Then he was gone too, and I was alone in the secure room with the hum of fluorescent lights and the weight of everything I couldn't say.
I sank into the nearest chair. Pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness.
The truth was worse than death. Death was clean, final, something you could grieve and move past. This was a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding—the knowledge that I'd found her, held her, tasted her, and then ripped myself away because loving her might get her killed.
Forget me, I'd told her.
As if I could forget her.
Threehourslater,Iwas pretending to work.
The tech hub occupied the east wing of the compound's second floor—a converted bedroom that I'd gutted and rebuilt into something that would make most intelligence agencies jealous.
I'd built this room to be my sanctuary. A place where data made sense, where patterns revealed themselves, where I could impose order on chaos.
Today, it felt like a prison.
My fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling reports I'd already read, running analyses I'd already completed. Going through the motions while my mind kept circling back to the same impossible loop: her face when I walked away. Her voice when she called my name. The taste of her that I couldn't scrub from my memory no matter how hard I tried.
The alert chimed at 2:47 PM.
Not a loud sound—I'd calibrated all my notifications to be unobtrusive, because loud sounds shattered concentration. Just a soft tone, a change in one of my peripheral monitors, a flag on the algorithm I'd been running for eighteen months.
I turned to look, expecting another false positive. The system flagged dozens of transactions every week, most of theminnocent, noise in the endless signal of international money movement.
This wasn't noise.
A private jet had landed at Teterboro an hour ago. Registration traced to a shell company in the Caymans, which traced to a holding company in Luxembourg, which traced through five more layers of obfuscation to a name that made my blood run cold.
Deshnev.
I sat very still, staring at the screen.
The Deshnevs were old bratva. Not the scrappy post-Soviet criminals who'd clawed their way up through chaos—these were the original architects, the families who'd transformed street gangs into something that resembled an empire. They had Kremlin connections that made them effectively untouchable in Russia. Politicians on their payroll, generals in their pocket, enough leverage to survive regime changes that destroyed lesser organizations.
They didn't invest in failures. They didn't back exiled pakhan's sons unless they were absolutely certain of returns.
If the Deshnevs were involved, Anton wasn't slinking back to negotiate. He was coming to conquer.
My hands were already moving, pulling up secondary systems, burning favors I'd been hoarding for years. Flight manifests from Teterboro—not public record, but accessible if you knew who to ask and what to offer. Customs records from JFK and Newark, cross-referenced against known associates. The particular kind of dark web intelligence that cost money and connections and pieces of information I'd never get back.
Each query was a transaction. Each answer cost something. By the time I was finished, I'd owe debts that would take months to repay.
I didn't care.
The picture assembled itself in fragments, each piece making the whole more terrible. Anton Belyaev had been on that plane. Not alone—with six men whose backgrounds read like a catalog of violence that made Konstantin look gentle by comparison.
Former FSB. The kinds of agents who'd done wet work in Chechnya, who'd made problems disappear for the state, who'd retired with skill sets that had no civilian application.
Former Spetsnaz. Special forces with body counts they'd stopped tracking years ago. The kinds of soldiers who went into buildings and left nothing but silence behind.
Six of them. Professional killers, every one.
This wasn't a negotiation team. This wasn't even a bodyguard detail. This was the advance force for a war.
I printed the files. The printer whirred in the quiet room, spitting out pages that felt heavier than paper should feel. Each sheet was a weight I'd have to carry to my brothers, a burden I'd have to place on Nikolai's already-overloaded shoulders.
The walk back to the secure room felt longer than it should have. My footsteps echoed in the compound's corridors—good hardwood, expensive, the kind of detail Grandfather had insisted on even when the family was still building its fortune. Appearances mattered, he'd always said. The way you present yourself shapes how others perceive you.
