“Personal,” I growl, my mind racing. The cathedral’s where my father crowned me his heir, where I was to take thePakhanoath. Destroying it isn’t just sabotage—it’s a message loud and clear. War’s just started, nothing subtle about it.
The security room hums with tension—screens flickering with data, men moving with smooth precision. Timur stands at the center console, his face bathed in blue light as he navigates through surveillance footage.
“Updates on my family?” I ask, the word “family” still strange on my tongue. Not just my children now. Bella. Her siblings. All of them—my responsibility.
Oleg steps forward, ramrod straight as always. “Mrs. Belov and the children are being escorted to the helipad. The first transport leaves in eight minutes.”
Viktor’s voice crackles through the comms. “We have three birds ready. Package Alpha in motion.”
Package Alpha. My children. Bella. The phrases reduce them to tactical objectives; safer that way. Less emotional. Less distracting.
I don’t feel safer.
“Show me what you found,” I tell Timur, leaning over the console.
He pulls up a series of images—security footage from St. Nicholas, traffic cameras, satellite feeds. “Bomber entered at 0417 hours. Professional. Knew the blind spots.” He taps the screen, freezing on a grainy figure. “But made one mistake.”
The image enhances, revealing a partial face—Slavic features, cold eyes, a distinctive scar along the jawline.
“Yevgeny Renko,” Arseny says, his voice hardening. “Mikhail Volkov’s cleaner.”
My blood runs cold. Confirmation. The Volkovs have made their move.
“We tracked his movements,” Timur continues, flipping through more images. “Arrived from Moscow three days ago under an alias. Stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. Made contact with this woman—”
The screen shows a blonde entering Renko’s hotel room. Even with her face partially obscured, I recognize her.
“Katrina,” I say. “Tatiana’s personal assistant.”
Arseny lets out a low whistle. “So much for plausible deniability.”
“That’s not all,” Timur says, pulling up bank records. “Six million transferred from Tatiana’s Cayman account to a shell corporation owned by Mikhail Volkov. Timestamped forty-eight hours before the bombing.”
The rage that floods through me is cold, precise—a blade sharpened to perfection rather than the wild heat of uncontrolled fury. This is better. This I can use.
“She’s not even trying to hide it,” Arseny observes.
“Because she thinks she’s already won,” I reply, straightening. “She thinks this buys her enough time to move against me before the succession.”
The door slams open behind us. My father strides in, Dimitri flanking him like a shadow. Anatoly Belov, still imposing at his seventies his silver hair slicked back, his eyes—the same gray-blue as mine—alight with barely contained rage.
“She’s gone,” he announces without preamble. “Emptied her personal accounts. Disabled her trackers. Her jet filed a flight plan for Geneva an hour ago.”
The confirmation twists in my gut like a knife. Tatiana has finally shown her hand—not that there was much doubt after the bombing.
“Not just Geneva,” Dimitri adds, sliding a tablet across the console to me. “Look at the money trail.”
I scan the document, jaw tightening with each line. Twelve million to numbered accounts in the Caymans. Eight million converted to cryptocurrency. Properties liquidated across three continents. All within the last twenty-four hours.
“She’s been planning this for months,” I say, the realization settling like ice in my veins.
My father’s face is a mask of cold fury. In all my thirty-nine years, I’ve rarely seen him truly caught off guard. Today, he looks… betrayed. It would be almost pitiful if it weren’t so dangerous.
“I underestimated her,” he admits, the words seemingly torn from him. “We all did.”
Arseny gives my father a sideways glance, careful to keep his expression neutral. We both know what Anatoly isn’t saying—that we warned him for years about Tatiana, that her ambitions were always greater than her loyalty.
“What matters now is containing the damage,” I say, redirecting. “The cathedral was just the opening move. They’ll come for us next.”
