Kara
I stood a few steps behind the men, my arms wrapped around myself more out of habit than the chill of the desert night. I had just listened to four people decide the direction of my life without asking for my opinion once.
Typical.
Roman was the first person I looked at. He stood with his back to the sea, dark hair slicked back, a faint sheen of sweat on his temples catching the floodlight. Everything about him screamed power, the stillness of a man who knew that the world would bend if he just glared hard enough. There was something about him that was different from when I’d first met him, stronger somehow, more responsible. If I was honest with myself, it was actually kind of hot.
I looked at Dmitri after that. He stood a few feet away from his brother, expressionless, hands in his pockets, like none of this had touched him, but I knew better. Beneath the composure, behind the calm exterior was that steady hum of energy thatcame from always being the smartest man in the room. He was watching all of us—me, Roman, Viktor, Katya—like he was already rearranging the pieces for whatever came next.
I shouldn’t have been watching them. I should have been thinking about escape routes, about ARCHEON, about Lev. Instead, I found myself cataloguing the way the wind caught their hair, the way the eyes of both men tracked me for brief seconds and then moved on, as if pretending neither of them had even glanced at me.
Roman was the energy. Dmitri was the gravity. And I was the idiot caught in orbit between them.
All that was missing at that moment was Lev.
My stomach twisted.
I’d told myself I didn’t care about the Markovs, about any of the three of them. That I was done caring about anyone. But now, with Lev in ARCHEON’s hands, that lie was unraveling.
Was he safe? Would they hurt him to get to me?
No one looked at me.
Maybe that was for the best because if they had, they might have seen that my hands were shaking.
They might have seen that I was thinking about Lev somewhere in a room not unlike the one I’d just been tied up in. About what ARCHEON did to the people who failed them. About how easy it would be to break him, not his body, but his mind. That thought made me experience a sensation I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Real fear.
The kind that sits low in your stomach and whispersyou can’t save him.
The night wind carried the faint sound of a horn from somewhere out on the water. A cargo ship, maybe. It didn’t matter. All I could hear was the echo of Dmitri’s last words.Let’s move.
I turned back toward them, toward the four people who had just decided my fate. Dmitri’s gaze met mine again, albeit briefly. There was a question there, unspoken but heavy:Are you with us?
I wanted to answer. I wanted to say yes, that I’d chosen them, that I was all in, but the truth sat like a stone in my throat.
I didn’t know whose side I was on anymore.
The Markovs might save me.
They might destroy me.
But the one thing I did know was that ARCHEON never lost.
CHAPTER 22
Roman
Viktor Dragunov’s penthouse sat high above the city, a glass and steel fortress that smelled of money, smoke, and the faint trace of gun oil. The floor-to-ceiling windows framed the Dubai skyline, beautiful and glittering far below.
We’d moved here after the deal at the port. Viktor claimed it was ‘safer’ than the docks, though safe was a relative term when you were surrounded by men who slept with weapons in arm’s reach.
The others had spread out through the massive space. Demyan had taken over the office, his pale face lit by the glow of screens as he scrambled signals and scrubbed locations. Grigor was on the balcony, making some quiet calls in Russian that I couldn’t quite make out.
Viktor had cracked open a bottle of expensive vodka, poured two glasses, and was already halfway through a cigarette. Katya sat across from him on the couch, her legs crossed, a gun resting casually on the coffee table beside her drink.
It was all too calm, the kind of calm that came after the adrenaline faded but before the real danger caught up.
