Despite everything, I find myself almost smiling. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m effective. There’s a difference.” He raises his glass in a mock toast. “To speaking the right language to the right person. And to recognizing that sometimes love means becoming fluent in someone else’s native tongue.”
I drink to that, feeling something like hope stirring in my chest for the first time in two weeks. Because maybe he’s right. Maybe the problem isn’t that Kira doesn’t want to see me—maybe the problem is that I haven’t figured out how to reach her in a way that makes sense to who she is.
Maybe it’s time to stop thinking like a man in love and start thinking like a hacker trying to crack the most important code of my life.
The code that leads back to her.
Kira
The security footage plays on my laptop screen for the hundredth time, maybe the hundred and fiftieth. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched those final moments in the warehouse—Father lunging with the knife, Rafa’s immediate response, the moment when everything changed forever.
Each viewing reveals new details I missed before. The micro-expressions on Father’s face, the precise angle of the blade, the exact split second when protection became killing became salvation.
Each viewing makes me hate myself a little more for needing to watch it again.
“You should eat something,” Nicolai says from the doorway of my safehouse bedroom, holding a tray with soup that’s probably been sitting untouched since this morning. “Real food, not just coffee and sleeping pills.”
“Not hungry.”
“That’s not really the point.”
He enters anyway, setting the tray on the nightstand and settling into the chair beside my bed—the same position he’s maintained for most of the past two weeks, watching me cycle through stages of grief and shock and something that might be acceptance if I could figure out what exactly I’m supposed to be accepting.
That my father tried to kill me? That Rafa saved my life? That love sometimes requires becoming someone you never thought you could be?
All of the above, probably.
“He’s been calling,” Nicolai mentions casually, though nothing about this conversation is casual.
“I know.”
“Texting. Leaving voicemails.”
“I know.”
“Nicolai says he tried to visit yesterday. I told him you weren’t ready.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“Kira.” My brother’s voice carries the patient authority he’s used since childhood to guide me through crises. “You can’t avoid him forever.”
“I’m not avoiding him. I’m processing.”
“For two weeks?”
“For however long it takes.”
I close the laptop, unable to watch that moment again right now. The moment when the man I love became the man who killed my father. The moment when protection and destruction became the same action.
The moment when everything I thought I understood about love and loyalty exploded into fragments I’m still trying to piece back together.
“What exactly are you processing?” Nicolai asks gently.
“How to be grateful for being alive when staying alive required someone I love to become a killer.”
“He was already capable of killing, Kira. We all are, in this world. The only difference is that he was willing to do it for you instead of for territory or money or pride.”
