“You do, actually,” Luka replies. “Especially when you talk about her father like he was nothing more than a stain on your shoes.”
“He was more than that,” Isaak counters. “He was a liability. I treated him as such.”
Luka’s eyes flash with a fury I haven’t seen before.
“You do not speak to her that way,” Luka insists, his voice low. “You do not drag her father through the mud while you sit behind this desk and pretend you are any better.”
“Iambetter,” Isaak replies calmly. “I did not abandon my son. I built a world for him. Foryou. Now you have a child on the way, and instead of using that to secure what we built, you stand here and challenge me over a dead traitor.”
“He is not just a traitor to her,” Luka argues. “He is the man who helped shape the woman I love. You will show some respect, even if you do not feel it.”
Those last words settle deep inside me, warm and startling.The woman I love.He has never said that before.
Isaak studies him, then me. The corner of his mouth lifts, but there is nothing kind in it.
“You grow soft,” he observes. “Dangerous in a different way. Emotions make men weak, Luka.”
“Emotions make men human,” Luka counters. “You should try it sometime.”
The silence that follows crackles. Isaak’s gaze cools further. For a moment, I think Luka’s temper will break and turn the moment into something explosive. Instead, Isaak picks up his glass and swirls the liquid inside.
“Get out of my study,” he finally instructs. “Both of you. We will revisit this when you remember who built this life you enjoy.”
Luka’s arm tightens around me. “We will revisit nothing,” he replies. He guides me toward the door, his hand firm at the small of my back.
As we step into the hallway, my heart still races. My mind spins with everything Isaak revealed and everything he didn’t mean to. The world feels unstable all over again.
Luka forcefully closes the door behind us. He turns to me, hands framing my face, his eyes searching mine.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
“I’m okay,” I answer, the words coming out rough.
He pulls me against his chest, one hand sliding to the back of my head, the other around my waist. I let myself fold into him, breathing in his scent, the clean spice of his cologne mingled with the familiar warmth of him. My fingers curl into his sweater.
“He admitted it,” I murmur. “He admitted ordering my father’s death. He talked about it like we were discussing a business invoice.”
“I am sorry,” Luka replies near my ear. “You should never have had to hear that.”
I stay pressed against him for a moment, trying to let the warmth of his arms quiet the rush in my chest, but Isaak’s voice keeps echoing through my thoughts. The more I replay his words, the more the pieces refuse to fit, leaving a small, cold ache lodged under my ribs. Luka’s hand moves slowly along my back, calm and protective, and I cling to him because everything else feels unsteady beneath my feet. I don’t know what will happen next, but I know one thing for sure. None of us are standing on solid ground.
14
LUKA
The house feels too quiet, even with a dozen men on the grounds and cameras covering every angle. A quiet that crawls under my skin and claws for a way out.
I sit at my office desk with the monitors lit in front of me, a grid of pulsing images. Front gate. Drive. Perimeter fence. Interior halls. Guest wing, where Sage is supposed to be resting. She is not on any of the feeds, which means she is either in her room with the curtains closed or in one of the blind spots she has already figured out.
Vega lies at my feet, his broad head on his paws. His ears twitch whenever a car passes on the road outside, but he does not lift his head. He feels it too, this pressure in the air. Waiting has a taste, metallic on the tongue, like pennies or old blood.
I drag in a breath and rub the heel of my hand along my jaw. On one of the feeds, Sage appears at the end of a hallway, just a glimpse of her profile as she crosses from one wing to another. She moves like she’s bracing against something unseen. Her arms are wrapped around her middle, her head bent. Vega’s ears prick, as if he can sense her from all the way down here.
I reach for the keyboard, thinking about pulling up her wing cameras closer, when the office door opens without a knock. Misha steps in fast, his expression taut, phone in his hand. “We have something,” he reports, his accent roughened by the pace of his breathing. “A hit on the number we flagged.”
I push back from the desk so hard the chair rolls into the credenza behind me. “Ray.”
“Unless he handed his phone to someone else for fun.” Misha crosses the room and drops a printed map on the desk, then taps his phone. One of the screens on the wall changes to a satellite image, all gray and muted green. “The last ping came from the industrial docks on the south side. This warehouse here. It fits with the traffic we tracked earlier. Two vehicles tied to his associates appeared in the area within the last hour.”
