She should be off limits.
Sheisoff limits.
“The Dubai order is confirmed,” Liev says beside me. His voice is steady and deliberately grounded. He knows me well enough to know how to draw me back to the moment. Which makes me feel even more guilt.
“Five jets, all custom builds. They want delivery staggered over eighteen months to avoid suspicion.”
I nod without looking at him, my gaze still fixed on the aircraft. Baranov Tech stretches behind me in a sprawl of steel, concrete, and manufacturing plants. It’s sleek enough to disguise crime as innovation, but every man inside knows exactly what we manufacture here. What else moves through our private airstrip under the protection of legitimate contracts and international ambiguity.
“Production can handle it,” I say. “Shift the smaller contracts. Outsource.”
Liev hums in agreement, making a note on his tablet, and I feel it then – the reminder that this empire is not self-sustaining and that my focus is not something I can afford to misplace. Guilt laps at me anyway, a sea of it against a steady shore.
Liev Demsky trusts me with his life. He trusts me with hisdaughter’slife, and what did I do? I had my hand down her panties, working her to the brink of euphoria in a dark alley outside of a dirty bar. We’ve known each other for more than half of our lives, Liev and me.
He has no idea how often I stand in the shadows three nights a week, watching his daughter exist in a space that does not deserve her. Tracking the way men look at her; calculating how easily I could ruin them.
The meeting continues with figures, timelines, and logistics flowing in one ear and out the other. It ends with a collective understanding that nothing here requires my immediate attention of violence. The men disperse. I roll my shoulders once, tension cracking through muscle and bone. The leftover anger from last night is still lodged inside me somewhere.
The memory of a stranger’s hand on Alyona doesn’t fade.
Liev lingers, as he often does, and Nika joins us near the exit. His sharp eyes are already cataloguing everything about me that’s off. That’s the price I pay for his expertise.
“You look like hell,” he says pleasantly. “Rough night?”
There’s nothing to read into his words, but I turn toward him anyway, agitated. Liev’s glance lands immediately on the dark bruise blooming along my wrist, the imprint of a desperate man’s grip before I broke his fingers.
Liev’s mouth curves. “You keeping secrets now, Kaz? Finally found oneworthkeeping?”
“Work,” I say shortly.
But Nika laughs behind me, quietly, commenting to Liev: “That doesn’t look like work.”
I let it pass because deflection is easier than truth. Liev studies me for a moment longer, suspicion flickering behind the humor, but he lets it go.
We leave Baranov Tech together, the heat slamming into us as soon as we step outside, Savannah in summer offering no mercy, the air thick and bright and oppressive. I slide into the back of the SUV, muscle memory taking over as the city rolls past in flashes of green and sun-bleached white.
Alyona does not leave my thoughts.
She arrived seven years ago after her mother died in a car accident on a wet road outside Prague, sudden and senseless, the kind of loss that cleaves a life cleanly in two. Liev had called me in the middle of the night, his voice strained in a way I had never heard, and I had arranged everything within hours. The plane. The paperwork. The quiet arrival that would keep her out of the press and away from questions she could not yet answer.
She had been older than I expected, younger than I was prepared for, grief sharpening her into something fragile and fierce all at once. I’d been obsessed then, but in a different way. It had nothing to do with lust; just with seeing something so untouched become sullied by the world. The unexpectedness of it.
She is neither fragile nor untouched now, and the knowledge twists in my chest.
The SUV pulls through the gates of my home, the old plantation rising from the riverbank like a relic that refuses to die, all sweeping oaks and wide verandas, history layered thick into its bones. Inside, the command room hums with low voices and screens flickering to life as we take our places. History swathes the technology, keeping my empire from prying eyes.
Nika is all business now, the teasing gone. “We’ve got movement from the south. Cartel traffic pushing north.”
That has my attention.
“Name,” I say.
“Hinto,” he replies. “Mostly drugs, but he’s branching out. Testing routes. Shopping for port space in Savannah.”
The implication settles heavily and is unwelcome. Savannah is mine. Every dock, every shadowed corridor of legitimate shipping, every informal understanding that keeps my operations smooth and invisible.
“He’s probing,” Liev says quietly. “Seeing what you’ll tolerate.”
