Viktor didn’t turn around. “Shouldn’t you be somewhere else, annoying someone who gives a shit?”
“Probably.” Kostya moved to stand beside him, following his gaze to where Anka was now examining some roses with the kind of concentration most people reserved for defusing bombs. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s a lying bitch.”
“Who also happens to be your wife.”
Viktor finally looked at him, letting him see the full force of his irritation. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that you married her for revenge, but you’re acting like a jealous husband.” Kostya’s dark eyes were amused, which only made Viktor want to punch him more. “Pick a lane, brother.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Right. And I’m a fucking saint.” Kostya chuckled, shaking his head. “Viktor, you’ve been in a mood for three days. You snapped at Elena for burning your toast, you fired two men for arriving five minutes late to their shift, and you’ve been staring out this window every day like some kind of lovesick teenager.”
“I have not—”
“You threatened to cut off Simon’s fingers because he touched her arm.”
That shut him up. Because he was right, and they both knew it. Viktor had been acting like a jealous husband instead of a man executing a carefully planned revenge. The problem was,watching Anka charm his men with that same smile she’d once used on him was like having salt poured into an open wound.
“She doesn’t smile at me,” Viktor said, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
Kostya’s expression softened slightly. “Maybe because you married her against her will and made it clear you hate her guts?”
“I don’t hate her.” The lie tasted bitter on his tongue.
“No? Then what do you call it?”
He didn’t have an answer for that. What he felt for Anka was too complicated to put into words, too raw and contradictory to make sense of. Hate was easier than admitting that seeing her again had brought back every feeling he’d tried so hard to bury.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “This isn’t about feelings. It’s about—”
“Justice? Revenge? Making her pay?” Kostya’s voice was dry. “How’s that working out for you?”
Before Viktor could respond, his phone buzzed with an alert from the security system. He glanced at the screen, expecting to see some routine notification, but what he saw made his blood run cold.
Anka’s tracker had gone offline.
“Son of a bitch.” He was already moving, pulling up the full security feed on his laptop. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Kostya leaned over his shoulder as he scrolled through the camera footage. “What do you mean, gone?”
Viktor rewound the feed to an hour ago, watching Anka’s morning walk through the grounds. Everything looked normaluntil she stopped to examine some flowers near the north wall. The same area Simon had mentioned had a blind spot in the motion sensors.
“Clever girl,” he muttered, watching her glance around casually before slipping behind a cluster of trees. The cameras lost her for exactly thirty-seven seconds, and when they picked her up again, she was walking back toward the house like nothing had happened.
Except she wasn’t wearing the tracker bracelet he’d insisted she keep on at all times.
“She ditched the tracker in the garden,” Viktor said, his admiration for her ingenuity warring with absolute fury at being outplayed. “Then she must have slipped out during the shift change.”
He pulled up the gate logs, cross-referencing them with the guard schedules. There it was, a fifteen-minute window where the new shift was getting briefed, and the cameras were cycling through their reset sequence. A window that should have been impossible for anyone to exploit unless they knew exactly when it would happen.
Unless they’d spent days chatting with the guards, learning their routines, and figuring out their weaknesses.
“The flirting,” Viktor said, realization hitting him like a freight train. “It wasn’t about attention or rebelling against me. She was gathering intelligence.”
“Gathering intelligence for what?”
