The admission guts me. I’d do anything, anything, to take away her fear. I’d raze this whole forest and everything in it.
I move to the chair opposite her and lower myself into it, elbows braced on my knees. I look at the door to the living room where Andrea sleeps and try to assemble thoughts that aren’t soaked in violence.
“This isn’t just about my business anymore,” I say slowly. “It isn’t just my lines they’re cutting or my land they’re crossing.”
I look up at her fully. “It’s you. And it’s her. I didn’t expect that.”
She searches my face with an expression that makes something twist hard in my chest. She looks ashamed, sorry.
“I shouldn’t have taken the job?—"
I shake my head, continuing before I lose my nerve. “I thought I knew what I would protect without hesitation. My men. My work. The structure I built over decades. But now?—”
The words knot in my throat.
Now I have something else to lose.
Someone.
Two someones.
Roxy swallows, her voice soft when she finally speaks. “Mak…”
It’s all I can do to keep the fear from rising again. Is this how my father felt all those years ago, when my mother wanted to leave? When she couldn’t sleep at night for fear that something would happen to her, to me? Of course, he’d bargained with her: set her up for a new life… as long as she left me here. And she had.
“I won’t let them touch her,” I say, and the certainty in my voice surprises even me. “I don’t care who they are. Chicago, Moscow, hell itself—I don’t care.”
Roxy closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, they shine with something that looks dangerously like trust.
The dread settles deeper. Trust is fragile, and I am not a man known to be gentle.
“Get some rest,” I tell her quietly, pushing to my feet. “I’m not leaving the perimeter tonight. I’ll come back here, later, and we’ll stay over; in the morning I’ll bring you both home.”
She nods, shoulders relaxing the smallest bit.
But as I walk toward the door, I’m certain of something in a way I’ve never been sure of anything before.
This isn’t justmywar anymore.
It’s ours.
Chapter 27
Roxy
By early evening, the river cottage had slipped into that soft hush it always seems to find at the end of summer days. It’s the time of day when the last streaks of sun fold behind the tree line and the crickets call. Andrea is on the living room floor, surrounded by markers and folded construction paper, humming while she makes yet another card for Mak. She’s been doing it almost daily now, as if the man needs one more reason to adore her.
I’m in the kitchen, rinsing blueberries, trying to unwind after a day that felt stretched thin. I should feel calmer than this. Ever since Mak doubled security, the cottage has held a stillness that makes my shoulders unclench as soon as I step inside. His people are everywhere. I can’t see them, not really, but I know the pattern of their rotations, the way the silence outside vibrates with their presence.
For the first time in a long while, I feel safe.
Which is why the knock at the door sends a strange shiver down my spine.
It’s firm and snaps both Andrea and me to attention. “Stay here,” I tell her gently, drying my hands on a towel as I move toward the front door.
When I open it, one of Mak’s men stands on the porch. His expression is professional, but the tension in his stance tells me he’s uncomfortable. Then I see why.
He’s holding Katherine by the elbow.
