All Deveraux.
All deliberate.
I sit back, shaking—not from fear, but fury.
Someone has been playing god with my life. With Dimitri’s war. With my family’s name.
Someone thought I wouldn’t look closely.
They were wrong.
I’m still staring at the documents when the door opens. I don’t jump; I don’t even look up right away. His energy always enters a room before he does.
Dimitri steps inside, shutting the door with a soft click. He’s damp from the rain, shoulders tight with tension. But his expression…quietly calm.
“I didn’t find you in the suite,” he says. “I knew I’d find you here.”
I lift the files with trembling fingers. “Have you seen this?” My voice betrays me—tight, fragile, stretched thin. “It wasn’t her. Dimitri, it’s all fake. The accounts, the signatures—everything. They used her name because she couldn’t defend herself. They used her.”
He doesn’t take the files right away. Instead, he studies me first—like he’s checking for cracks, for bleeding edges, for all the places the world has been trying to break me.
Then he nods once. Slow. Controlled.
“I know.”
The breath leaves me in a sharp rush. “You…knew?”
“I suspected,” he says quietly. “Sylvester traced one of the IPs to Zurich last night. I needed confirmation before telling you.”
The room tilts. The rain outside grows louder, hammering at the windows like a warning.
I stare at him, stunned. “You waited?”
His jaw flexes. “I wanted to be sure.”
“Sure?” My voice catches. “This is my mother, Dimitri.”
“I know,” he murmurs, stepping closer. “Which is exactly why I didn’t want to give you hope until I had proof.”
My throat burns. My knees nearly give out from the sheer relief ripping through me. For weeks I’ve lived with this nauseating dread that maybe my family isn’t as innocent as I need them to be—that maybe the rot runs in my blood too. But now…for the first time in what feels like forever, I can breathe.
A sob escapes me before I can swallow it down. Hot tears blur the documents on the desk.
Dimitri doesn’t rush. He moves slowly, almost cautiously, like he’s approaching something breakable. Then he cups my face with both hands, his palms warm despite the cold storm outside. His thumb sweeps a tear from my cheek.
“She’s innocent,” he says, his voice gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “And you—” his eyes soften, almost unbearably, “—you were right. This isn’t a war between us anymore.”
A small, shaky sound leaves me as I lean into his touch. “Then who’s pulling the strings?”
His expression changes instantly—the tenderness folding into something sharper, deadlier.
“Deveraux isn’t just laundering money,” he says. “He’s aligning the Kovals, the old bankers, every family with a grudge against the Rusnaks. He’s building a shadow syndicate—and he’s using both our names to fund it.”
A cold, violent shiver runs through me. “So this is bigger than revenge.”
“This,” Dimitri says, voice flat and lethal, “is extermination.”
The word hangs between us like a blade.
