“Not even close.”
He signaled the guards. The door hissed open.
The moment he walked out, leaving the room colder than before, I let my smile fade.
Pieces were falling into place. Who they had, who they didn’t, who was coming for me, and who was already moving against them.
But Katya was the variable I couldn’t get out of my head.
Katerina Volkov wasn’t built to be anyone’s captive. I knew that she’d be fighting, even now, even if she happened to be injured. She was probably making some interrogator regret waking up this morning. And if they pushed her too far… no, I wasn’t letting it get that far.
I wasn’t giving Mikhail time to bargain or Andrei time to charge in blind.
She needed me thinking clearly and acting fast.
Time to break out.
CHAPTER 3
Present day
Katya Volkov
The drainage pipe was cold and disgusting, a tight metal cylinder with just enough room to crawl through if I kept my elbows tucked in. The walls were slimy, coated with algae and condensation, and every time I pushed myself forward wet things slithered under my palm like they wanted to make friends. I didn’t scream, but only because I’d been trained better than that.
My knee caught on a ridge in the metal and pain spiked up my thigh. Perfect. Exactly what I needed while crawling through God’s least-welcoming ventilation system. I shoved forward again and hissed when the thin strip of a rusted edge scraped the back of my wrist.
“Of course,” I muttered under my breath. “This is exactly how I wanted to spend my afternoon.”
I could still smell the remnants of smoke and disinfectant stuck in my nose from the facility above. Revenant wasn’t subtle. They never had been. What they lacked in creativity they made up for in infrastructure, and this pipe system was clearly designed to be navigated only by rats, plumbers, or people who desperately needed to escape and had no dignity left to lose.
People like me.
I wiped my hand on my shirt, immediately regretted it, and forced myself another foot forward. Water trickled beneath me, soaking into the knees of my pants, and a cold draft swept through the pipe from somewhere up ahead.
Fuck, yes.
Airflow meant an exit. Or at least a larger tunnel.
I would take either at this point.
My thoughts turned to Viktor.
“I swear to God,” I whispered, near silently, “if you’ve gotten yourself killed, I’m going to resurrect you just so I can strangle you to death.”
The metal echoed my voice back at me, a soft, sibilant mockery.
Viktor Dragunov was many things. Charming. Brilliant in a way he pretended not to be. Stupidly reckless. Infuriatingly handsome. And the single least cautious man I’d ever had the misfortune of falling into bed with. It was a terrible combination of traits in a hostage situation.
We’d been together when Revenant had sprung their trap. One second, we were walking the concrete hallway toward the meeting room they’d requested after we’d left Kara, Roman, Lev,and Dmitri in that ridiculous penthouse suite with orders to stay put.
Instead of a meeting, we’d gotten a half-dozen armed guards, a pair of tranquilizer darts, and a flashbang bright enough to wipe the memory of my own name for three full seconds.
I remembered the moment before everything went white—Viktor with his gun halfway raised, fury etched across his face like a man preparing to chew through steel, stepping in front of me. I’d tried to shout something to him, but the blast swallowed my words whole. When my vision snapped back, I was on the floor, and someone was screaming in the distance. Viktor was gone.
By the time Revenant turned their pet drones on the rooftop pool and put the Markovs and Kara on their knees, we were already ghosts in separate cages. They didn’t need to grab us all at once when they could break us apart piece by piece.
They separated us on purpose. They didn’t want us thinking together.
