Ghost was gone too.
The dog who'd loved her. Who'd slept at her feet every night. Who'd known something was wrong before anyone else and tried to warn them.
All of it. Gone.
"Auralia." Her name came out broken. A sound I didn't recognize as my own voice. "My Ptichka—"
The silence swallowed the words.
Three women. Sophie, who'd survived an auction and rebuilt herself piece by piece. Maya, who'd escaped a murder frame and found love in the last place she'd expected. Auralia, who'd trusted me to keep her safe, who'd let me dress her and hold her and promise her everything was going to be okay.
Gone.
Taken while we played soldiers in an empty gallery.
While I was so fucking clever, so certain I'd figured out Anton's trap.
He'd been counting on it.
Counting on my clever little fox brain.
And I'd walked right into it. Dragged my brothers with me. Left the women unprotected because I was so sure I understood the game.
Konstantin's roar shattered the silence—rage and grief tangled together, his massive fist going through the wall like it was paper. Nikolai had gone still. Completely, terrifyingly still, the way he only got when violence was about to follow.
And me?
I stood in the wreckage of everything I'd promised to protect.
Holding a phone that had gone silent.
Knowing that somewhere out there, Anton Belyaev had my little bird.
And I had no idea how to get her back.
Chapter 18
Auralia
Thedarknesswasabsolutebefore my brain came online.
Then pain—sharp, specific, radiating from somewhere behind my left ear where something hard had connected. My first coherent thought wasn't fear. It was cataloging: damp concrete smell, cold seeping through my clothes, the distant hum of machinery that meant industrial space, urban, probably underground.
I couldn't see anything yet. Just darkness and the particular pressure of air that said enclosed space, low ceiling, no windows. My fingers found rough floor beneath me. Concrete, old, the kind with aggregate showing through where decades of feet had worn the surface smooth.
Slowly—agonizingly slowly—my eyes adjusted.
A single bare bulb hung from a cord overhead. I could make out walls now. Cinder block, industrial grey, the particularaesthetic of a basement that had never been meant for human habitation.
Not alone.
The realization hit me before the visual confirmation. Someone breathing in the far corner—shallow, rapid, the particular rhythm of distress. And another sound, softer: murmuring, words I couldn't make out, a voice I knew.
Maya.
I turned my head. The pain spiked, white-hot and nauseating, and I had to close my eyes and breathe through it.
When I opened my eyes again, I could see them.
