"I'm trying not to get you killed." His voice broke on the last word. "You have no idea what's coming. You have no idea what kind of war I'm walking into, and I won't—Iwon't—drag you into it."
He was at the door before I could respond. Moving with that particular economy of motion that had fascinated me from the first moment I'd seen him. His hand on the doorframe. His face when he turned back—anguished, determined, already grieving something we'd barely had the chance to build.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "I should never have contacted you. The job, the—" He stopped. Swallowed hard. "Forget the job. Forget me. It's safer."
Then he was gone.
The door closed behind him with a soft click that felt like a gunshot.
I stood in the middle of my studio, in the space I'd built to protect myself from exactly this kind of devastation, and I couldn't move. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but stand there with Ghost pressing himself against my legs and the taste of Maksim still on my lips.
The laugh that escaped me was raw, desperate, closer to a sob than actual humor. Forget him. Like I could forget five months of patient conversations. Like I could forget the way he'd said "little bird" with such unconscious tenderness. Like I could forget the feeling of his mouth on mine, his hand cradling my jaw, the sound he'd made when he kissed me back.
I had never been less capable of forgetting anything in my entire life.
Ghost whined softly. I sank to the floor, and he followed me down, pressing his long grey body against mine, his nose tucked into my neck. We stayed like that for a long time—how long, I couldn't say. The light outside my windows shifted and deepened. The city sounds rose and fell in their eternal rhythm. The coffee cups on my worktable grew cold.
My phone buzzed with a Discord notification. Someone in the server, probably. Someone who wasn't him.
I didn't look at it.
I thought about the way Delphine had looked at me last night.Stop looking for the trap. Sometimes good things are just good things.
This wasn't a good thing. This was a disaster. This was exactly the kind of complicated, dangerous, impossible situation I'd spent my whole life trying to avoid.
But my lips were still tingling where he'd kissed me. And my chest still ached with the particular pain of wanting something I wasn't sure I could have. And somewhere in my brain, underneath all the fear and confusion and overwhelming emotion—
Something that felt dangerously like hope refused to die.
He'd saidforget me.
He hadn't saidI don't want you.
And maybe that distinction didn't matter. Maybe I was reading too much into words, seeing patterns that weren't there, building castles in the clouds the way I always did when I wanted something badly enough to lose my judgment.
But I kept thinking about the way he'd kissed me back. The sound he'd made. The tremor in his hands when he'd pulled away.
He wanted me. He'd been wanting me for five months, across screens and anonymity and the careful distance we'd both maintained. He'd found out who I was and he'd kept my secret instead of using it. He'd walked away to protect me, not to hurt me.
That wasn't nothing. That wasn't something I could just forget.
I pressed my face into Ghost's fur and let myself cry—big, messy sobs that shook my whole body. He stayed pressed against me, warm and patient and understanding in the way only dogs could be.
Chapter 6
Maksim
Istoodattheheadof the table where my grandfather had built empires and my brother had learned to command, and I told my family I'd failed.
Not in those words, of course. I'd spent the night composing the report—when I wasn't staring at my ceiling, when I wasn't replaying the sound she'd made when I pulled away, when I wasn't fighting the urge to drive back to DUMBO and beg her to forgive me for everything I was about to do.
"The authenticator lead is dead," I said. My voice came out flat, professional, the voice of the Fox delivering intelligence. "She's not going to work for us."
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Twelve feet underground, soundproofed walls, electromagnetic shielding that turned cell phones into expensive paperweights.
Nikolai sat at the head of the table—his seat now, not Grandfather's, though sometimes I still expected to see Mikhail's silver hair and knowing eyes when I walked in. My oldestbrother looked tired in a way he never used to. The shadows under his grey eyes had deepened over the past month. His six month old daughter, Katya, was not sleeping well.
"Did she give a reason?" Nikolai asked, but his attention was already drifting. I watched his fingers tap against the table in that particular rhythm he used when he was thinking about something else. About Sophie, probably. About the baby that was keeping them both awake every night.
