She nodded, and I could see her already planning how the conversation would go. Cassandra didn’t just negotiate—she orchestrated. She mapped out every possible response and prepared for contingencies I hadn’t even considered yet. Rafael was going to either be very impressed or very threatened. Possibly both.
“I’m not going back as his assistant,” she said quietly. “I’ve realized I don’t want to be anyone’s shadow anymore. I’ve been a shadow my whole life—Rafael’s shadow, Vance’s shadow, your shadow for a while there too. But not anymore.”
“What do you want to be?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“His equal,” she said simply. “In every way that matters. Fifty-fifty on operations, fifty-fifty on decisions, fifty-fifty on everything. If he doesn’t like it, I’ll set up independently and watch him realize how much of the organization’s success was built on my work.”
I smiled. This was the woman I’d married. Not the one pretending to be compliant or grateful for the opportunity. The one who understood her own value and refused to let anyone diminish it.
“Did I mention my wife was brilliant?” I asked Damir and Kirill earlier, and the comment seemed even more true now, watching her make these calculations.
She shifted Luka slightly, making sure he was still comfortable. “He’s getting heavy,” she murmured. “I think he’s gaining weight faster than Dr. Volkov predicted.”
“He’s a Kamarov,” I said. “We’re designed to take up space.”
The thought of Luka growing up in this world, in our world, still sometimes terrified me. I wanted to give him everything I’d never had—stability, genuine affection, the knowledge that he was loved for who he was, not what he could do for the family business. But I was also pragmatic enough to know that loving a Kamarov child meant preparing him for the realities of what that name meant.
“Come on,” I said, taking her free hand. “I want to show you something.”
She put Luka in the cot—a process that involved an intricate series of movements designed to avoid waking him, something she’d perfected over countless nights of practice—and followed me outside. The cold hit immediately, that particular Russian cold that felt like ice forming inside your lungs. It was the kind of cold that clarified things. That made you understand why people in warm climates seemed somehow less serious about life.
The treehouse was exactly as I remembered it.
It sat nestled in the branches of an ancient oak, its wooden planks weathered by decades of winter and spring. The rope ladder was still intact, though it looked like it might be questionable in terms of structural integrity. I tested it first before letting Cassandra follow, my hands gripping the knots while I climbed.
“You’re going to get us killed,” she said from below, but she was already reaching for the ladder.
“We’re Bratva,” I replied. “We survive everything.”
“That’s not actually how physics works, Drew.”
But she climbed anyway, and I was there to help her onto the platform, my hands steady as I made sure she had her footing. When we were both settled, the wooden boards creaking slightly under our weight, I felt something settle in my chest.
“I climbed this when I was five years old,” I said, helping her lean against the sturdy trunk. The forest stretched out before us, white and silent and infinite. “Damir swore I’d fall and break my neck. My mother was terrified—she nearly had a heart attack when she found me up here. But my father…. My father said that the only way to understand freedom was to risk falling.”
“Your father was a philosopher disguised as a crime boss,” Cassandra said, leaning her head against my shoulder.
“He was a lot of things,” I agreed. “He was ruthless when he needed to be. But he also understood something that most men in this world miss—that loyalty isn’t built on fear. It’s built on the knowledge that someone would climb a tree with you just to sit in the cold and watch the snow fall.”
We sat there in silence for a while, and I felt her hand find mine. The familiar weight of her palm against my skin, the way her fingers fit between mine like they’d been designed specifically for this purpose.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” she said eventually. “About what Rafael said, about the partnership. I don’t want to just manage operations. I want to eventually take over the whole Chicago arm. Not to compete with Rafael, but to prove that women can run this world just as effectively as men.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve known since you started keeping those detailed records about everything Rafael does wrong.”
She laughed, a real laugh that echoed through the forest. “You weren’t supposed to notice that.”
“I notice everything about you,” I told her. “It’s one of my most annoying traits.”
“It’s one of your most useful traits,” she corrected. “It’s why you’re still alive.”
We talked about Chicago and the changes she wanted to make. About how we’d navigate raising a son in a world of crime and violence. About the nightmares she still had sometimes about the warehouse, though they were fading with each passing month. About the fact that she’d killed a man and didn’t regret it, but she also didn’t want to become someone who killed casually.
“I’m not a monster,” she said at one point, and the vulnerability in her voice broke something in me.
“Neither of us is,” I replied. “We’re just people who’ve done what we needed to do to survive. That doesn’t make us monsters. It makes us human.”
We climbed back down as darkness settled completely, as the Russian night became absolute and all-consuming. Inside the house, the warmth hit like a physical force after the cold outside. Damir and Kirill were still in the kitchen, engaged in what looked like an aggressive debate about the proper technique for making traditional Russian soup.
