asked him.
“Terrified,” he admitted. “Are you?”
I thought about it honestly. I thought about what being afraid meant anymore. I thought about how fear had ruled my life for so long—fear of losing my job, fear of being discovered, fear of what I might become if I let myself feel too much. And then I thought about the moment I’d pulled that trigger, the moment I’d chosen Drew over everything else, and I realized that fear didn’t matter anymore.
“No,” I said. “I’m not afraid.”
Drew reached over and took my hand, threading our fingers together the way we had in his car after the warehouse. But this time felt different. This time, our hands weren’ttentatively seeking connection. They were a promise. An anchor. A declaration that we were in this together, whatever came next.
“I love you,” he said, and it was the first time he’d said it without anger or passion or any qualifier at all. Just the truth, stark and simple. “I need you to know that. Not because you saved my life tonight, though you did. But because you’re the only real thing I’ve ever had. The only thing worth fighting for.”
I felt my throat tighten, felt tears threatening again, but I held them back. I’d cried enough tonight. What I needed now was to feel this moment, to let it settle into my bones.
“I love you too,” I said. “I have for a long time. I was just afraid to admit it.”
We drove through Chicago, through the city that had become our territory, our home. Outside the warehouse, I could see them—the Kamarov forces Rafael had assembled. Dark figures moving with the precision of men who’d done this a thousand times before. They were there to clean up the mess. To erase the evidence. To make sure that when morning came, it would be like none of this had ever happened.
But we would remember.
I would remember the weight of the gun in my hand. I would remember the look on Vance’s face when he realized that his revenge had been undone by the very weapon he’d tried to forge. I would remember the moment I chose Drew over everything—over justice, over answers, over the comfortable lie that I was different from the people who surrounded me.
I wasn’t different. I was a Kamarov now, in the only way that mattered. Not by blood or paperwork, but by choice. By the willingness to do what needed to be done. By the refusal to let anyone take what was mine.
And Drew was mine. Our child was mine. Our future was mine.
As we pulled into the driveway of Drew’s house, as he helped me out of the car and walked me inside, I made a silent promise to myself. I would never apologize for what I’d become. I would never regret the choice I’d made. Because sometimes love requires you to become a killer. Sometimes survival demands that you shed your humanity like an old skin and emerge as something harder, sharper, more lethal.
I’d killed Vance Donovan tonight.
But I’d also saved the only man I’d ever loved.
And I’d do it again.
Epilogue – Drew
Six Months Later
Six months later, the snow fell like powdered sugar on the pine trees.
The old Kamarov family home nestled in the woods glowed with firelight from within, its rustic wooden walls a stark contrast to the pristine white landscape surrounding it. Russia. Home. A place I’d thought I’d never want to return to, but standing here now, watching smoke curl from the chimney, I understood why my parents had always held this place sacred.
It was where things made sense. Where the noise of the world fell away and left only truth.
I stepped inside, and laughter immediately assaulted me from the kitchen. Damir’s voice, loud and outraged, boomed above everything else.
“You call this flipping?” he was saying, his Russian accent thick with exasperation. “This is not flipping. This is destroying. This is the murder of innocent food.”
I moved toward the kitchen and found my brother standing over a skillet of pelmeni, his massive frame bent at an absurd angle as he attempted some kind of culinary maneuver that looked more like a fighting stance than a cooking technique. Kirill sat on a barstool with a vodka in his hand, his blue eyes bright with amusement as he watched the catastrophe unfold.
