Dimitri’s grin is a quick flash. “We’ll bring her home, Roman.”
The plane drops through clouds; New York grows closer, a scatter of lights. I let myself imagine the moment I find her—the feel of her in my arms, the way she breathes when she thinks she’s safe. That image is a blade and a balm both. I force it down and turn to work: maps, street cams, phone triangulations. If Chang thought he could bait me away from home and get to Elara, he guessed wrong.
As soon as I arrive at the estate hours later, I fly up the stairs two at a time, breath tearing in my chest like a thing I can’t control. The house is wrong—too quiet, the kind of quiet that holds its breath before something breaks. My hand finds the doorknob, cold and suddenly foreign. I shove the door open.
Glass crunches under my boot. The window is a jagged grin; curtains shredded, the frame splintered outward as if someone had clawed their way through. A thin ribbon of red dots the sill, bright and ridiculous against the pale plaster. It runs in a frantic line across the floor, a cartographer’s map of panic.
I go to the glass on instinct first, fingers hovering above the smear like I could wipe it away and rewind the world. The blood is hers—the scent sharp, metallic, impossibly intimate. It sits on the glass in a smear where a hand met pane and slid, as if someone had tried to stop themselves from falling. My knees give.
I sink to them without meaning to, the room tilting. The bed is a rough square of dented sheets, the pillow still warmed where she pressed her cheek. Just days ago, we lay there together.
Memory claws through me—her laugh on the terrace, the way she wrapped herself into sleep against me, the way she told me she wanted to protect me too. Her telling me she loves me.
“Goddamn you,” I whisper to the quiet, to the glass, to whoever tore her away. My voice is small and ridiculous. It doesn’t hold the size of what sits in my chest.
Rage arrives like a live thing. It makes my hands shake until the knuckles on my right hand split open on the windowsill glass; blood mingles with hers, and for a second, I can’t tell which stain is mine. The pain is real and glorious—a thing I can name. It anchors nothing except the fact that she’s gone.
I stand. The room is suddenly too small for the fury crawling up my throat. I draw in air until my ribs ache, and I speak it loud enough that the house itself seems to flinch.
“I will burn the world before I let him keep her.”
The vow lands in the rafters and stays there, as solid and terrible as an oath. I move, already becoming the thing I say I will be: precise, brutal, unstoppable.
I will find Elara, even if it’s the last thing I do.
Chapter 23 – Elara
I wake to a mouthful of dust and the aftertaste of metal. Darkness presses against my eyelids; when I force them open, the room tilts into focus—low ceiling, cracked plaster, the sour smell of damp and old smoke. My wrists sting. Cold iron bites my skin. I’m strapped to a metal chair bolted to the floor.
Panic is immediate, stupid, and hot. I shove at the restraints. They do not budge. The seat is heavy beneath me, the chair’s bolts nailed into concrete. My breath comes fast; I taste fear, and it tastes like pennies.
This is one of my father’s properties, I think, because only he has houses that look like abandoned museums—grand in decay, expensive in neglect. I don’t know which one, and I don’t care. I only care that I am here and I have to get out.
I spit out the gag in my mouth; it’s rubber, rough, and it slides free with a wet, humiliating sound. My voice cracks when I call, “Roman?” but the name dies in the rafters. Silence answers back, thick and patient.
Why do I keep calling for him? He’s not here!
Light fractures through a high, barred window, slivering across the floor. Dust motes float like slow satellites. I turn my head, trying to catalogue everything—plaster flaking, a tarnished chandelier, a low table with a single glass of water sweating on it. A newspaper lies folded, the headline hidden. Nothing else moves.
I test my wrists again. The metal cuff doesn’t slip. Fuck. I’m in trouble. I’m still trying to shake myself loose when the door swings open. My head snaps up, but the breath hitches in my throat when my father walks in. He’s here. My father. The man whose shadow has always loomed over my life, whoseapproval I’ve never truly earned. Fear coils in my chest, sharp and suffocating, but beneath it, anger rises like wildfire.
“Let me go!” I shout, voice raw, trembling with fury. “I’m your daughter! Your own blood! You can’t do this to me!”
He stops a few feet away, his hands tucked neatly behind his back. The light catches the lines in his face, the tiredness masked by his composure. He shakes his head slowly, deliberately, and the gesture feels like a punch.
“I didn’t want to do any of this, Elara,” he says, his tone almost…calm, clinical even. “But you chose to run. You chose to destroy the paintings, the property, the evidence. You forced my hand.”
I gape at him, disbelief burning hotter than fear. “Forced your hand? You’ve gone mad!”
His eyes harden, glinting with a cold practicality that chills me. “I need the money, Elara. And to me, you’re just a commodity. A tool to secure what’s mine. Nothing more. Don’t think emotions will make a difference here.”
I swallow hard, my throat tight, my hands shaking. Rage battles with terror, but my mind claws for a way out. I will not let him own me like this. Not ever.
“You’re sick,” I whisper, barely holding back tears. “I’m your daughter. You have no right.”
He tilts his head, as if humoring a child’s tantrum. “Rights are for people who follow rules, Elara. You didn’t. Now, everything has a price. You will learn that soon enough.”
The words cut deeper than any physical blow. I tense my muscles, straining against the chair’s metal cuffs, willing my hands to find leverage, to force freedom.
