The collar pressed against my throat.
I wrapped my fingers around it.
And tried to remember how to breathe.
Chapter 19
Maksim
Isatonthefloorof the living room, back against the overturned couch, staring at nothing. The chaos of the earlier search had given way to a different kind of devastation—the particular stillness that followed when there was nothing left to do. Nothing left to break. Nothing left to find.
Auralia's book still lay face-down on the carpet. I couldn't make myself pick it up.
Three hours since we'd returned from Chelsea. Three hours of Nikolai's men combing every inch of the compound for clues they wouldn't find. Three hours of Konstantin putting his fist through walls while Sophie's baby slept in Mikhail's arms in the secondary location, too young to understand why her mother hadn't come back.
I should have been doing something useful.
Should have been running traces, pulling surveillance footage, deploying every asset in my network to find them. Instead I sathere, useless, my legendary fox brain spinning in circles that led nowhere.
I had been so fucking clever. So certain I understood the game. And he'd played me like a child, used my intelligence against me, counting on exactly the moves I'd made. The gallery was never the target. The meeting was never real. Everything—everything—had been designed to make me feel smart while I walked my brothers straight into a trap.
The guilt was a physical weight. Pressing on my chest, making each breath an effort.
Auralia was somewhere in this city, chained and afraid, because I'd been outsmarted. Because my clever little fox brain hadn't been clever enough.
Think.
The command came from somewhere beneath the self-loathing. The part of me that had survived years in this world by analyzing, by finding angles, by understanding enemies better than they understood themselves.
Stop wallowing. Think.
I closed my eyes. Let the intelligence reports unspool in my mind like surveillance footage. Anton Belyaev. His organization. His alliances. His weaknesses.
Deshnev.
The name surfaced like a body in water.
Dmitri Deshnev. Moscow's shadow king. The man who'd survived every regime change since Brezhnev by being too useful to eliminate and too dangerous to challenge. His infrastructure had enabled Anton's expansion—the servers, the financial networks, the particular architecture of power that let a mid-level player punch above his weight.
But Deshnev wasn't Anton's partner. He was Anton's patron. The distinction mattered.
I'd studied the Deshnev organization for years. Part of my job—mapping the power structures that might one day threaten us, understanding the players who moved pieces on boards we couldn't see. Deshnev was old bratva. The oldest kind. The kind that had survived not through adaptation but through rigidity, through codes so absolute they'd become their own kind of religion.
My eyes opened.
The codes.
I sat forward, suddenly alert, suddenlypresentin a way I hadn't been since finding the empty compound. My mind was racing now, pulling threads I'd filed away years ago, connecting dots I hadn't thought to connect.
Dmitri Deshnev had three daughters.
I remembered the detail from an intelligence report I'd read in my early twenties, when I was first building our surveillance infrastructure. Three daughters, all married into powerful families, all producing grandchildren that Deshnev doted on with a ferocity that seemed incongruous with his reputation.
And his wife.
Irina Deshneva had nearly died giving birth to their youngest. Hemorrhage. Thirty hours of labor in a Moscow hospital while Deshnev held siege outside, reportedly threatening to execute the entire medical staff if she didn't survive.
She survived.
