Eventually, I pull out. I turn him around.
His face is streaked with tears and sweat.
He is beautiful.
“Alexei.”
“Don’t speak. Just... let me look at you.”
I have spent weeks dismantling his identity. I did not expect the process to work in both directions.
He has taken something from me too. Armor. Distance.
I pull him against my chest.
“I’m not leaving,” I say again. “I don’t know what comes next. But I am not leaving you.”
He buries his face in my shoulder and weeps.
I hold him through it.
And somewhere in the observation room, the cameras continue recording.
I cannot bring myself to care.
Chapter Fourteen
NIKOLAI
I wake in a different room.
The realization takes time to process. My brain moves slowly through the fog of exhaustion and aftermath. The ceiling is different—lower, acoustic tile instead of concrete. The walls meet at sharper angles. There’s a cot beneath me instead of the chair, thin padding that feels like absolute luxury after days of rigid metal.
I’m covered by a blanket. The fabric is rough, military-issue wool, but it is warm. My body aches in unfamiliar ways—my throat raw from screaming, my hips sore from the angle against the wall, the bite mark on my shoulder throbbing with each heartbeat.
The memories surface in fragments, vivid and chaotic. His hand on my throat, constricting, releasing. The codes spilling out of me like blood from a wound. His mouth on mine, hard and consuming. The wall against my chest, the acoustic panels swallowing the sound of my surrender. The overwhelming fullness of him inside me.
I gave him everything. The Zurich accounts. The Geneva vault. The insurance recordings that my father kept to ensure the loyalty of politicians and judges. And then I gave him more—my body, my submission, the last shreds of the person I used to be.
I should feel like a traitor. I should feel the weight of what I’ve done crushing me from the inside.
I feel light.
The lightness is strange, almost physical. Like something has been removed from my body along with the codes. The weight of expectation. The burden of being the heir. The constant, grinding pressure of trying to be something I was never capable of becoming.
Nikolai Petrenko, heir to the Petrenko organization, is officially dead. Not just buried in an empty box in Moscow, but actually gone. Erased from the inside out.
What remains is something simpler. Something that exists only in this room, under these lights, in the space between his body and mine.
The door opens.
Alexei enters. He is carrying a tray—not the surgical implements of the Processing Room, but food. Real food. A bowl of steaming broth. A piece of bread. Cheese. Thin-sliced smoked meat. The sight of it makes my stomach clench with a hunger I’d forgotten I could feel.
He crosses to a small table and sets the tray down. His movements are precise as always, but something in him has shifted. The mask is still there, but it fits differently now. Likearmor worn by someone who has begun to question whether they need it.
“You’re awake,” he says. Not a question.
“You moved me.” My voice is destroyed, barely a rasp.
