The room stretches long, shelves lined wall to wall with ledgers. Thousands of pages, meticulously catalogued, written in Gavriil’s neat hand. Years of blackmail, of blood-money trails, of favors traded and bought. Records of every sin the Bratva has committed and every deal the old guard ever made.
It should terrify me, the sheer weight of it. It should tempt me, the power in these shelves could control half of Moscow, a noose tight enough to hang every man in power.
Instead, I feel only disgust.
This is what my father left me. What Igor demanded be kept. What Gavriil safeguarded like a holy relic. Not loyalty. Not strength. Paper chains. Rot given order and ink.
Vivienne steps closer to one of the shelves, her hand brushing across the spine of a ledger. Her eyes are unreadable, her shoulders tense. “This is everything,” she whispers.
I nod once. “It dies here.”
Before she can ask, I pull the matchbox from my coat. My fingers don’t tremble as I strike the match, but my chest feels heavy, the weight of every page pressing down as the flame flickers to life.
I drop it onto the nearest shelf.
The fire catches fast. Pages curl, blackening at the edges, then ignite. The flames race across the ledgers, eating through decades of names, numbers, signatures. Smoke rises thick and acrid, the smell of ink and leather burning into the air.
Vivienne coughs softly, covering her mouth with her sleeve, but her eyes stay fixed on the fire. I step closer, take her hand in mine, gripping it tight as the flames consume the past.
“This part of the empire is gone,” I tell her. My voice is low, but certain. “The chains my father built. The leverage they clung to. The blackmail, the lies… it all burns.”
The fire spreads even faster now, climbing higher, devouring shelves. Heat presses against my skin, beads of sweat forming at my temple, but I don’t let go of her hand.
“The Bratva still stands,” I continue. “Not as it was, but as I will make it. Withyou.”
She turns her head, eyes locking on mine. The firelight flickers in her gaze, reflecting back something fierce and unyielding. Her grip tightens on my hand, and in that moment, the weight of everything—blood, betrayal, vengeance—settles into something else.
Partnership.
We stay until the smoke grows too thick, until Dimitri yells from the stairwell that the flames are climbing too fast. I don’t move until the shelves collapse inward, until I know there’s nothing left but ash.
Only then do I pull her with me, out into the freezing night.
The snow feels clean after the smoke, sharp against my skin, the sky above endless and black. Behind us, the dacha burns, orange light glowing through the windows, fire eating away not just paper but the last remnants of an empire built on lies.
My knuckles are raw, my lungs heavy with smoke, but my chest feels lighter than it has in years.
Vivienne stands beside me, her breath clouding the air, her hair tangled by the wind. She doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t need to. She saw the fire. She held my hand. She knows what it meant.
When the roof finally caves in with a roar, sending sparks into the night, I turn to her.
“This is the end of him,” I say. My father, Igor, Gavriil, all of them.
Her lips part, but she doesn’t answer. Instead, she steps closer, close enough that the heat of her body cuts through the cold. She presses her forehead to mine, her breath trembling, and in the silence I hear everything words can’t say.
The fire behind us spits sparks into the night sky, smoke curling up through the trees like a black prayer. The snow at our feet glows orange with the reflection, a sick kind of halo around the ruin we’ve left behind. My chest heaves, lungs raw from smoke, but the weight pressing on me isn’t exhaustion. It’s her. Always her.
Vivienne stands close, her breath warm against the cold. Her forehead lingers against mine, a silent vow neither of us spoke aloud. The fire is gone from the ledgers, from the paper chains of my father’s empire, but it burns hotter in my veins now. In her eyes. In the space between us.
I don’t think. I don’t plan. I grip her jaw in my hand, rough, pulling her up to me, and crash my mouth against hers.
The kiss isn’t soft. It’s brutal, consuming. My teeth catch her lower lip, her nails dig into my coat, and the taste of smoke and blood fills the heat of it. She shoves back against me, fierce, her tongue clashing with mine, answering me with the same desperation.
It’s not tenderness we’re trading. It’s fury, it’s hunger, it’s everything we’ve bled through poured into a single collision.
Her breath hitches when I press her against the cold wall of the dacha’s stone, my body caging hers. She bites my lip hard enough to draw blood, and instead of pulling back, I groan into her mouth, the sting feeding the fire. Her hands fist in my hair, pulling, demanding more, and I give it to her, my mouth trailing rough down her throat, teeth scraping her skin.
She gasps, then yanks my face back up, kissing me again like she wants to devour me, like she doesn’t care if we both burn down with the ruins behind us.
