"She wasn't comfortable with the scope of work." The lie slid out smooth as silk. I'd always been good at this—the careful construction of truths that obscured larger truths, the art of saying everything while revealing nothing. "Too much risk for someone outside our world."
Nikolai nodded. Accepted it. Moved on.
That should have been a relief. Instead, it felt like a betrayal—not of my brother, but of her. Of the woman who'd looked at me with those grey-green eyes and seen something worth wanting. I'd reduced her to a failed lead, a dead end, a line item in the ongoing project of tracking Anton Belyaev's money.
She was so much more than that.
Konstantin hadn't spoken. That was never a good sign.
My middle brother sat with his chair pushed back from the table, boots crossed at the ankle, arms folded over his massive chest. The pose looked casual—was designed to look casual—but I'd grown up watching Kostya read people the way I read code. He saw patterns in body language, tells in micro-expressions, the particular tension that meant someone was hiding something.
Right now, he was reading me.
I kept my face neutral. Shuffled my files. Pretended to check the next item on my agenda while my skin prickled under the weight of his attention.
"We'll need another approach," I continued. "I'm working on alternatives. There's a gallery in Geneva that might give us access to—"
"Later." Nikolai was already standing, already checking his phone—a breach of protocol in the secure room, but the device was one of mine, hardened against surveillance, and I wasn't going to call out my Pakhan for worrying about his pregnant wife. "Send me the summary. I need to check on Sophie and Katya."
He was gone before I could respond. The door sealed behind him with a soft hiss of pressurized air, and then it was just me and Konstantin in the fluorescent silence.
I gathered my files. Organized them into their proper folders. Maintained the illusion of control even as everything underneath was cracking apart.
"Maks."
I didn't look up. "We should talk about the security rotation for—"
His hand closed around my arm. Not hard enough to hurt—Kostya was always careful about that now, always conscious of his own strength in ways he hadn't been before Maya. But firm enough to stop me.
"What happened?"
I met his eyes. Dark brown, sharp as broken glass, seeing everything I was trying to hide. My brother the enforcer, the monster, the man who'd spent fifteen years learning to read pain and fear in the faces of people who had every reason to lie.
"Nothing."
"Bullshit." His grip didn't loosen. "You look like someone died."
The laugh that escaped me was raw, bitter, nothing like humor. I pulled my arm free and stepped back, putting the tablebetween us. Distance. Control. The architecture of separation I'd been building my whole life.
"No one died."
"Then what?"
I looked at my brother—really looked at him, past the tattoos and the scars and the reputation that made grown men cross the street to avoid him. Kostya had found something, these nine months. Someone. Maya had cracked him open and crawled inside and built a home there, and now he looked at me with eyes that understood what it meant to want someone you shouldn't have.
I almost told him.
The words were right there, pressing against my teeth: I found her. My little bird, the woman I've been falling for across five months of careful distance. She's real and she's brilliant and she kissed me like I was oxygen and I walked away because if Anton finds out about her, he'll destroy her just to watch me suffer.
But saying it would make it real. Would make it something that existed outside my own chest, something that could be tracked and targeted and used against us.
"It's handled," I said instead. "The lead is dead. We move on."
Kostya watched me for a long moment. I could see him weighing the cost of pushing further against the reality of what we were facing. Anton was coming. War was coming. There wasn't time for emotional excavation, not now, not when the family needed every advantage we could scrape together.
Finally, he stepped back.
"When you're ready to talk," he said, "I'm here."
