I turn to Dre, "Get the El Paso team in the air, we're going in." Then to Oksana, "I want you off your feet until then."
She gives me a considering look. "Bossy still looks good on you."
"I know." I step closer, lower my voice. "One more thing."
"Say please," she murmurs.
I don’t. "When we go," I tell her, "we go quiet."
She smiles slowly, a promise and a warning. "Don’t I always?"
Behind me, Dre makes a noise that could be a laugh or a prayer.
"Get your coffee," I say to her, stepping aside so she can pass. "Then meet me in the office. We’ll map your pings to my routes."
She brushes by, the scent of my soap on her skin, and for a stupid heartbeat, I imagine saying her new name out loud just to see how she reacts.
Metelitsa.
The Blizzard.
White-out death—quiet, suffocating, beautiful.
You don’t see her until it’s too damn late.
The next morning…
We’re comingdown through a strip of cloud that makes the plane’s belly rumble and some lights blink. Somewhere ahead, the desert waits with its deadly patience.
I watch Steph text Enrico—as in Enrico Sartori, another of La Famiglia’s capos-in-waiting—that he and hiswife—I can’t help but smile at that—are on their way to free his brother and can't make it to the wedding in Vegas. Steph glances at me like he can’t help himself. Like the sight of me is a question he wants an answer to but doesn’t know how to ask.
"What?" I ask a bit too casually. The truth is, he's been a bit off since we got on board his jet.
He looks at the screen, then at me, and the look is different, somber, serious. "Who are you, Ana?" he asks.
The plane rocks, the landing gear thumps. For a beat, the world is just metal and engines and the way his face takes in the light. The way he asks tells me he already knows. And of course he does. I’ve dropped enough breadcrumbs that even a blind, deaf man could’ve followed them. And he’s not just a man—he’s Stephano fucking Conti. He runs a multibillion-dollar cyber empire built on patterns, tells, and what people don’t say.
He watched my hands on the keyboard last night. Watched how I clear a room. How my knee came up, how my weight shifted, how a man twice my size went down without a sound. He’s been cataloging me since the moment we met.
Still—he wants me to say it.
Not for confirmation. For ownership. He wants the truth from my mouth, shaped by my words, not dragged out of a data scrape or handed to him by one of his men. That matters. More than it should.
It’s a small thing.
And small things, in our world, are always the most dangerous. I’m not the kind of woman who hands out pieces of her life. Trust is a currency I hoard. But because he’s myhusband—because the word sits between us now like a thin shield—I owe him something. A truth. Not everything. Not the ledger of my sins, not the parts that would burn men alive, but the name at the center.
"Oksana Arsenyev."
The name feels like an armor plate. Saying it aloud makes it less of a weapon and more of a fact. "Grigori’s sister." I watch his face for the flicker that would tell me I misread him. But there is no surprise on his features, only relief as it washes over him slowly, like warm water. He exhales, and the tension in his shoulders bleeds out.
"I’m glad you told me." He smiles, but it's still strained. "Would you have told me if you hadn’t already suspected I knew?" Dangerous curiosity lines his voice.
I try to measure the honesty inside me. Did I want him to know? Do I want anyone to know? Some private corner of me wants to be seen. Another corner wants to remain veiled over in lies.
"Do you really want to know?" I answer instead, because I want to make him earn it.
"Yes," he says. Not a flirt, not a tease. A flat demand wrapped in something softer.
