"Ten days, brother. It's the best I can do."
I hung up and started the car.
I didn't drive back to Raven's apartment. I couldn't. I knew now that Viktor would have someone watching, and I'd been an absolute complete fucking idiot to think he wouldn't. Maybe it was Dmitri, maybe one of his other dogs, or maybe it was a camera pointed at her building entrance. It didn't matter. What mattered was that the leash had been pulled tight, and any slack I had left just got cut.
Instead, I drove across town to my loft.
When I got home, I didn't turn on the lights. Just walked to the window and stood there, looking out at the city as it came alive with a new day. The sky was going gray at the edges. There were more headlights on the highway. And I watched as a plane descended toward Bergstrom, its landing lights blinking like a slow pulse.
I thought about Raven.
Not the Raven who played Chopin while men discussed murder ten feet away. Not even the Raven who arched under me in the dark, gasping my name while her nails carved lines down my back.
I thought about the Raven who pressed her mouth to my chest, right over my heart, and held there, like she could keep it beating through sheer fucking will.
She hadn't said the words, but I'd felt them building in her for days now in the way she touched my face, and the way herbreathing caught when I pulled her close. I'd felt it in the tremor of her lips against my skin.
But she hadn't said them.
And I hadn't said them either. Not because I didn't feel it. Christ, I felt it like a wound that wouldn't close. But because saying those words to a woman while you're planning how to smuggle her out of the country felt like making a promise I might not be able to keep. And I'd rather stay silent than lie to her.
Unlike everything else in my life, what I felt for her wasn't a performance.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes. I was compromised. I've always known it. And they knew it, too. Yet I believed her when she told me she wasn't the one leaking information to the feds.
But what if she's lying?
I shoved the thought down. Hard. Slammed the lid on the box and sat on it.
It didn't matter.
I turned that over in my mind, testing it for cracks.It doesn't matter.And it held. Solid and unbreakable. Because I'd made my decision in that freezer, watching Viktor's eyes while he threatened to hand her to Moscow. I'd made it the night I called my contact.I'd made it every night since, lying in her dark apartment with her heartbeat matching mine and her secrets in the air between us.
Guilty or innocent. Liar or saint.
She was mine.
And they wanted to kill her.
I turned away from the window and paced across my apartment.
Ten days. It might as well be ten years, because Konstantin wasn't going to wait ten days. Konstantin was going to watch, and test, and build his case with the patient precision of a man who'd done this a hundred times before. And when he had enough, he was going to act.
And running half-prepared meant getting caught. Getting caught meant dying. Both of us.
I ran the options the way I ran crime scenes. Systematic. Clinical. Every angle, every exit, every variable.
Run now. No documents, no safe house, no clean trail. We'd get maybe forty-eight hours before someone picked up the scent. The Bratva had roots in forty countries and memories that lasted decades. You could change your name, change your face, move to the other side of the world, and they'd find you. Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. But eventually.
Stay and fight. Kill Viktor. Then what? I couldn't take on the entire Austin organization by myself.
Hand her over.
The thought surfaced for half a second before something violent inside me crushed it.
No. Absolutely fucking not.
Give Viktor what he wants—evidence that she's clean. Except I didn't have evidence. I had nothing. A week of investigation had turned up zero leads on anyone else, and Konstantin's data was pointing in one direction like a compass needle finding north.
