“We are safe.”
“I know.”
He leans into my touch. “Say it again.”
I smile. “We are safe.”
He lets out a breath he seems to have been holding for years. He pulls me to him, his forehead resting against mine, his eyes closing.
Outside, Chicago glitters and moves and pretends it isn’t built on violence.
Inside, the organization hums under new leadership.
And somewhere below, an old man sits in a room designed to break people and learns what it feels like to be irrelevant.
We won.
Not just a throne. Not just a war.
We won the thing Sergei never believed could exist: a partnership that makes us sharper, steadier, harder to kill.
The nightmare is over.
Now the real work begins.
28
IVAN
The revenue reportsblur before my eyes.
I have been staring at the same column of figures for the past twenty minutes, my mind refusing to process the information despite its simplicity. Territory 7 is underperforming due to the restructuring. Territory 12 is exceeding projections now that the Italian pressure has vanished. The integration of Boris’s former assets—the warehouses, the routes, the laundered accounts—is proceeding on schedule.
None of it requires my immediate attention.
But I keep staring at the tablet anyway, because the alternative is acknowledging the profound strangeness of peace.
The penthouse is quiet. The city glitters beyond the glass walls, a galaxy of lights that continues its endless motion regardless of what happens in the towers above it. I am sitting on the couch where I once sat alone, reviewing reports that used to feel like the only thing worth caring about.
Everything is different.
I am the Pakhan. The organization answers to me. The threats that once circled have been neutralized or brought to heel. My father is currently in a transport vehicle, headed toward a comfortable, silent exile from which he will never return. The lieutenants have sworn their loyalty—some sincerely, some pragmatically, but all bound by the understanding that the new order is absolute.
And Maksim is somewhere in this apartment.
Existing in the same space as me. Free to come and go.
The thought still catches me off guard. After three months of absence, after years of having him present only as a function rather than a person, the simple reality of his presence feels like a glitch in the world’s logic.
Footsteps approach from the hallway.
I do not look up from the tablet. I know his footsteps. I have known them for years—the particular cadence of his movement, the weight he distributes across his feet, the almost-silent quality that is a remnant of the Kennel.
He stops beside the couch. I feel his presence like a change in atmospheric pressure.
“You are done for the day.”
His hand enters my field of vision, reaching down to pluck the tablet from my fingers. I let him take it, watching as he sets it on the coffee table with the deliberate care of someone who wants to make sure I understand that it is staying there.
